Today I’m at the Corante Symposium on Social Architecture (hereafter referred to as “SSA”), which is an interesting collection of both “the usual suspects” and some faces that are new to me. Stowe Boyd from Corante did some welcoming remarks, and then turned things over to David Weinberger.
David breaks the shit and fuck barriers in the first two minutes of his talk. His powerpoint is for shit, he’s fucked because he dropped his laptop and it won’t work now. (And by transcribing that, I’ve probably just guaranteed that this blog post will be filtered by most library computers…)
David starts by saying that we’re all probably tired of explaining blogs at conferences (most of us never expected that we’d be using the term “reverse chronological order” quite so often, he says). This symposium assumes that everyone here is past the point of needing to have the technology carefully explained to them.
He says that social software is in some sense the fulfillment of the hope that the Internet could fundamentally change relationships in business contexts.
References Eleanor Rosch, and says we need to start by defining what we include within the umbrella term of social software. Tosses out a list of tools (wikis, weblogs, email, IM, etc), then asks what these things have in common?
He talks about the publishers’ responses to Google Print, and says the stupidity of the arguments is an indication of the fear of cultural change—“both sides are getting stupider,” he says, which is the indicator of significant change. The battle he sees is between centralized, controlled information and a “wide-open” model of information that the web represents.
(My unspoken question: isn’t Google Print just another form of centralized, controlled information?)
We’re moving from pyramidal to hyperlinked organizations™. Social software lets us route around the hierarchy of the organization.
What does David worry about? Three things:
Criticizes the “echo chamber” label, because it turns the very basis of conversation into something negative. If you look at only one site, you’ll see only one conversation, true—but most people choose to look at a variety of sites. (This is a huge challenge in building the tools—how do you avoid the Memeorandum effect on conversational spaces?)
You need some degree of sameness to enable conversation, but you need some degree of difference to even be able to approximate the truth.
This is a panel that Stowe Boyd is leading, with Seth Goldstein and Kaliya Hamlin.
Seth says that the answer to the question of “Why now? Why is business now noticing and implementing social software solutions?” is three letters: API. Says that sites like del.icio.us and Flickr only got interesting/popular when developers were able to create things using the API. (Not sure I completely agree with those examples, but I agree in concept with the importance of APIs. What he’s not acknowledging though, and what I think is also important, is ease of use and design simplicity.)
(This is being held in a large law school lecture room, theatre style, which is not well-suited to audience engagement. These kinds of rooms trip my “bored student” switch, and I find it much harder to stay engaged.)
Seth quotes Josh Schachter describing del.icio.us as “crystallized attention.” (Ah…just realized that Seth’s the president of AttentionTrust.org.)
Stowe asks if we’re going to see a backlash against these social, collaborative tools in the enterprise—will employers see this as “wasted time” because the ROI is less explicit? (My unspoken comment: We’re already seeing that backlash with email. Also, we need research that makes that ROI more explicit—how does the organization (not just the individual) benefit from use of these tools.
Seth: We all work for Google, whether we know it or not.
Comment from Adam Greene in the audience—quotes someone as saying that “tags are about memory, not about categorization.” Do you take the “folks” out of folksonomy when you impose tagging “rules.”
(The backchannel discussion is becoming more interesting than the panel discussion…not because the panel is boring, but because conversation is inherently more interesting that presentation in most cases. The exceptions are speakers like David Weinberger who can really grab your focus.)
Kaliya talks about the “Hollywood model” of teams that come together for a project and then disband and go to other projects. Stowe asks how many people in the audience are working in that mode now, and a number of hands go up. In the backchannel, the question of whether this is necessarily a good thing is raised—as is the fact that key players in those Hollywood groups are unionized in order to ensure that they’re compensated appropriately.
Seth talks about AttentionTrust—says it’s founded on the idea that we all are entitled to a record of our own attention. Google, Amazon, etc are doing an excellent job of recording our actions and attention data; consumers haven’t had good ownership of their own data. (I’m not convinced yet that these attention.xml files are much more than a way to make it easier for more companies to have more data about me…)
[I apologize to the panel for not better representing their remarks. Between jetlag and room architecture I’m having a hard time staying focused.]
I’m posting these snippets in an attempt to avoid using powerpoint just to display text today. Context will have to follow in a later post.
We shape our buildings; thereafter they shape us. (Winston Churchill)
The artist creates beautiful things. Art aims to reveal art and conceal the artist. The critic translates impressions from the art into another medium. Criticism is a form of autobiography. People who look at something beautiful and find an ugly meaning are “corrupt without being charming.” Cultivated people look at beautiful things and find beautiful meanings. The elect are those who see only beauty in beautiful things. Books can’t be moral or immoral; they are only well or badly written.People of the nineteenth century who dislike realism are like Caliban who is enraged at seeing his own face in the mirror.
People of the nineteenth century who dislike romanticism are like Caliban enraged at not seeing himself in the mirror.
It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors.
—Oscar Wilde
We’re trying to build a site that reflects what the world says, but it will also reflect what you look for within it. The web is Caliban’s mirror, and Technorati a magnifying glass in front of it. If you don’t like the reflection, you can change where you look, but you can also change what we reflect back with your writing and linking. —Kevin Marks
So, does the Internet open people up or shut them down? The existence of echo chambers by itself doesn’t answer the question. And we should probably worry whether “open” and “shut” are themselves metaphors that shut down our understanding of how we decide, believe and act. —David Weinberger
Weblogs enable groupthink circles to form. This is only natural and mirrors any real-world social aggregation process. The nice thing about this is that it does not spoil the fun for those who seek intellectual diversity. As a reader, you get to choose your neighborhood on a fine-grained, per-person basis - and this is unlike any other social situation I’ve seen. You can make that neighborhood as diverse as you want. So you’re not stuck with echo effects unless you want them. —Seb Paquet
Echo Chambers have a valuable pedigree in the Invisible College. Just as with the Invisible College, by allowing like-minded individuals to argue over, agree over, and develop new ideas, Echo Chambers facilitate new thinking and specialism. But Echo Chambers do more: they are visible, open access versions of Invisible Colleges, and as such allow generalism. Their visibility allows those same like-minded individuals to look out and see where their thinking lives on the landscape. Their open access allows others to look in and appraise and critique.Nuking Echo Chambers is, to use an - ahem - gentler phrase, throwing the baby out with the bathwater. How about giving people the benefit of the doubt, allowing for them to be curious? Why not just concentrate on building tools for better visibility and access?
—Piers D. Young
While we go to conferences to see our friends, the opportunity to learn and really think from a new perspective is still there. We all learn from new people and yet we rarely leave a conference having met more than a handful of people. But try going to a different country - it’s a mind-opening experience. You see your own culture from a new lens. You come back to your home environment and you bring with you ideas based on observations abroad. There’s something very powerful about really moving oneself out of one’s comfort zone, out of the norms. —danah boyd
How does a user new to a social software project establish a sense for how his interest match with the popular interests of the most active users? Where are the the tools that let me search against delicious like data to see what’s popular with people who have traits or interests I care about? For example: there will never be a luddite group on meetup.com. What other hidden biases are there? The digital divide as an important but easy example, but there are more subtle ones. Are there inherent biases that most active users in social software have (e.g. technical, high math SAT scores, etc.)? How does this impact how social software should be designed? A traditional software designer can shape the design around different, and possibly under-represented, user’s needs - but if social software is user driven what counterbalances are there?
—Scott Berkun
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