I need to write a long post tying together the past few months. In the interim, this says some things which nestle close to my thinking, if not hatched in quite the same nest. Perched on a nearby branch, maybe. Under the same sky…

I feel that his post, in its entirety, ends up diluting the most important thought — this one:

For sake of argument, we need a working model of the self. Let’s posit the one proposed by Clifford Geertz who described the Western concept of the person as a

bounded, unique, more or less integrated motivational and cognitive universe, a dynamic center of awareness, emotion, judgment, and action organized into a distinctive whole and set contrastively both against other such wholes and against its social and natural background.

Wave goodbye. That was you before you bought a computer and signed up for an email account. Those were the good old days, when people could still complain about anomie, of being locked in the lonely confines of their selfhood…because they still had a selfhood, something relatively impermeable that kept the world out and the precious self in.

I’ve written before about the generation who are of the Cloud, and the schism between them (us, I know which is my tribe) and the rest. I think it’s a genuine possibility — if that particular singularity hasn’t already happened — that there is some splitting of the Western psyche going on here… not quite what the transhumanists and techgnostics have proselytised, but something of equal scale.

Something of that — maybe one way into this is to frame it by saying that we are experiencing the effects of adoption of the first generation of post-communication technologies: tools that aren’t (endlessly-failing) attempts at meetings-of-souls (c.f. Durham Peters’ argument in Speaking Into the Air), but rather frameworks for something like Deleuze’s desiring machines: or as in Olson’s pronouncement: desire is a cluster which seeks to cluster (from whence the title of this site).

What if it’s that? That this is what we have post-communication. Because the Cloud isn’t about communication: it’s [not only but also] the cluster(s) where functions can be reallocated from the self. Mutually. We are a cloudscape, together. And that’s new.

The ever-stimulating Grant McCracken recently posted some good insight on our obsessive privileging of innovation. His framing is that innovation isn’t the management challenge: it’s dynamism, to which innovation is a response.

The problem is to make the entire organization more adaptable, and to learn the secrets of dynamism management. (CEO note to self: Buy copies of Virginia Postrel’s The Future and Its Enemies: The Growing Conflict Over Creativity, Enterprise and Progress for everyone.) A mere skunk works won’t do it, not when every function and hire now needs rethinking and retooling.

He leads on from this, to Google’s employment strategies in pursuit of ‘future-ready’ employees:

What Google wants is someone who is both really good a programming or systems design, say, AND have a deep and abiding interest in, say, the biology of Brazilian rain forest. (Least case, we are talking about people with a diversity of deep interests. More dramatically, we are talking about people with quite different identities.) Why? Because there is no substitute for someone who thinks about things from an entirely different point of view.

This is an advantage that begets an advantage. Once someone has mastered one additional identity (or deep interest) it is easier to master new identities in the same way (and perhaps for the same reason) that knowing one additional language makes it master more languages. The candidate has learned to learn. And this means that the candidate has solve the very pattern recognition that the corporation will need to prosper in a newly dynamic marketplace. (The corporation is now a little like a star ship headed for many galaxies, each of which has new scientific and social puzzles to work out.)

All good stuff, and nicely general enough that he avoids the narrow open-innovation-focus ranting we can succumb to here all too easily. I readily admit that most businesses won’t (and shouldn’t!) outsource process to the cloud — but they can certainly try and employ people with a demonstrated ability at pattern learning… maybe appraisals should start asking people to block-out a pattern language for their worklife strategies…

[Towards a credo for any business serious about engaging with and transforming through networked technologies. The overarching thought is that the adoption of such tools drives attention, knowledge and skills out into the World, not in into neat 'managed' silos within the business]

1. Everything you do is being done better elsewhere. Get used to it.

   What does that leave? What you have: talent, brand, reputation, your social networks. What you are: elegant, charming, engaged. Generous.

2. Outsource the rest to the Cloud. (You will need to find someone with the skills to manage this process).
3. Audit yourself: do you understand your reputation, your brand?
4. Map your social networks.
5. Employ hackers. They were here first. They know the rules. But employ hackers who share your values and talents: generous hackers. Elegant, charming. Engaged. You may learn from them how to share.
6. (Re-)Focus the effort you spend on process onto improvement and adaption, not on invention. Learn the craft skills of the networked society: to stitch and glue, patch and fold together others’ excellence into your own fabric. To give back to the commons for the common good. You will find opportunities for real innovation & creative excellence along the way. Seize them and use the skills and connections you’ve developed to exploit the possibilities you see.
7. Invention will come, but it will arise where there’s a real value to it, and you will find you have at hand the tools to invent speedily and well, and access to other hands which will help in the task.
8. Think in interfaces, as much as in functions. The power of the hand is in the relations between the fingers, not in their individual strength.
9. Befriend tall giants, with strong shoulders. Climb bravely. Stand tall. See further.
10. Fail gracefully. Not all should be lost because one plan (or all of them until now) didn’t work out. “Try. Fail. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better”.

Or, to put it elsewise:

1675: “If I have seen further [than certain other men] it is by standing upon the shoulders of giants.”

2007: Once you see the value of giants, it’s a small step to notice that some giants are taller than others. The tallest giants are networked communities — and they are legion. Social media is the fastest way to get access up on those shoulders, head in the Cloud. Up where the new things happen.

We digital immigrants consider our (media-saturated post-modern) physicality as the ‘real’ world. For today’s young digital natives, their transmedial realities — the elseware of MySpace, Second Life and the rest — are equally valid. Unlike many, we don’t think they’re escaping from, or denying ‘real’ reality: they’ve just internalised the precept that all reality is socially constructed, and vanished off into someware more fun, of their own making. And why not?

Their generation is busily — knowingly — creating their own be-ing. The rest of us, in denial, still privilege a ‘genuine’ reality, while all the time, we are also moving (not retreating or escaping, but simply moving — inexorably), into digitally-mediated realities (The-World-According-To-Google is as much a virtuality as Second Life) where the temptation of easy self-selecting tribalism leads to ever-reducing direct contact with others’ world views — and thus a weakened shared ontology of the World.

At least the kids acknowledge their departure. The rest of us media-immersed first-worlders could do to be more honest about the future we’re making. Forget a ‘Clash of Cultures’ — cultural evolution far outpaces the biological kind, and is equally senseless and free-floating: we’re not heading onward-and-upwards towards some glorious technotopian dawn, we’re setting course towards a fundamental schism with the reality experienced by the rest of our species.

Without a common ontology — an origin story of the metaverse of divergent cultural shards — we no longer have a shared basis for debate, resistance or synthesis; let alone understanding, or reconciliation. This contemporary chaos of dysculturation jettisons dialectic: the paths of our private realities may start separate and parallel, but we fear those tracks will soon diverge, leading off into ever more isolating futures.

We no longer talk, but damned if we aren’t in love with tools for Social Network Analysis, ‘reality’ content, all such proxies for actual engagement: touching from a distance, further all the time.

Daniel Dennett on memes and our mediated realities, in his recent book Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon:

…it seems best to include all these replicators [computer virii and online scams/social engineering] under the rubric of memes, noting that some of them make only indirect use of human vectors, and hence are only indirectly elements of human culture. We are beginning to see this porous boundary crossed in the other direction as well: it used to be true that the differential replication of such classic memes as songs, poems and recipes depended on their winning the competition for residence in human brains, but now that a multitude of search engines on the Web have interposed themselves between authors and their (human) audiences, competing with one another for reputation as high-quality sources of cultural items, significant fitness differences between memes can accumulate independently of any human appreciation or cognizance at all. The day may soon come when a cleverly turned phrase in a book gets indexed by many search engines, and thereupon enters the language as a new cliché, without anybody human having read the book.

[My emphasis]

Indeed. And more generally, the many weirdnesses of words, halt-footed bearers of heavy memes that they are, when processed through dumb tech. From some of our recent work, it’s become very clear that issues around search engines and memes will loom large into our near future — one of the challenges for anyone trying to track the spread and evolution of (human-generated) memes online is the attempt to identify the current lexical correlates of a particular meme, and to understand how and when that lexical structure changes over time as the meme itself mutates. It’s a hard problem — something like building a parse tree for a Gerald Manley Hopkins poem, maybe (recommended reading: Lexical Ambiguity in Poetry). Only over time. Harder.

And for those of us in the communications business — in the absence of real automated semantic analysis — there’s the challenge of trying to instrument our messages with trackable terms or phrases which survive intact as the messages themselves spread and mutate in the (human and digital) wilds.

Early days. Having just read both Dennett and Hamlet’s Mill on holiday, it’s pretty clear that for true memetic (not simply lexical) invariance over time, we need to engineer myth. Then build search engines which interrogate mythic structures.

It’s all getting a bit Snow Crash. Whatever. Count me in.

One to explore later: during the 90s, there was much excitement and hype about the idea of keeping a business to its core competencies — small and lean — and developing strong alliances with other businesses to flesh out the offering. In the post-stratified, networked world of today, surely businesses should be thinking past such rigidity! From our learnings with social network structures, there is much strength in weak ties — relationships which aren’t constantly reinforced, or core to our activities, but which can be called on dynamically as and when required to achieve some specific goal. Out with Alliance! In with Dalliance!

As mentioned earlier, we’re been working on tools to track online influence — as it stands, the system monitors both the web and the blogosphere, in an attempt to balance the ‘authority’ of high-ranked web pages, with the ‘currency’ of freshly-minted blog postings, and runs analytics that track breaking news in pretty much real time. Hardcore.

From the resulting network of citations and mutual cross-referencings, a bit of graph theory can generate all sorts of interesting metrics about the centrality and reach-of-influence of particular sites in the ongoing ebb and flow of online discussion. And some pretty pictures.

All well and good.

But we’ve unearthed something interesting. What we’ve been finding, time and again, in the analysis of the patterns of influence which result, is that the blogs themselves aren’t at the centre of things — they are merely speedily responsive and orientable [in the sense of picking up a new story or meme en-masse and spreading it widely] attention-harvesters which draw people though to more authoritative traditional websites [based on the evidence that it's the 'high-centrality' websites, such as say the Wikipedia, or the BBS News site to which people actually link, rather than to the blogs whereby they've discovered those sites in the first place].

And I’m not sure why I’m surprised by that, but I am. Blogs started out as merely pointers to sites (web logs), but given the saliency and stickiness of many of the current generation, I would have expected them to take centre stage, attentionally, on many subjects. But in a graph-analysis sense, that ain’t how things play out.

Which leads to a thought about how blogs and websites work symbiotically, as part of an evolving ecosystem/organism/colony: we’ve noted before that consumer-created media is expanding the attentional surface of the web into hyperbolic forms. From our recent analysis of influence, it seems that the hyperbolic surface of the blogosphere serves a similar function for the collection and focussing of attention as the fractal surfaces of lungs and gills do for oxygen — pulling it in where it can be used. Blogs are the gills of the web. The blogosphere? A hyperbolic surface sucking attention into the traditional core of Web 1.0 where it can feed more mainstream channels.

Weird, and a bit more than an analogy. Some questions — what other emergent biomimetic processes and forms are evolving online? Does Web 2.0 function as an organism or a colony? In any case, it must be fair to say that it feeds on attention, and that we’re seeing here the evolution of an efficient way of gathering and exploiting that attention. What comes next?

So. Having done some research: a number of sites offer calendar hosting and search. Well and good. But obviously not enough to get people very excited: these sites are mostly fairly low-key, even though they offer some fairly high-value data (calendars for sports rosters, national holidays and so on), that in a world truly turned-on to the power of calendar pub/sub, you would reasonably expect to find not tucked away on a hosting site, but regularly updated on the websites of the related organisations, teams or governments. There’s a real gap between potential and perceived value.

What’s missing? Or a better question: what’s needed to push this into broader consciousness? Two inter-related aspects: passion and personality. People care about calendars because they care about stuff which happens: bands go on tour, teams compete in championships. People will pick up on technology to the extent that the people who are doing the stuff that people care about (let’s generalise them as actors) pick up on it. we don’t need more sites hosting random collections of calendars, we need the people who do stuff hosting their own, so the people who are passionate about what they are doing (lets call them the fans) can keep closer in touch, more easily.

But it’s rare than fandom is limited to a single actor — most fans care about related clusters of actors and what they’re up to. Currently fans who want to track a number of actors’ calendars use client-side aggregation/layering in desktop software like iCal, giving them their own personally aggregated ‘calendar-of-me’, reflecting their varied passions and predilictions.

And there it currently stops.

As if we had never had IMDB, playlists or Amazon lists, or any of the other network-based, edge-fed collaborative filtration systems. What’s missing: internet-based publication of those personally-aggregated clusters of actors and events back online, so we can all benefit from the incremental value added at the edge by people who care about stuff, and aggregated back into the network (the purple arrow in the above diagram). With that feedback in place, we could start building systems that harvest value from network characteristics and patterns: popularity, clustering, geospecificity. The (small) benefit that each edge user accrues from their own desktop aggregation would be no longer be lost out at the edge, but instead become part of (yet another) network of live networks (like all the others with which we are now familiar: CDDB (as was), page ranking, LiveFM, mp3 playlist search etc.). And I think aggregation does add value for calendar systems. Amongst other network effects, it’s easy to see how preferrential aggregation would quickly give rise to ‘instant fame’ for fans whose calendars were really useful to others: imagine city-wide gig guides for specifc genres of music. Or the stickiness of such guides if sponsored by famous DJs or music critics. There’s something to this. More thinking to do

[adapted from an email exchange with Axel at SMLXL]

It’s funny how bottom-up, transformative organisational change is usually portrayed as a gung-ho, networked culture youth thing…

When I worked for (as it then was) Yamatake-Honeywell in Tokyo, we used to go out to places like the Nissan car factories, where the kaizen quality control systems were entirely bottom up — individual guys on the line had almost complete freedom to find ways of improving process, and the organisation had very well organised systems and communities in the corporate hierarchy to make sure that those tweaks and improvements got picked up, assessed and incorporated. But there was no cultural change as a result — the insight of bottom-up improvement had been built-in into the most rigid corporate/cultural hierarchies in the world. The workers on the line were empowered only in that one, specific, process-improvement area. You might think that the same communities of practice would scaffold the collective action of, say, all the welders, who would then get together and form some kind of craft guild->union/mass action structure. But it doesn’t (seem to, I might be wrong!) happen like that in Japan — union activity seems driven from hard-left radicals, rather than bubbling up (like process improvements) from the shop floor…

So I think it’s a mistake to see the bottom-up thing as self-evidently the start of a great wave — it may well be contained within a particular area of activity within a business: which is actually, when I think about it, the cause of my reservations about ‘the IT guys loving blogs’ necessarily being an advance marker of the start of something big organisationally. The IT people love blogs because it’s cool tech, and because knowledge-sharing is part of their world: 90% of 90% of IT jobs is about engineering and problem solving: perfect domains for bloggish collaboration…

On the other hand, and with even less evidence, I still believe the Cluetrain credo, that communication across corporate firewalls (via blogs and so on) can (not will) fundamentally transform the relationship between brands and consumers. Still, that doesn’t mean that for a particular business, at a particular time, there is any clear route to actually using a given technology or strategy to get that scale of cultural change forced through… and although it would be nice to believe that it can really bubble up, I’m not yet convinced (see above). More on this later.