eMAGINE.IT.ALL's shared items
Many businesses are buying iPads for their employees, saying that it fills a niche not covered by desktop or laptop computers.
Richard Ziade‘s impressions of the iPad – on multitasking:
You can’t multitask. This is a good thing. Without being poked and prodded by juggling five things at a time (which usually includes some sort of chat client), we’re giving our brains a chance to dive deeper into the experience in front of us.
On paper:
You can’t resize the Web browser. By imposing this constraint, it frees up designers to think more about composition and art direction. There are two modes – horizontal and vertical. It’s a hat tip to paper. You can’t resize paper.
I got an iPad as a birthday present a little while back (thanks again, Mom!), and am loving it. So when I heard that Cory Doctorow, the science fiction author and editor of geek candy blog Boing Boing, was not enamored of the device I was eager to learn why. I checked out his post expecting to read a review, but instead found a diatribe. And one that cries out for a response.
“Why I won’t buy an iPad (and think you shouldn’t, either)” is Doctorow’s accurate and self-explanatory title. He concedes that the iPad’s design reflects “a lot of thoughtfulness and smarts,” but is still not going anywhere near one and wants everyone else to stay away, too. In other words, he likes the device just fine; he just hates what it stands for. Like property rights and the clearly expressed desires and preferences of millions of people.
Doctorow is a well-known advocate of openness, sharing, and tinkering with gear. He writes “I believe — really believe — in the stirring words of the Maker Manifesto: if you can’t open it, you don’t own it.” He rails against the fact that it’s hard to physically take apart the device, but he seems even more angry at the “technical and social infrastructure that accompanies it.” This infrastructure includes:
- Prohibitions on swapping, sharing, reselling, and forwarding many kinds of content once they’re downloaded to the device. Comics from Marvel, ebooks from Amazon, and many other digital wares can’t be easily copied and endlessly passed on.
- Gatekeeping by Apple with the App Store. Only Apple-approved apps can be easily installed on iPads, and the company works to keep out porn, malware, and other stuff it deems inappropriate. Doctorow writes that the iPad’s “universe of apps [is] constrained to the stuff that the Cupertino Politburo decides to allow for its platform. As a copyright holder and creator, I don’t want a single, Wal-Mart-like channel that controls access to my audience and dictates what is and is not acceptable material for me to create.”
Neither do I, which is why I’m really glad for the one-two punch of the 1st Amendment and the Web. Doctorow, I and everyone else with Internet access in America are free to create almost anything we want with astonishingly few restrictions (the Supreme Court recently decided that even appalling depictions of animal cruelty are protected speech), and to distribute our digital content via the Web. And the iPad provides Politburo-free access to all this Web content.
Doctorow dislikes that in addition to providing Web access, Apple has also created the walled garden of the App Store and allowed companies like Marvel and Amazon to place restrictions on replicating some content delivered to the iPad. And even though I like free stuff, too, I’m really happy Apple put this infrastructure in place. Let me explain why.
Marvel’s comics are the company’s property, and the App Store is Apple’s. Every first year law student learns to think about property rights as a bundle of sticks, with each stick corresponding to a different right. As law professor Jerry Anderson writes, these include “the right to convey, the right to devise, the right to use, and, at the top of the pile, the right to exclude,” or to keep others from doing certain things with the property.
Anderson is not alone in putting exclusion at the top of the pile. A 1982 Supreme Court ruling emphasized that the right to exclude is “one of the most essential sticks in the bundle of rights that are commonly characterized as property.” It’s the right at the heart of the patent system (a patent gives you the right to keep others from using your innovation without your permission) as well as the concepts of copyright, trademark, and other forms of intellectual property (IP).
So Marvel, Apple, and the other players in the iPad ecosystem aren’t doing anything new, weird, Orwellian, or unAmerican. In fact, quite the opposite. They’re thinking about how to take care of and gain value from their property, two activities that have been at the heart of our legal, economic, social, and technical infrastructure for a LONG time. Article 1, Section 8 of the US Constitution gives Congress a set of powers, including “To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.” The Framers realized, as did their predecessors in English common law, that strong and clear intellectual property rights generate innovation.
Technology changes lead to important clarifications and extensions of the IP infrastructure, but they certainly don’t invalidate it. The fact that digital property can be perfectly, endless, and near-costlessly copied and replicated does not in any way imply that it always should be. The fact that digital platforms can be opened to all comers doesn’t mean that all of them must be.
Doctorow wants to give others the right to share and alter his own IP, and has taken advantage of legal innovations like Creative Commons licenses to permit this on terms he finds acceptable. Which is great. What’s not great is the insistence that other terms are harmful to society and worthy of contempt. Such a stance is wrong in both theory and practice.
The theory I hear him espousing in the iPad post and elsewhere is that the right to exclude with should be curtailed (if not eliminated) when it comes to IP – that digital goods should become something like communal property. If this argument were being made about physical property we’d recognize it immediately as an argument for communism, wouldn’t we? And once we did, wouldn’t we stop taking it seriously, and place it somewhere on the kooky-to-dangerous spectrum?
I am honestly puzzled why this argument gets any other reception when it’s made about IP. We all agree that intellectual property is becoming more and more important. But how many of us think a digital Bolshevik Revolution is the way forward, or a cure for what ails our economy and society at present? How many of us think the Framers of the US Constitution just got it dead flat wrong in Article 1, Section 8, Clause 8? Or that the appearance of the Web invalidates their insights?
If the ‘information wants to be free’ argument were right in practice, the iPad, Apps Store, and other elements of non-communal digital infrastructures would be failures; people would recognize them as big corporate cons, and stay away. Neither IP producers nor consumers would abide their restrictions, especially when totally open hardware+software+content ecosystems are available (Doctorow, for example, uses a Thinkpad running Ubuntu to surf the Web).
Well, more than 2 million iPads were sold within sixty days, and developers have created more than 5,000 apps for it (in addition to the more than 200,000 available for iPhones). It’s been welcomed by large and enthusiastic crowds around the world. It seems that many, many people have been waiting for something like the iPad – a reliable, easy to use, malware-free device that serves up many kinds of content, some of them free, some not.
Since these folk have very different beliefs and preferences than Doctorow’s around IP, they’re clearly worthy of his contempt. I realize that ‘contempt’ is a strong word, but it’s the right one. He writes that
The model of interaction with the iPad is to be a “consumer,” what William Gibson memorably described as “something the size of a baby hippo, the color of a week-old boiled potato, that lives by itself, in the dark, in a double-wide on the outskirts of Topeka. It’s covered with eyes and it sweats constantly. The sweat runs into those eyes and makes them sting. It has no mouth… no genitals, and can only express its mute extremes of murderous rage and infantile desire by changing the channels on a universal remote.”
(I want to point out that this is not necessarily Gibson‘s own view of consumers. These are words spoken by a character in his novel Idoru)
Got that, my 2 million+ fellow iPad owners? Never mind that we can use the device to surf the entire Web, not just access Apple-approved content. Never mind that we can use it to compose and play music, write, draw, and do other creative tasks. Never mind that we can develop apps for it and give them away if we choose via the App Store. We’re still fat, pale, infantile trailer trash because we buy into its model of interaction with IP.
I lose track of the number of ways in which that attitude is snotty, offensive, and dumb. It’s almost not worth taking seriously or paying attention to at all, except that lots of people do take Doctorow and his ideas seriously. So it’s important to engage with them, and to provide a different perspective on the situation.
I want to be clear about a few things: I like Creative Commons licenses, Wikipedia and Linux, the Maker Faire, and so on. I think the ethos they embody of tinkering, volunteering, and sharing is wonderful. And while I’m not a code-slinging professional geek, I learn a lot from them and like hanging out with them. I’m a Fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Center, got invited to Tim O’Reilly’s 2010 FOO Camp East, and presented at SXSWi.
But I’ve also been teaching and researching at business schools for the past 15 years, and I’m an ardent capitalist. I feel about it the way Winston Churchill felt about democracy, which is that it’s the worst system for organizing economic activity except for all those other forms that have been tried. I believe that America’s extraordinary track record of innovation and creativity exists not despite its IP laws, but at least in part because of them. I applaud the fact that IP creators and owners have strong rights to exclude, even when these creators and owners are big, powerful corporations. And I really like the bundle of sticks contained in my iPad.
What do you think of all this? Leave a comment, please, and let us know.
It is undoubtedly true that modern technologies can keep us from getting our work done. We drown in email, surf the Web endlessly, check in with our social networks, and constantly get interrupted and interrupt ourselves. Today’s digital workplace tools, the ones that are supposed to be making us so much more productive, seem to instead serve up endless diversions from the high road of effective and efficient knowledge work.
This is something new under the sun. Writer W.N Taylor observed a while back that “Temptation rarely comes in working hours. It is in their leisure time that men are made or marred.” He appears to have overlooked office romances, but he had a point. For many of us, the workplace used to contain fewer distractions than other environments.
But not any more. News, sports, video clips, games, chats with family and friends, gossip, shopping, and scores of other temptations are now as close as the nearest screen, and many of us spend most of the day in front of a screen. This is novel and uncharted territory.
Except that it’s not. Temptations have been around as long as people have, and sages have realized that they can actually be good for us. This is because the work of overcoming them and getting back on the high road forces us to confront our weaknesses and learn from them. This work forces us to acquire some self-mastery. It forces us, in short, to grow up.
St. Augustine, one of the great minds and souls of the early Christian church, realized this fact and articulated it with economy and grace. He wrote:
Our pilgrimage on earth cannot be exempt from trial. We progress by means of trial. No one knows himself except through trial, or receives a crown except after victory, or strives except against an enemy or temptations.
I have a colleague who unplugs his wireless routers when he needs to get serious writing done. Another gets up absurdly early and plays white noise through his headphones so he can concentrate. I’m thinking about adopting techniques like these because if I’m not getting enough good work done, it’s nobody’s fault but mine.
My friends and coworkers aren’t to blame, nor are the vendors of tempting technologies, nor, certainly, are the technologies themselves. To borrow a turn of phrase from Eleanor Roosevelt, no one can make me unproductive without my consent.
The right strategy, surely, is to realize that the distractions and temptations of modern technology are just another set of temptations, and to react to them accordingly. This often means turning away from them or turning them off, at least for large chunks of time, so that real thinking can get done and we don’t spend all our time wading in the shallows.
Why do we find this so hard to do? Is it because today’s technologies are more seductive and addictive than what’s been available before? Because our bosses, customers, and colleagues are more demanding than ever? Because our IQs and coping skills are inferior to those of previous generations?
I don’t think so. I think we find technology hard to resist for the same old simple reason: temptations are hard to resist, and we prefer not to. And here again, Augustine got it exactly right. He distilled the eternal battle between virtue and vice into the most honest prayer I’ve ever heard: “Give me chastity and continence, but not yet.”
What do you think – do we stand a prayer against the modern technologies of temptation? How, if at all, do you rise above them at work? What kinds of self-mastery have you achieved or observed? Leave a comment, please, and let us know.
… but sometimes it feels that way.
A set of prominent, smart, and thoughtful analysts of technology have adopted a fretful or pessimistic tone in recent books about the Net. Jonathan Zittrain‘s The Future of the Internet — and How to Stop It came out in April of 2008. In August of that year Andrew Keen‘s The Cult of the Amateur: How blogs, MySpace, YouTube, and the rest of today’s user-generated media are destroying our economy, our culture, and our values appeared. Its title tells you much about its content.
Jaron Lanier‘s anti-Web 2.0 manifesto, You Are Not a Gadget, was published this past January. Nick Carr‘s The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to our Brains came out last month; it was based on an article he wrote for The Atlantic called “Is Google Making Us Stupid?”
And still to come is Sherry Turkle‘s Alone Together, which examines the Net’s impact on adolescents — how they interact with family and friends, learn to think, and form their identities. I heard Turkle talk about the book a while back; a pretty representative quote from her (from a Frontline interview) is “Do we want children to have social skills, to be able to just look at each other face to face and negotiate and have a conversation and be comfortable in groups?… Well, if so, a little less Net time, s’il vous plait.”
Most of these authors state that there is much that is good and beneficial about the Net. But their books heavily emphasize what’s bad and/or worrying about it. A person who woke up today after a 20-year nap and set about educating herself on the unfamiliar “World Wide Web” by reading these books would probably start panicking, and wondering why it hadn’t yet been shut down. They read like amicus briefs filed in a lawsuit against modern technology.
So as a counter to these books and the cumulative impression they leave, I’m going to do something that’s frowned upon in in many bien-pensant circles: I’m going to cheerlead for technology. Let’s look at where we are at present:
- In developed economies that are free of totalitarianismm, it is economically feasible and technically trivial for most people to express themselves, as much as they like, in any form or media that can be digitally transmitted – words, music, pictures, video, code, etc.. Whatever they create can be made available, almost instantly and freely, around the world, to everyone else in a similar society.
- It’s easy for these people to instantly access a huge amount of free information on almost any topic imaginable, and to sort through this information with some level of precision.
- It’s also easy for them to find old friends and colleagues and meet new ones, connect with these people, and stay in contact with them over time, even as their circumstances change.
- Huge numbers of the planet’s poorest people have finally ended the information and communication vacuum that has hampered their progress and increased misery. There are over 4.5 billion mobile phone subscriptions in the world today. One of the globalization pundit’s favorite lines used to be that over half of the world’s population had never placed a phone call. Anyone think that’s still the case?
- The Web’s novel technologies and approaches are changing the world of work, making organizations more multi-voiced and egalitarian.
- Intense, Schumpeterian competition in the tech sector is yielding unprecedented levels of innovation in devices, applications, and services. And much of this innovation is concerned with making tools that are powerful, yet easy and fun to use. Technology is now expected to delight us, not frustrate us.
None of this was the case twenty years ago — not even close. And isn’t all of it really good news, on balance? Turkle says that “I see part of my role in this conversation as giving nostalgia a good name.” Well, I see part of my role here as restoring progress’s good name, making it once again something to celebrate rather than disparage.
Carr and Turkle are particularly worried about the bad habits that result from ‘always on, always on you’ technologies. And I see their point; there certainly seem to be more ways for me to distract myself now. But the neuroscientist Steven Pinker got it exactly right in a great New York Times opinion piece: “… distraction is not a new phenomenon. The solution is not to bemoan technology but to develop strategies of self-control, as we do with every other temptation in life.”
Pinker courageously outs himself as a techno-enthusiast:
Internet and information technologies are helping us manage, search and retrieve our collective intellectual output at different scales, from Twitter and previews to e-books and online encyclopedias. Far from making us stupid, these technologies are the only things that will keep us smart.
I’m one, too. I’m not a techno-utopian, believing that technology alone will solve all our problems, or that it’s an unalloyed good. But when I see the benefits information technology has brought us over the past twenty years I get deeply appreciative and enthusiastic, and I remain so after I read some books that have come out recently.
A while back, I quoted a prediction from Julian Simon: “The material conditions of life will continue to get better for most people, in most countries, most of the time, indefinitely.” Here’s a technology-specific variant on it; let’s call it “McAfee’s Elaboration:” Information and communication technologies will, for the foreseeable future, contribute positively to the material, psychological, and cognitive well-being of the great majority of people who use them, regardless of their age or circumstances. I wonder if Zittrain, Keen, Lanier, Carr, and Turkle would agree with this statement?
Do you agree with McAfee’s Elaboration? Am I overinflating the virtues of the current era of technological progress, or being too naive about or dismissive of its discontents? Are the good things not as good as I’m portraying them, or the bad things worse? Or are you, like me and Pinker, a cheerleader for tech? Leave a comment, please, and let us know your thoughts.
No theorizing or exhorting with this post. I just want to highlight a couple excellent resources for people and companies interested in Enterprise 2.0 and the new tools and modes of collaboration, innovation, knowledge sharing, expertise location, and collective intelligence.
The Enterprise 2.0 Boston conference runs from June 14-17 this year (the San Francisco equivalent takes place in November) at the Westin Boston Waterfront. I’ve been involved with this event since its birth, and cannot recommend it highly enough for anyone interested in the topic. It’s where I learn the most every year about how companies are putting emergent social software platforms to use and what they’re learning as they do so. The conference is growing and becoming more vibrant every year, and is valuable for organizations at any stage of interest or deployment.
I’ll be giving a keynote presentation and talking onstage with Gentry Underwood of IDEO about the intersection of Enterprise 2.0 and innovation. Disclosure: the conference is buying a bunch of my books and giving them away to attendees. I’d be flattered to sign a copy for you, a colleague, or a boss who needs to be persuaded about the business value of E2.0.
If you’re a builder of Enterprise 2.0 software, you’ll likely be interested in the conference’s Launch Pad, a competition for E2.0 developers. The Launch Pad proceeds in best 2.0 fashion: entries are collected via tweets that use the #e2conf-lp hashtag ; the deadline for these is April 19. Judges select 8 quarter-finalists, who then upload 3-minute videos to YouTube. The whole world votes on these, and the four semifinalists present live at the conference. More explanation is here, and rules are here; entrants do not need to be exhibitors at the conference.
If you’re working within a medium-sized to large organization to make Enterprise 2.0 work, you really should join the 2.0 Adoption Council, the brainchild of my friend and technology maven Susan Scrupski. Susan set the Council up online and calls herself its ‘chief concierge.’ I asked her to describe it; here’s what she said:
Because Enterprise 2.0 is still in its infancy and early adoption phase (this is hard to recognize in the bubble), customers need to talk to each other in order to accelerate the pace of change. No one company, consultant, academic, blogger, researcher has all the right answers. It will be trial and error for a long while.Customers most respect other customers’ opinions (lots of data to support this).The Council launched in the summer after the E20 conference in Boston. Today, we have 169 marquis brands that are in some phase of 2.0 adoption.The Council by definition is a 2.0 organization. It is run on two socio-collaborative platforms: Jive and Yammer. Both are supported on mobile devices, as well. It’s a virtual resource available to any individual in any time zone. It is a flat organization where contributions by every title, paygrade, background have an equal voice. Teams are self-organizing in the council, combining IT, HR, Marketing, Innovation/R&D, and Knowledge management experts to hash out strategic issues.The collective intelligence shared within the Council has saved members hundreds of thousands of dollars and countless man-hours/man-months of wheel inventing.Quotes from Council members (today on Yammer):“Although I have a tactical team to help me implement E2.0, I consider the Council as my strategic team. With all the information we share freely, the support and conversation is better than many on-site teams I have been on. Few outside this group understand the challenges we face. To be able to share and come up with many perspectives is the working epitomy of E2.0.”“It is simply not possible to find such a high concentration of like-minded practitioners within most companies. The very fact that Council members self-select by applying to join says a lot about their level of understanding and willingness to learn from other domain experts.”
The Council is open to internal E2.0 evangelists only – no vendors – and is currently free to join. Learn more about it and request membership here. As with the E2.0 Conference, I can’t recommend the 2.0 Adoption Council highly enough; it’s a hugely valuable community of practice (I have no financial interest in it).
In the coming months I’ll be working with Susan and Council members to write a series of case studies that capture the current state of the art with Enterprise 2.0: how companies are using the new tools and approaches, what results they’re achieving, and what they’re learning as they go. Stay tuned for more information about these.
And finally, huge congratulations are due to E2.0 pioneer Dion Hinchcliffe: his Hinchcliffe and Company has been acquired by The Dachis Group to further bolster its Social Business Design practice. Dion was one of the first people I met when I got interested in Enterprise 2.0, and has for years been a tireless writer, teacher, advisor and connector in the space. I’m thrilled for him and for Dachis, and wish them great success…
What other interesting Enterprise 2.0-related recent news is there? And what resources and events do you find most valuable in understanding the new technology-enabled world of work? Leave a comment, please, and let us know.
The 2010 South by Southwest Interactive (SXSWi) festival is wrapping up in Austin. I was there over the weekend and gave a talk on “What does Corporate America Think of 2.0?” on Monday morning (tweetstream from the talk is here; here are summaries by @TheRab and @hertling ).
SXSWi is growing like a weed every year, and this newbie could see why. There’s a huge amount of energy and enthusiasm among participants, and a mass of new ideas and information being exchanged. It’s also a chance to catch up with old friends (including @sengseng and @ehellweg, who is a fantastic guide to Austin) and meet new ones (hi, @dearsarah, @danariely, and @muchosalsa !)
However, I noticed a couple disquieting memes in the air at the festival, and I want to highlight them. Not to disparage SXSWi as a whole, but rather in the spirit of constructive criticism. I’m an ardent technology enthusiast and optimist, and I want the energy on display at the festival to have its maximum possible impact. I saw two things that might keep that from happening — two ways the SXSWi technophiles’ discourse is not helping their cause, in my opinion.
The first of these is the zombie-like rebirth of the meme that “the old rules no longer apply” or “everything’s different now” as result of the 2.0 era’s technologies, practices, communities, and philosophies – let’s call this the ‘2.0 bundle.’ I heard versions of this argument applied to the disciplines of marketing, advertising, PR, and brand building, and to the business world as a whole, the work of managers, and the idea of stable organizational structures.
It’s clear that the 2.0 bundle affects all of these, but does it completely remake any of them? If so, I haven’t seen it, and I’ve looked around a fair bit. As I wrote earlier, I just don’t believe that any of these ‘old’ ways were so fundamentally worthless or broken that any single techno-social advance, even one as powerful as the 2.0 bundle, could smash them.
The “everything’s different now” mantra of early 2010 brought back decade-old memories that I’d hoped were buried forever. These were memories of the first wave of Internet hysteria, which peaked just about exactly ten years ago, then crashed just as quick and hard as the NASDAQ did.
Remember the late ’90s? When B2B exchanges were going to reshape industries? When fixed prices, even for gas and groceries, were dinosaurs thanks to services like eBay, Priceline, and their kin? When portals, ‘vortals.’ and dis- and re-intermediation were all the rage? When Porter’s five forces no longer applied?
If you don’t remember these grossly mistaken ideas, you’re more likely to repeat some version of them. And if you do, there will be two consequences: you’ll almost certainly be proven wrong in the long run, and in the near term you’ll alienate your less fervent colleagues. Because you need these people to listen to you, buy from you, and work with you it seems a poor strategy to cause them to close their ears as an anti-hype defense. We’d do well to curb our enthusiasm before that point.
We’d also do well to watch the self-congratulation and air of superiority. The (accurate) sense we 2.0 enthusiasts have that we’re on to something big has an ugly twin: the sense that everybody else is a little slow. One mid-SXSWi tweet summarized this sentiment nicely: “…just the fact that you’re here at sxsw means you are WAY ahead of everyone else.”
If and when this is the case, ‘you’ have two main choices: you can try to bring everyone else up to speed by teaching, coaching, and educating them, or you can distance yourself from them by sneering, gloating, self-congratulating, and blaming. Only one of these paths is difficult.
Teaching requires patience, empathy, creativity, tenacity, and self-reflection (”Why aren’t my lessons getting through? What do I need to do differently?”). Gloating, congratulating the other members of the in-crowd, and blaming others require absolutely none of these skills. They’re all trivially easy and all provide some satisfaction; they’re thus highly seductive.
SXSWi can be a support group, echo chamber, and party for the cool kids, or it can be something much bigger: an event that actually improves the often-fraught interface between alpha technologists and the rest of society and business. If the memes of “everything’s different now” and “you all just don’t get it” gain traction at the festival, it’ll take the former tack. I think that would be a great shame.
I want to be clear: I’m not saying that these were the dominant memes of the festival, or on the lips of most attendees. I’m simply saying that they were explicit or implicit in some of the panels and conversations I heard. And they made me a bit nervous. Hence this post.
What do you think? If you were at SXSWi, did you sense these memes as well? And what do you think of the state of the dialogue between 2.0 advocates and everyone else – am I characterizing it fairly, or not? Leave a comment, please, and let us know.
Writing a social requirements spec, much like the MRD, involves organizational and company goals. What are your business interests in social media? What kind of audience are you assembling — and how? What's the engagement model? How is content, in the form of interaction and communication, captured and returned to participants and non-participants alike? And of course, how do you help and add value to your social media audience?
This requirements document serves startups in the social media space as well as brands or companies using social media for "campaign" purposes. For it is important to identify end-user goals and interests in order to best serve them with social media. Principally, because interactions between members of an audience will not only result in compelling experiences but also leave behind content that can be consumed by those who don't participate.
The social interaction design requirements spec thus wants to address user diversity. Users have different needs and interests — in terms of social media participation and use habits. Users have different ways of engaging in social media, too. And they are likely to interact with other users for a great variety of reasons.
I thought I would share some of my own insights and approaches, in a roundup of simple tips. I write this in the spirit of sharing a look into how best to apply social interaction design thinking. Social interaction design is, as I approach it, not what is on the screen but what happens off it. The emphasis is on social, less so design. And design is as much about our own frames and perspectives, as it is in the products and experiences we create.
This list is not exhaustive, and for many of you it will seem basic. But sometimes we forget the basics, myself included. Oh, and this list goes to eleven.
1. What moves your users?
Social is all about putting people in motion. And people move each other as they are also moved. So what kind of audience are you assembling? Is it a public, a crowd, an attentive audience, a gathering of individuals? Is it groups, passersby, or players playing social games?
Audiences have different psychologies and are moved in different ways, according to their collective sense of presence and involvement, and their individual sense of participation. So think first about what kind of audience you are assembling, and how it is moved.
2. All content is communication
All content in the world of web 2.0 is communication. Yes, it is information and it informs. But it is created and left behind by countless individual acts of communication — with the intent to communicate. If you view social web content as information you're still in web 1.0. The talkies are here.
So consider the interests of your audience members, and read and listen for what they are communicating and to whom they are communicating. Communication does not just want to speak. It wants to be seen and heard. And people don't just talk about stuff, they talk to other people. So how do you help users get from talking at to talking with?
3. What's the user's investment?
You have made an investment in social media. Well so too have your users. So what's their investment, and how are they invested? Consider the things that reflect on people, provide them with responses and feedback, with impressions and a sense of being involved and valued. Are they here to build a reputation, to talk, to maintain friendships, to contribute and feel acknowledged? Likely they are.
We all are in this because we are invested, personally, in what our experiences return. Reflect on what your own investment is. Do you track your progress and are you invested in your own success? Speaking honestly and for myself, I know that I will look at traffic I get from this post. That's one of the ways in which I am invested. And likely, you do the same — whether for your own company, campaign, or that of a client. So you have yourself in mind — as do I when I check the numbers. And that's precisely the point: your audience thinks the same. So get past your own investment and have your audience in mind. What's their investment?
4. What are your users' individual motives?
Users are people too, like you and I. So they have motives of their own, and they participate in social media because they want to, and because it involves things they are good at. So think about what motivates people you know. I try to as much as possible.
When constructing my social personality types I built a list of a few dozen friends and put myself in their place, emotionally, mentally, and habitually. I tried to think through their experiences and habits on social media. To get out of my own experience and to enrich my palette and understanding. Who would invite friends to events? Who would check twitter by phone? Who cared most about pageviews or follower numbers? Try doing the same. We are all different, and we recognize only what we know. But the greater your grasp of these differences between people, the more user experiences you can recognize and accommodate.
5. Embrace ambiguity
All social interaction and communication is ambiguous. Embrace it. For ambiguity is precisely the unresolved, the unknown, and the unacknowledged of human exchanges that keeps all interaction and communication going. We interact because it's never finished. We keep talking because there's more to say.
Social software is not regular software. It is not comprised of discrete transactions and well-defined tasks. It's an open state of talk in which transactions always sustain the possibility for more. So consider the ambiguities that both sustain interaction and communication around your service. And which provide for ongoing interests expressed and exchanged by people never completely in the know.
6. Change your frame
It's not about you but about them. Success in social media comes when you shift your frame of perspective, and take your user's interests to heart. This change of frame is as much about thinking less in terms of your own product or service, as it is thinking from the user's perspective and experience.
We think too much about what we are trying to achieve, about what we have designed or built, and thus in terms of what it does or should do. That leads us to think in terms of controlling outcomes, or tweaking features for new behaviors. All well and good, but those engender a product and design-centric view of what's going on. Social is happening out there, and your users do not have you or your product in mind, but their own experiences and those they share them with. Change your frame.
7. Know your blindspot
We all have a limited perspective and understanding of the world, and that includes our interpersonal and social relationships. We build this into our products and services because we tend to want to confirm our own views. Users are not taking a drive in your car — they are going someplace.
Know your blindspots. Reflect on what matters to you and to what and how you seem most inclined. Then fill in, as much as possible, what's in your blindspot. Self awareness and humility will return generously.
8. What's your surplus value?
What surplus value do you capture and extract from your social, and how does it add value to the experience for all? We live in a system of excess information, of noise, redundancy, and a collective clamor for attention. How are you designing your product or service to provide surplus value to the experience?
All social media is about interested users — interested in other people and interested in their contributions. Interests are preferences, tastes. And social media are about tastes: capturing tastes, reflecting tastes, making tastes. And tastes are individual, social, and cultural. So what do you do that offers a view or experience of collective participation that no single user can see and enjoy?
9. Help users help each other
Facilitate random acts of kindness. We are all kind, and an exchange of kindness is the spark that lights up the social like no other. Think less about what people want, and less about what you (think) you have to offer them. Think instead about the moments and opportunities you might design through which users might experience spontaneous and serendipitous kindness. The virtuosity of kindness needs no architecture, and its spark needs only connectedness and a gap to bridge.
10. What differences make a difference?
We talk a lot about identity online, but identity really only matters because there is difference. We are all different and all becoming different by differentiating ourselves. Even when we identify with somebody, or with a brand or idea, we differentiate ourselves in doing so. Difference matters most in social, not identity. So consider how your social allows differences to make a difference. Think about how you encourage and enable people to be different. How you capture and represent social differentiation. And how these differences might add some interesting facets to the differences that make our identity what it is: different.
11. Don't lose yourself in metrics and numbers
You are better than that, and to lose the forest for the trees is to undermine your own knowledge, skills, and effectiveness. Social is in the heart as it is in the head. It's about everything you already know and all that you would still like to learn. That goes for your users as it does for you. So disregard the numbers when you sense they are a comfort or distraction. Objectify your social, and your users will be stats and numbers. They should count more than that.
The aftermath of last week’s earthquake in Haiti has brought out the best in people who have been generous in their compassion and unselfishness. Unfortunately it has brought out the worst in a few public figures that have exploited the tragedy to advance their respective political agendas. From Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez on the left to the revisionist history of Pat Robertson, these individuals have needlessly politicized the terrible situation in Haiti.One of these cold-hearted souls is U.S. Representative Steve King when he decried the granting of temporary protected status (TPS) to undocumented Haitians. Instead of using a thoughtful and rational analysis he foolishly claimed that that Haitian migrants “have no reason to fear deportation” because they would fill the “great need of relief workers.” As the liberal blog Think Progress noted, King appeared to backtrack from his comments while on talk radio on Tuesday. Yet he could not help but take an unnecessary potshot as his political opponents:
Well, the first thing that happened was we hadn’t even gotten through the after shocks and people were still crying out from under the rubble and the open borders amnesty crowd jumped on that and used the Rahm Emanuel axiom, which is never let a crisis go to waste. And it began to call for Temporary Protective Status for the illegal Haitians that are in the United States, which about thirty, thirty thousand of them have been processed for deportation but not sent.Sorry to burst your bubble Rep. King yet as we’ve written about several times before immigrants’ right groups, lawmakers, and activists have long advocated granting TPS for Haitians. Last week’s earthquake was one of the latest in a string of natural disasters including hurricanes and flooding to hit Haiti in recent years. Such nasty comments discredit the hard work that groups such as Haitian community organizations have done for years as well as a few politicos within your own party.
It may seem contradictory to bring attention to the remarks by the likes of Rep. King but they deserve to be mentioned as examples of crass selfishness that brings no benefit to the victims of Haiti’s tremors.
Image- CNN (“Haitians line up to receive food and water Wednesday at a U.S. Army distribution point in Port-au-Prince, Haiti.”)
Online Sources- detnews.com, The Latin Americanist, Think Progress, Wonkette, Reuters, BBC News
