CONSUMMATE Vs

Boingy Boingy Boingy Means Gelato

2008-08-01T05:23:00.001-07:00

I understand that the Italian economy is doing fine already, but I can't help but wonder: would it do better if they charged money for things? I'm sitting right now in the lovely Bar Fiorentina, where I have just ordered an espresso with a dollop of milk for .85 Euros. In Paris this same would cost $3.50 E and a pound of flesh from nearest the heart.

The same is true of Italian clothing stores. In Paris, I could not find even a thrift store where I could bring myself to exchange money for fabric. Parisian thrift store racks are organized by designer (really). For two weeks I searched Paris for a t-shirt that I could wear on our upcoming bike trip. I could not find one for less than 30 Euros ($45), on sale. (Note my sunburned shoulders.)

In Trento, on the other hand, where we are stationed for two weeks, clothes are free. This is in part because they are all fabricated out of pixie tears and unicorn secrets. Italy is the first country that I am aware of to speculate into the unicorn-secret-based textile industry, and while I think there is real potential in it (D, as a control group, seems to respond favorably to clothes made of lycra-bonded starlight as modeled by the lazy ranks of tawny, long-legged, black-haired, sweat-misted, bouncing Italian co-eds), I can't help but think that it would be more successful if they charged money.

Here are some other observations I have drawn, in the last four days, about Italians:

Italians don't know what breakfast is. Ask an Italian for breakfast, and s/he will give you coffee and a gelato.
Italians eat gelato three meals a day.
Italian old men look and move exactly like you think they do, even if you have only ever seen cartoons. Also, they really do that thing where they turn their palm up, touch all four fingers to their thumb, and brandish it while arguing.
Italian buildings do have insides, but no one uses them. The entire population of Italy is visible 24 hours a day at sidewalk tables, stoops and balconies. You could pour concrete into the insides of all Italian cafes and restaurants tomorrow and no Italians would notice.
It is physically impossible to overexaggerate an Italian accent. I will teach you. Put a smoky, slightly wanton tone in your voice, and then say: "BOinGY, BOinGY, BOinGY?!" You are speaking perfect Italian. That is how you say: "I would like to order a free espresso and a gelato."

Also, the heat-induced laziness is contagious. I wake up in the morning, stretch, knock back another two stories from Gaiman's Fragile Things (highly recommended), go to a café, write on my book for four hours, wander off to: gape at the painted murals on the outsides of all the buildings, buy a tablespoon of flattering Italian clothing, wander ruins/castles, hike in the vineyard-raked mountain villages (left) , or take photographs of unsuspecting Italians ("I know it's wrong! But every single Scottish person does it!").

Once I peeked through a gate and saw a young Italian woman in white scrubs repainting the frescoes on the cathedral reliquary floor. Once I stepped out of our apartment here and found a 1920s movie being filmed right there, with a huge film crew of Italian cameramen all squinting and holding their hands out like goal-posts in random directions. Wandering between them, like the half-tame American Zoo Peacocks of yesteryear, were half a dozen tweed-wearing actors and red-lipsticked actresses with shellacked hair, chatting with their heads inclined together.

Sooner or later, I have enough of this tableau and I go write some more. D eventually comes home, all hyperactive with new info-vis ideas, and we wander around imitating the locals' nightly game of café-roulette. Sometime nights there are thunderstorms and heat lightning.

I feel like I could spend the rest of my life here. I've loved this whole trip-- I've seen so much in these last four weeks, I can barely sort it all in my head-- but I love Italy. There are no cars allowed in the middle of most Italian cities, so there is this central core to them where rushing is all but impossible. These centers are characterized by cobblestones and the old, broken-down ramparts symbolizing how long it has been since these people really worried about anything. (Zoom in to this pic on the left-- these broken-down stairs just kill me.) In this favorite café of mine, I have an electrical outlet stationed right by the door, and while I write, I get to stare out at the hoopy, oversized bicycles swooshing by and the inevitable patio-side café arguments. I want to learn Italian. I want to come back here.

This weekend, we are going to bike out to the modern museum and the huge castle ruins in the nearby town. Last weekend, I went to the Geiger café & nearby castle in Switzerland. You won't believe the pictures.

Till next time, Gadget.

I'm in Paris

2008-07-15T07:24:00.001-07:00

Yeah, so I haven't written to this blog in a while. That's because I:

Finished my former contract with Microsoft (Odyssey project).
Moved.
Interviewed for and accepted my next position (Research Analyst with MSNBC.com).
Left for 6 weeks in Europe.

When I decided to create this blog, I made a resolve to keep it impersonal and intellectual. In part, I wanted to avoid the self-centrism that I see in a lot of younger blogs; I want to see this practice as collaborative, communicative, rather than some digital form of public mirror. In part, too, I wanted to create a space for conversations about technology and sociology that people who didn't know me personally would be comfortable interacting with. I knew I was going on the market, and I wanted something I could have sitting on my resume.

It is an ethical, well-reasoned and well-intentioned plan, the kind of plan that is designed aerodynamically to make a satisfying 'whuf' sound when chucked unceremoniously out the window of one's 6th floor Parisian flat.

With that friendly preface, allow me to say: I am in Paris (!!!!!!!!!!). It has been a cautious union, leading inexorably towards the same fate that befalls all international travelers. When I first met Paris, 9 days ago, I found it loud and pushy. After a few days in its company, I liked Paris as a friend, but I did not like it like it. Four days in, I met London on a brief 24-hour sojourn, and suddenly Paris seemed twice as witty and good looking. And, finally, last Saturday morning, I woke up intoxicated on the floor of Paris' bedroom, covered in butter and oil paint, in love.

I have no illusions about this fling. Paris is a player. I know I'm not the first tourist it's bedded. Everyone's emotional experience of Paris seems deceptively similar: drugged, euophoric. My sense is that the streets of Paris run with a fjord-deep fantasy about a life based in art, presence, sensuality and sex. You can choose to adopt the fantasy or not. If you adopt, you fall in love.

Living here would be like living inside a deeply indulgent, idyllic VR game. Both metaphorically and literally, I can't imagine that years of imbibing this much fresh creamery butter could really be genuinely nutritive. But as a month-long spa-- as a rehabilitative, neck-deep butter skin soak followed by a full-body modern art massage (picture a crisp French waiter pummeling you gently with oblong red ceramic statues)-- it's phenomenal.

Also: I got a camera.

More later.

The Boundary that Became a Telephone Wire

2008-06-02T20:10:00.001-07:00

This blog entry is the second part of a short series about my interview with Gina Neff, a professor in Communications, who specializes in social structures and technology. It will make a lot more sense if you read the first one.

The Boundary

I talked last time about homophily (groups composed of individuals which are very similar, and communicate well, but have little new to add to each other) and heterophily (groups composed of individuals who are very different, can't communicate at all, but have lots to add).

So, the middle between the two extremes, as always, is where the good stuff happens: where groups with remarkably different perspectives become able to come up with ideas and solve problems together. (Yes, you probably can't get the Bolivian witch woman to communicate with the American economist, but if they could, holy Toledo, the essay they could write.) If your goal is to give an organization the power to get valuable stuff done, then you want to build a bridge -- but not a very thick one -- between heterophilious groups, getting them talking, but keeping them different.

Gina explains that sometimes this bridge is made out of boundary objects; these are objects that mean different things to each group, but which create a shared place where dialogue can begin. I think of them as hinges, like in the image to the left, creating the bare minimum connection between two different and isolated social networks. In the case of her current study, the former boundary object of the blueprint is being replaced by collaborative software, which is actually facilitating (instead of just necessitating) conversations; the thin connections are growing thicker, and it closes the gap between the two heterophilious groups.

The Telephone Wire

Closing that gap means changing everything about the process of building buildings. A lot of formal work processes, as well as personal biases and rituals, have evolved around the interaction of these two culturally-isolated groups. If you deepen that interaction, those processes and biases will change, too. There will be unintended consequences, not only subjectively for the participants, but with the products they create.

In Gina's current study, in this particular case of contractors collaborating with architects, those side effects might wind up being very good: the improved collaboration may be making it much easier to build environmentally efficient buildings. Gina explains:

The building industry is one of the most environmentally wasteful of all the industries. Something like 35% of landfill is from the building industry, either by torn-down houses or waste from construction projects. The built environment in America consumes 65-70% of our energy. We tend to think it's cars, but mostly it's heating our buildings.
[…] I believe that if we improve collaboration, and if we have better use of these new technologies, this building information modeling, that buildings can be built greener, better decisions can be made, less waste produced. And the icing (which isn't "icing" for me, but which is "icing" for the industry), is that: people get along better! They're happier! They're less stressed out. They don't burn out. They don't scream at each other. They don't sue each other.

The (Metaphorical) Phone Bill

I don't want to mislead anybody, though (least of all me); unintended consequences of technological innovations are not reliably good. In this case, they were (so far, anyway): brining in the technical tool is redistributing the power in a way that is more egalitarian, and more good stuff is getting done. But ritualized power disparities are everywhere, just like the organizational or social mandates that dictate them, and they are not always bad.

Power is complicated; take for example this fascinating blog entry called "Privacy and Power" by Bruce Schneier on the nature of information disclosure in power balances (amusing example from the entry: "When your doctor says 'Take off your clothes,' it makes no sense for you to say, 'You first, doc.' The two of you are not engaging in an interaction of equals."). Do you want to be able to ask your doctor to drop trou? Do you want your kids to be able to send their teachers home in the middle of the day? If you could leverage a technology to even those playing fields, what would happen?

One lesson that I am learning over and over again about using technology to intervene in social systems: the social structures, cycles, rituals, and needs are bigger and smarter than you. You cannot get a comprehensive view of them before you act, and thus your actions will always have unintended consequences... No matter how smart you are, or how wholly good the technology seems to be. Thus, Rule #1 of using technology to intervene in social systems: Remember: you don't know what you're doing.

For more on how none of us know what we're doing, see my next blog entry, of the same name. :)

Ruthbert

2008-05-21T16:50:00.000-07:00

Note: If you are looking at this blog because you are considering employing me, and only want to see the non-silly entries, filter for the keyword consummate_vs. For more Ruthbert, filter for same.

Welcome to the next episode of Ruthbert, wherein two non-colocated sardonic female information workers search for life, love, meaning, and opportunities to make cute puns about bears.

Kimberly: I spelled "for example" as "for exmaple"
this particular field goes out to all of you ex maples out there
don't ever go back, man
Ruth: snort
Kimberly: Oh god, I'm sorry for this:
"I know you're pining away.... but don't fall off the wagon"
Ruth: NO
Kimberly: "I'm not ON the wagon, man. I AM the wagon"
Ruth: NO Kim that's a BAD Kim
Kimberly: HA
HA HA
Ruth: now you go to your room and THINK about what you did

Ruth's statuses for April 08:

One two three o'clock four o'clock BARACK
Solid as Barack
Barack-a-bye baby, in the treetop, when the wind blows the cradle will Barack
We built this city on Barack and roll
Hush little baby don't say a word, Obama's gonna buy you a Barackingbird
Walk this way, Barack this way
Barack me Amadeus

Kimberly: His travel doctor ALSO suggested he get the same blood test I suggested he get.
Ruth: travel doctor? is that like a miniature version of a doctor, that comes in a plastic carrying case?
Kimberly: it's nice because he's magnetic on the bottom and doesn't tip over
Ruth: makes it harder to lose him under the seat, too
Kimberly: sometimes you drop him and find him sticking perpendicular out of the gearshift

Ruth status: "whipped topping" is a phrase disturbing in its vagueness
Kimberly status: Officemate: What would you do without me? Me: I don’t know! Probably become a Pollyanna optimist with nothing but hope for the future and respect for Microsoft products. Officemate: I doubt that.
Kimberly: crashed
Ruth: oh, that's no good
Kimberly: I would like to drive a requirement into today's Ruth Release
it's a pry 2, but will support many other releases
it's called: More Talking
you'll note if you take a look at the process workflows that we would like at least 15 Funny Jokes included in this piece of functionality
Ruth: I don't know if 15 Funny Jokes is a realistic expectation of deliverables this late in the Release
what are your KPIs for the jokes?
Kimberly: well
we're measuring them by funny sounds
like "ingers" and "oogle"
that's going to have the greatest customer satisfaction impact
"eezle"
also references to bears
Ruth: Those success metrics sound reasonable
here is my counter-proposal:
I should be able to get you 10 Funny Jokes by EOD
Ruth: we can push the remaining 5 out to tomorrow's release
Kimberly: hmm
Ruth: and supplement in the meantime with Talking About Boys
Kimberly: iiiinteresting
Ruth: my research has shown that customers respond almost as well to Talking About Boys
but admittedly, the sample size is small
Kimberly: that may be bad news to our Future Humor Writers of America division, but the 13 Year Old Girl stakeholder group has been trying to push that change request through forever
I think we can ship this one
I crashed again

Kimberly: my midday lonesomes are hitting
Ruth: you are not alone
you are at Microsoft
Steve Ballmer is probably spying on you right now

Kimberly: it's going to be cloudy all weekend
but warm
Ruth: it better not hail
Kimberly: I screwed up and scheduled a bunch of meetings for Memorial Day because nobody had blocked it off
including me
Ruth: oopsie
Kimberly: this is how I covered my tracks: "On second thought, I'm going to declare Monday Memorial Day and give all of you guys the day off. No need to thank me. "
I have godlike powers
this is why it's valid and useful for you to bring your concerns about hail straight to me

Ruth: cows
I am wearing jeans yay!
Kimberly: ME TOO
Ruth: yay
Kimberly: that's why we're friends
Ruth: does that mean we're only friends on fridays?
Kimberly: yes
UNLESS
you are ALSO usually wearing something that I also am usually wearing
like shoes
we could base our friendship on shoes
Ruth: or a bra
or an air of superiority

Gina Neff: Work and Power

2008-05-05T19:13:00.000-07:00

Note: I have resolved to: (1) make my posts shorter so they stop eating my life, and (2) swerve, with a deft flick of the steering wheel, from my former outline of stuff that I was going to cover, to concentrating on my "Technology as Social Intervention: Discuss" topic, where I hope to learn more and rant less. It's all the same basic subject, though, so you may not even notice the difference.

That said, I went out a few weeks ago and interviewed Gina Neff, who is faculty at the UW Department of Communication. Gina is very taken with the concept of "work and power," and I wanted to ask her: what's the connection between the two? How do organizational structures dictate how power gets allocated to its members? And what happens to those power structures-- or to the communication dynamics of the org as a whole-- when you introduce new problem-solving technologies? If you are also geeky enough to find these topics interesting, you will find some of Gina's answers to those questions in the following few blog entries.

Information, Power and Tools

Gina has been studying these type of questions for years, and she has seen organizations' implicit power structures change radically with the addition of new technological tools, "magnifying existing power disparities," she says, "or breaking them down." The power-holders in an org may try to restrict how a tool is distributed or employed, or might even rally against it, if it seems like it has the potential to redistribute the power to make things happen. Alternatively (as in the following example), it might level the playing field, causing an initial chaos that leads to large changes to the org's workflows and the way its members define their own roles.

Gina is currently undertaking a study about the adoption of building information modeling tools in the construction industry. She explains:

Historically, contractors (the folks who build the buildings) and architects have lived on opposite sides of the organizational divide. They spoke different languages and had different goal sets; they communicated via blueprints. This mutual organizational isolation allowed each group a lot of control over their spheres, but frequently made collaboration a painful, contentious mess. Each group guards its information and works at cross-purposes to the other, with miscommunications leading to mutual stereotyping, which itself helps reinforce the divide.
Gina is studying a transition that's taking place right now, before her eyes as she studies it: Today, builders and architects are beginning to share their visions via 3-D computer graphic tools and databases that represent the building being built. In other words, these groups are adopting a communications- and design- based technological innovation, and it is creating dramatic changes in the way they work together. The stereotypes are being put to the test as the groups are forced into proximity with one another, and each silo's private language is being opened up to the other. As Gina describes: "Their entire communications infrastructure has been channeled into different visual symbols, and is hardwired through different network pathways." Each group is also, in the process, losing some of the autonomy that came with that defended isolation.

Heterophily: Difference and Group Intelligence

It's not far-fetched to imagine that switching the wiring in an organization's communication structure could lead to huge changes. Cultures large and small, since the civilization of man, have kept themselves alive by employing one or another form of isolation: a mountain range, a separate language, secrecy, stereotyping, a forbidding initiation rite; Jews, for example, have kept Jewish culture alive, despite the diaspora, with the aid of lengthy and complex conversion processes, services conducted entirely in Hebrew, and dietary restrictions that can help limit who Jews eat with. If you move a culture's boundary devices, you change the way the culture lives. Build a highway, raise children bilingual, install a phone system, the internet: suddenly you find cultures blending, changing, and questioning the way they do things.

The contractors and architects in the system Gina is studying have historically been heterophilious. "Heterophily" is an amusingly polysyallabic term for "different in a way that makes communication between them hard." The words heterophily and homophily describe two ends of a spectrum: on the one side, you have two groups (or individuals) who are different to the point where they can't communicate at all (an American economist and a Bolivian witch woman); on the other side, you have groups who are so similar that communication between them is easy, but totally uninteresting (an American economist and an American economist ;) ). They have nothing to say to one another that they don't already know.

Want More of This Stuff? Check out:

The next blog entry and maybe the one after it, where we talk about the consequences of these sorts of changes
The stuff coming out of the The Center for Work, Technology and Organization at Stanford.

And four "easily accessible" books Gina suggests everyone read:

Sorting things out: Classification and its Consequences (Bawker and Star)
Talking about Machines (Julian Orr)
Human Machine Configurations: Plans and Situated Actions (Suchman)
Cognition in the Wild (Hutchins)

... Gina recommends all of the above except, technically, the following blog entry. :)

Image pulled from here.

1.2 No I in Meme: Culture and Cognitive Dissonance

2008-04-15T20:07:00.000-07:00

There is a wonderful scene in Douglas Adam's Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency where our hero (Dirk) hypnotizes his client (Bill?) and instructs him to, when asked if he'd like some ice cream, jump into the Thames. The scene plays out; on a mid-day walk, Dirk asks his client if he'd like some ice cream; Bill promptly jumps into the Thames with all of his clothes on, climbs back out, and resumes talking. Some version of the ensuing conversation takes place:

Dirk: "Why did you just do that?"
Bill: "Oh, it just seemed like a nice day for a dip."
Dirk: "With all of your clothes on? Why not at least take off your jacket and shoes?"
Bill: "It's one of those 'sieze life by the throat' things. Youv'e got to be spontaneous. And anyway, I needed a quick pick-me-up."

These justifcations are of course total inventions by the client. Dirk stages the scene to show Bill that, given sufficiently subtle and convincing instruction, human beings can be influenced to do all manner of things that aren't necessarily in our best interests, and, when prompted, will provide reams of plausible fiction to make our actions sound congruent with how we look at ourselves.

This strange and fascinating coping mechanism shields us from the unpleasant feeling of cognitive dissonance (the distress that accompanies believing one thing and experiencing another). We are complicated creatures, filled with coping mechanisms like these upon which we rely to plausibly mislead ourselves away from discomfort. Students of cognitive psychology have undertaken the spooky process of enumerating dozens and dozens of these intellectual flaws for us in the form of cognitive biases, like the following:

Choice-supportive bias: Inventing reasons to support a decision that's inconsistent with your desires or character. Example: "I prefer not to swim in my clothes, but today I jumped into the Thames with my 3-piece suit on. Why? .... Because I was being spontaneous / my suit was dirty! It was a good idea."

Irrational escalation: Making more irrational choices to justify choices made in the past. Example: "I think I'll jump into the Thames with all my clothes on again on Tuesday. I'm the kind of person who does that."

Exposure effect: The tendency to feel preference for things simply because you are familiar with them (one of the foundations of corporate or political advertising). Example: "Do you like jumping into the Thames?" "Well, I've never walked down this boardwalk without doing it. So... yes! It's better this way."

Hypothesis: What if, before Dirk triggered the hypnotic suggestion in Bill, someone had walked up to Bill and said: "Hey, what would you think about jumping into that polluted river over there in a few minutes for no reason? With all your clothes on and then being cold all day?"

To test this thesis on one of the greatest implicit American hypotic suggestions of them all (ok, also to have a cultural-miscreant laugh), I participated in a street-theatre-cum-sociological-exercise on Black Friday of 07, the biggest shopping day of the year: Buy More Stuff. I and about 15 other burning man people (burners)* stood, well-dressed, friendly and formal, in the middle of the shopping district holding signs saying "Buy More Stuff" and "Hurry!" When given the opportunity, we engaged shoppers in deadpan and sincere dialogues, advising them: "Don't forget to buy more stuff! Remember, if you don't hurry, they might run out of stuff… or you'll run out of time!"

Aside from being extrardinarily funny for me personally, this was a fascinating exercise in cognitive dissonance and cultural adherence. Some folks laughed at us and cheered us on; many were quite confused and asked us (no kidding) if we were with the local business commission. The great majority, though, avoided our gaze as though we had some kind of deadly laser vision. And a few, about 5% of the passing shoppers, became fiercely angry and verbally attacked us.

Why should it be so scary to look at those four little words? Why would you rain ambiguous-yet-desperate verbal vitriol down upon a polite fellow in a suit holding a "Buy More Stuff" sign? Because reducing the cultural message to its most blunt form makes it really difficult to fib your way around it. If you are not pointlessly rushing and hoarding, the message isn't bothersome (just weird). If you are, though, you are suddenly faced with an instruction that is stupid and objectionable, but that you somehow find yourself right in the middle of executing. It hurts. You can't just stop, but you need to believe that what you are doing is what you want to be doing. So you need that message to go away.

So if it hurt some folks to look at the signs, why didn't it hurt us performers to hold them? Was it because we didn't hurry or buy stuff? Hardly (In fact I remember laughing at myself all the way there because I was an hour late and in a panic). We made it clear to the folks who spoke to us that we ourselves had bought plenty of stuff: our nice clothes, coffees, fancy signs, etc., and that we all planned to buy lots more stuff later. Nobody's immune to their culture, no matter how smart they think they are. We didn't have that horrible sinking feeling of cognitive dissonance, though, because we could laugh at our own actions. We humans are not always acting in our best interests. We do dumb stuff because we are Americans or women or Microsofties or what have you. Structure influences behavior. It's not your fault. But it's a lot easier to change it if you can admit it's going on.

Before I close out this topic, I'll revisit a statement I've made in the last few entries: the USA hosts what is perhaps the most individualistic culture in the world. Individualism is baked into our economy, our media, our housing design, our grocery options. See the following quote from American Cultural Patterns for a tip-of-the-iceberg about what that means:

Self-Reliance and Mythic Individualism
Of all the cultural norms associated with individualism, probably none is stronger than the idea of self-reliance. Americans talk fondly of "pulling themselves up by their own boostraps" or becoming "self-made men" (and women). Many of these ideas are based on myths of the Old West, where brave settlers carved out a new life without outside aid and lonely cowboys who shot straight imposed justice on equally lonely outlaws.
[…] The social norm persists, however, as an avoidance of dependence. Since Americans can envisage few fates worse than dependence, they continue to stress self-reliance as a guard against desirable socialization becoming dreaded conformity. Although rugged self-reliance lives on mainly in movies, Americans abroad are often quick to fall back on mythic individualism and fault the foreigner who shows no desire to be self-reliant.
The meaning of this social norm is neither translatable into other languages nor is it self-evident in many cultures. [… In Latin America] the idea of the self as the source and sole limiting factor in action is missing. Indeed, the whole concept of self-reliance itself is not particularly congenial to Latin Americans, who have a strong attachment to their families and immediate groups. They do not deplore dependence as Americans do. Among the Chinese, dependence on others is desirable, for it strengthens the relationship among people and affirms a broad definition of self. Chinese parents, for instance, take pride in being dependent on their children and being supported by them. In Japan, to be self-reliant in the way that is meant by Americans is to be without an identity. [p.136 - 137]

It is probably ironic, or painful, or even perhaps really funny, that our highly individualistic American culture tells us so convincingly that we don't have or even need one: that each person is totally free to make his or her own choices, irrespective of what other people or our society expects us to do; that we are standalone units who think and make choices primarily by ourselves. It so clearly ain't the case.

I am an individualistic person; I also buy stuff and hurry. Don't get me wrong. I'm not saying (necessiarly) that we shouldn't be individualistic or look at things in those terms. I am saying, though, that the next time we jump into our American Thames, we not make up a reason about how it's the best way to do things (and folks who don't do it are dumb or criminal), or how it's human nature and inescapable, or how 'we actually don't jump into the Thames, sorry, you must be mistaken' (as we stand there squelching wetly in our Oxfords).

What does it mean to be the most individualistic culture int he world? How does it make us feel? Is there anything we'd like to change about it, anything we're sure we want to keep? What cultural structures give rise to our behavior? How could those structures be changed, and what makes them difficult to change? Why should we care? What are some interesting parts of life that non-individualistic cultures are good at that we haven't figured out yet?

----

Last but not least in Structure Determines Behavior: Work and Power (Interview with Gina Neff; how technology changes structural dynamics)

** Note: I am not really a "burning man people." They do some kickin street theatre, though.

Image thanks to Michael Holden, to whom Buy More Stuff is credited.

1.2 No I in Meme: Culture (White People are White)

2008-04-01T20:02:00.000-07:00

Though it is a step further away from my basic focus on social systems and technology, I would be remiss in my duties as a lister-of-social-structures if I did not list the most pervasive and unconscious structure of all: culture.

I write this entry with a mild, throbbing pain in my left Heresy Lobe, an old sports injury incurred from climbing too many times up onto my old soapbox about individualism in American culture. I threw a tarp over it when I graduated from grad school, but I am formally breaking out my carnie barker voice and bowtie as we speak.

What, you ask, is my hangup about individualism and American culture? (Watch my friends dive into bushes and roll off screen as I respond.) Recall that my basic point here is that structure determines behavior: it affects our actions, belief systems, perception of ourselves, and our conception of our options in the world. If you know about the structure, you have a little more free will; if you don't, you run a high risk of unthinkingly incorporating its mandates.

We Americans are particularly susceptible to this, and particularly blind to that susceptibility. Perhaps you have heard the joke:

Q: What do you call someone who speaks three languages?
A: Trilingual.
Q: What do you call someone who speaks two languages?
A: Bilingual.
Q: What do you call someone who speaks one language?
A: American!

The USA hosts one of the most geographically and linguistically isolated urban cultures in the world. That makes us Americans very different than (for example) European, Latin American or Asian cultures when it comes down to knowing that we have a culture at all. Even when we do travel, we rarely stay long or become fluent in the local language, and thus we miss volumes about what culture really is: arbitrary, powerful, silly or objectionable. We are convinced that everything we do as Americans is "just human nature" or "the same all over the world."

Living overseas for a year is a great way to recognize that what you are, and how you do things, is not "the default way." Most of us, though, can discover this bias in ourselves from our desk chairs. Give it a shot: if you are Black, say out loud "I am Black." If you're Chinese, Japanese or Korean, say so. If you are White, say "I am White."

So, the first two may come easily. But most White people will become very uncomfortable openly stating we are White. To us, we are not White: we are normal. We do not behave like White people; we behave normally, while Black people behave like black people and Japanese people behave like Asians.
I, the writer of this blog, am a White American person, and mostly I behave just like one. I am a consumer, I'm highly innovative, very individualistic, stuffy about sex, outgoing; I wait patiently in lines; I have a large "personal space" envelope, and get antsy when all but specific people touch me at all but agreed-upon times; I am more standoffish and disingenuous than the most uptight Latin American, and my friendships are usually shallower and more transient than the most cynical European (though I am working hard to shake those two).

Are you a White American? In what ways do you behave just like a White American, and in what ways do you behave differently? Does this whole section make you wince and hold your breath? If so, why?

We Americans have, by and large, "drunk the Kool-Aid" of American culture, and so we take the nourishment and the carcinogens together and call them "humanity." We are highly susceptible to the negative societal and psychological side-effects of our quirks. Where we are individualistic by culture, we fall prey to loneliness or rudeness; where we are materialistic, we fall prey to the existential vacuum. Etc etc.

The question of "what is human nature" vs "what is American culture" has always fascinated me, and so I learned some foreign languages, spent a non-small portion of my life living in third-world countries, and focused my undergraduate thesis on social-cultural constructs and how they affect self-perception and relationships.** I only suggest you also do this if you, too, want to contract the Tourette's Syndrome-esque tendency to rant uncontrollably. If you would instead prefer a more moderate and salmonella-free immersion in the topic of the great spectrum of cultural structures, I strongly recommend the book American Cultural Patterns. It was written some 20 years ago to prepare first-time Peace Corps workers for culture shock. It is short and highly readable and will completely mess up your mind. It is one of the best nonfiction books I have ever read; I can't go five pages without bolting up from my chair to discuss it with someone.

Allowing yourself to question your own deep, foundational assumptions about human beings, relationships, success, time, reason and language can be a seriously unsettling experience. It can lead to cognitive dissonance, the discomfort that arises from a stark contradiction between what one believes to be so and what appears to be true; human beings are typically so extremely averse to that discomfort that they will usually become angry, or contstruct elaborate and transparent untruths, to avoid feeling it (a fascinating cognitive bias which I'll talk about sometime later).

This cognitive dissonance is sometimes fun for insensitve counterculturalists like to me to play with...

Next: >> I thought I could rant about this in one entry, but I was oh so very wrong. >>

**My web page is really really outdated. It's going to stay like that for a while.

Ruthbert

2008-03-25T18:10:00.000-07:00

My hilarious friend Ruth and I have been keeping each other company from our disparate, cross-city desk-jockey gigs for going on three years now. She works in search optimization.

Here, for posterity, are some of my recent conversations with her:

Ruth: I just accidentally sent an email asking someone for an "estimeat"

Ruth: :'(\
mr. stabby-face feels your pain
Ruth: he is sad because he has been stabbed in the face

Kimberly: oh I hate getting lunch
I always feel guilty that I did not prepare my own
Kimberly: I currently do all my cooking at D's on the weekends
weeknights I live on prayer and the non-kosher noodle bowls I keep in my bedroom
Ruth: you should prepare your own lunch then!
[Ruth delivers office lunch recipe]
Kimberly: I have noted your recipe and will take it up with my manager for possible inclusion in a future release
however this week's release is full, I'm sorry
Ruth: mission statement: to increase lunch-eater value by improving lunch efficiency and reducing lunch spend, while maintaining current levels of lunch deliciousness
Kimberly: of course you realize you're going to have to get signoff from the downstairs cafeteria lady, she's a stakeholder in this
and they're veeeery preoccupied with their chicken parmesean release right now, so good luck getting on THEIR radar
Ruth: I'm confident that the impact to downstairs cafeteria lady will be within acceptable bounds to her organization, and will be more than offset by the increased value offered by the new Kim lunch plan
Kimberly: Have you consulted EMEA? I'm sure that the Latin regions will buy in to the tortillas, but I don't know if you're aware of this, EMEA's servers are all allergic to gluten
Ruth: it wouldnt' be stored on EMEA's servers, it would be stored directly on Kim's work fridge servers
and tortillas can be desk-hosted for several days before losing optimum freshness

Ruth: I am gradually accumulating Buffy seasons, when sale prices coincide with coupon-having on my part. M calls the shelf where I store them the "Garden of Whedon."

Kimberly: 7 more bottles of meetings on the wall, 7 more bottles of meetings
cancel one down, send it around, 6 more bottles of meetings on the wall
Ruth: I hope that someone gets my
meeting in a bottle yeah

Kim: I wrote a song on the way in to the tune of that "Shorty got low" song.
Here it is:
She had the powerpoint deck
And the laser poin-ter
The whole conference call was lookin' at her
Ruth: She hit her visio
next thing you know
spending got low, low, low, low low low
she had the Excel spreadsheet
and that ThinkPad in her lap
she turned around and gave that big budget a slap
Hey! She hit her visio
next thing you know
spending got low low low low low low

Ruth: in the last 6 weeks there have been 133 searches for the phrase "nose bidet"

(Just want to see the serious stuff, huh? Well nuts to you. For social / technological systems stuff only, stick to this URL: http://consummatev.blogspot.com/search/label/ConsummateVs)

1.2 There is no "I" in "Meme": Language

2008-03-13T19:57:00.000-07:00

The language we use, whether it beongs to our culture, subculture, technical tool or organization, affects our fundamental perceptions, choices, and behavior (and we rarely notice).

[T]he language a person speaks [affects] how that person both understands the world and behaves in it. [...] Different language patterns yield different patterns of thought. -- Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis, Wikipedia

The world, and the process of living, are inherently continuous and nameless. To communicate about them, we humans use our amazing minds to interpret them down into structures, finite bits with ends, beginnings and apparent affinities with other bits. We come up with those structures by drawing from our history, our cultural biases, our priorities, which themselves are created by language in an ongoing feedback loop. There is no "accurate" way of describing the world, and thus there is no objective way. There's just the way that you happen to be using.

A language is a very heavily biased cultural description of the parts of the world that it cares about, and its own priorities. For example:

In American culture (and some, but not all, other cultures), words about sex and sexual organs are used as the strongest forms of insults. It would be ridiculous for me to insult you by calling you a "stupid arm," but we find the word [cxxx] so offensive that I can't even directly reference it in this blog. This use of language reflects, and perpetuates, certain cultural assumptions about sex.

The languages of subcultures and organizations also codify, teach and perpetuate, unconscious cultural values and expectations.

A close friend of mine just became a cop. He is a deep and thoughtful person with a strong protective instinct. I was thus surprised, in recent conversations, to hear him talking about apprehending and charging people as "contacting" his "clients."
For me, "contacting a client" means calling someone who has voluntarily hired you and maybe leaving them, say, a voicemail, or perhaps a nice fruit basket. For his unit, "contacting" someone might mean chasing a guy four blocks, fighting him to the ground with the help of three other officers, finding a gun and a gram of coke on him, and taking him to jail where he will develop his first criminal record, permanently changing the course of his life.

Foolish? Maybe, maybe not. Contrast this linguistic convention to some other options: instead of "Today I contacted four clients," make it "Today I handled, then made life-changing decisions towards, four human beings." Or, alternately: "Today, I wiped the floor with four more scumbags." The neutral language employed by my friend's unit serves two instructive purposes: it facilitates the emotional detachment that makes policework possible, and it restricts that detachment to the universe of professionalism and service.

So, yes: the linguistic structure you use effects how you think and act. But while changing a language is often a part of changing a social system's rules and behavior, it is rarely the direct route. If you had a goal, for example, to make all police highly sensitive to the human realities of the people they are arresting,* you might think it would be smart to change the institutional language from "contacting clients" to "Making Choices to affect Human Beings." But if your police still (for example) (1) have to fill an ambitious weekly quota of arrests to succeed at your unit, and (2) only see the perp at the time of the arrest (no exposure to context or after effects), your new language won't change their approach to the job. It will just irritate them as phony polish on top of the job's harsh reality.

I don't know about you, but I see surface-level language "fixes" in the industry all the time, and they drive me directly to drink.

To learn more about this fascinatng topic, you may want to read this highly-recommended book: Sorting Things Out: Classification and its Consequences.**

* And I hope you do not
** Lord knows I want to read it. It's on my short list.

Stay tuned for: 1.3 There is No "I" in "Meme": Culture

[Picture Your CV Here]

2008-03-11T20:12:00.000-07:00

By the way, I've also started doing some interviews with folks in various fields who are working with social & organizational structures and technology. This is in no small part because sitting here reading books and wikipedia articles and writing entries gets boring fast.

If you have any suggestions of people to interview (including your bad self), I'd love it if you'd drop me an email. Any genre (academic, researcher, geek, change agent) or discipline (sociologist, computer systems architect, government, teacher) is fine. You don't have to feel like you have a handle on how to make the stuff work in implementation; just some experience in trying.

These interviews are structured around this slightly silly thesis question: "Technology as Social Intervention: Discuss." If they keep going well, I'll be including some snippets from them here (next up, an interview with Gina Neff, a researcher in work, communities, and technological innovations). Time permitting, I'd also like to bring in some of the fantastic material from the book Diffusion of Innovations.

1.1 How to Build Horrible Social Systems by Accident: Incentives

2008-03-04T18:37:00.000-08:00

In the last entry, I proposed that tools and organizations, often (make that usually-- actually make that almost always) unintentionally bake into their very structures a set of implicit instructions for their members / users about what behavior is appropriate, rewarded, or discouraged.

How, exactly, do they do that? Here are some of many possible answers.

Incentive Systems. Behaviors rewarded by your system or tool will grow in emphasis and frequency; behaviors that are punished will become less frequent. This statement may seem obvious; people are always trying to leverage positive or negative incentives to get one another to do things. Unfortunately, those conscious incentive programs are usually laid on top of preexisting incentive systems that are deeper, more subtle, more ubiquitous, and far less intentional. In other words, they are much more convincing to the people involved, and are impossible to casually override.

Example: You have a new software company, and you have to hire some people and then give them employee reviews of some kind. Like many orgs, you base your employee review system on whether or not an employee succeeds at his projects. If he succeeds at all of them, he gets a raise; if he fails at his projects, he gets a poor review and a lower bonus. If he gets three poor reviews in a row, he gets fired.

While this seems like a simple and obvious incentive system, you are literally incenting your average employee (let's call her Martha Generic) to succeed at her own projects… even if that messes up everyone else's. If she sacrifices her own project, one quarter, to enable four other projects to succeed, she will still be punished by your system.

Example, Cont'd: Five years down the line (after every manager in your company has worked your incentive system into dozens of mini-processes and deliverables), you discover your employees aren't collaborating. You say to yourself: "These poor geeks just don't know how to collaborate. I've got to get them thinking like a team…"

You start publishing some weekly articles on the importance of collaboration. You deliver a motivational speech to the whole company about how software development is really about putting "people first." You offer a trophy for the "most collaborative team member."

Will it work?

What would happen if you created an online community (let's say, a "resource group for workaholics") and let your members give each other public ratings (1-5 stars) on two things: "Humor" and "Best Vocabulary"? … What if it were an automated system that gave privileges based on "Most Links Contributed"?

Next up: 1.2 There is no I in Meme: Language and Messaging

1 of 4: Structure Influences People

2008-02-25T20:16:00.000-08:00

Premise #1.0: The structure of a tool influences the people who use it, and the structure of an organization influences the people who belong to it.

Premise #1.1: We don't act nearly as independently as we think we do. All day long, we are listening for cues about what behavior is appropriate in each context. We also broadcast cues as to what behavior is rewarded, acceptable, or inappropriate.

Example A: You're invited to an acquaintance's house; he's "having some cool people over." He has spiky hair and a nose ring. So, you grab your Immortal Technique CDs and take a cab out to his place, expecting to tie one on and get loose. You get there and discover that, (1) the table is set with a white tablecloth and matching silverware, and (2) there are wine glasses. You instantly realize this is a Grownup Party. Chagrined, you start greeting the other guests with conversation about work while privately lamenting your wasted $30 on cabfare.

Example B: Usually, the lady checker with the orange hair at the Red Apple asks "How are you?" in a monotone while she's typing your produce codes with one hand and checking her watch with the other. You respond: "Fine, thanks, and you?" But today, she notices you look kinda off. You come up to the counter, and she sets her pen down and places both hands on the counter. She looks into your eyes, and says: "How are you?" You say: "Pretty lousy. I'm just not sleeping well. I stress too much."

This is our symbolic, implicit, fantastically complex language of human aggregation: we tell each other what to do all day long without saying a word.

Organizations and tools bake these messages into formal structures that tell people what behavior is desirable and what is unacceptable. When we successfully and ritually use the tool or belong to the organization, we adopt those behaviors. Usually, we adopt them unknowingly; often, we do it involuntarily.

Premise #1.2: It's important to set up tools and systems to encourage the behaviors that you want, and discourage the behaviors that you don't.

The more unconscious those behavioral handshakes between us and our org/tool, the more likely they are to affect our perception of ourselves, and our ability to see a broad set of options and to make decisions.

Premise #1.3: If you have a system where a group of people are doing the same odious thing over and over again no matter how often you try to get them to stop, look at the rules of the system they belong to.

Next up: 1.5: How to Build Horrible Social Systems by Accident: Incentives. This is one of several entries fleshing out the theme of "Structure Influences People." It will be the first in, time willing, a short list of tools I learned about in academia that aim to analyze structure and its influences.

Platform 9 3/4 Train to Academia, Departing

2008-02-13T17:40:00.000-08:00

All right, it's been a year, it's time for me to get back online.

I've spent the last year at Microsoft observing the great gulf between What Was Obvious In School and What Is Obvious In The Workplace. It has brought me, as so many things do, to chew over the two worlds of theory and practice and the ineffable, nearly unnavigable boundary between them.

I am a "nitty gritty" practice kind of person, so this problem is more acute for me than it is for my friends in the field. A lot of folks who study social networks, groupware, or decision theory go straight into research, where people are already thinking in those terms. But those of us who choose to ride the train back from Hogwarts every summer and punch through into the Muggle world find ourselves having lots of conversations with folks who (1) have no idea what we are talking about, and (2) can't figure out what it has to do with designing anything or shipping products anyway (so drop it already).

If you talk about it in the wrong language, you sound like "an academic" [shrill scream!] (read: "someone who will tank your project if listened to"). This is a terrible shame, because 500-level wisdom from the social-technical fields would seem to address some of the most constant and painful industry rituals of failure.

At Microsoft, I look around myself every day and see what, to me, are obvious organizational circumstances that give rise to endless marching ranks of identical problems. Every day, brilliant, respectable, road-tested technical minds walk into my building, sit at their desks, and proceed to completely fail to assess the ramifications of their design decisions on their users, or on the wide topology of systems with which they integrate. All projects are late and over budget, and individuals from integrating applications eye one another with the (by now, justified) savage wariness of two strangers meeting on Lost Island.

These projects are breaking down, in my lowly humble opinion, because neither the organizational incentive system that contains us, our communications / knowledge management infrastructure, nor our technological tools are set up to help us think long-term, view systems globally, or collaborate.

So, the first topic series on my latest blogging venture is: Why you should care about social and informational systems even if you are not in school or research. In the next few entries, I will present four basic premises:

Structure Influences People's Behaviors & Perceptions.
Groups Can (and Should) Be Smarter.
Information is the Blood of Groups. If it doesn't circulate or store right, your group will get sick or die.
It's Easy and Interesting to Play with These Ideas.

I didn't come up with these ideas, and most people who are really into social/organizational systems and tech don't even find them particularly smart. They seem obvious, and they are everywhere. When Muggles see unending, ritual failures in their teams or tools (and blame the idiots involved), we over on the other side of the invisible barrier of platform 9 and 3/4 see broken systems and systemic fixes.

I really don't want to see these ideas like this: thriving in practical irrelevancy in the private greenhouses of graduate programs while the Dursleys ship code and build organizations in annoying squalor down the hill. I don't want them to be fumbled as corporate fads or exploited by $300/hr consultants. Most of all, I don't want, myself, to be some dork academic who doesn't understand how impractical these ideas are out in the real world. So, here are some of them. If you think they are wrong or unusable, argue with me.

Next: 1 of 4: Structure Influences People

Like a Pimp

2008-02-03T15:41:00.000-08:00

So I'm walking on Cap. Hill and ahead of me is this very animated Black guy, mid-50s, talking exuberantly alongside his long-suffering, fat, disenfranchised girlfriend.

"You know, you know!" He's saying. "Like a pimp." He's faking a big hitch in his step. "You know."

I am highly amused by this. He looks over at me, catches my eyes/smirk, and, thrilled, re-directs his story to me. "YOU know," he calls, with a huge grin, exaggerating the hitch in his step. "Like a, like a pimp!"

I nod at him in empathy, continuing on my way. He calls back to me: "They said-- They said I couldn't be a pimp." I laugh, and his excitement redoubles. His fat long-suffering girlfriend pretends not to notice.

"See, I can't be a pimp," he yells down the block at me. "Mm-mm, yep! See I filled out, I filled out the paperwork to be a pimp, but they said I couldn't be a pimp. They said I couldn't be a pimp because I fall in LOVE too easy!"

I am trying to control my amusement as I enter my building. "See," he shouts after me, just delighted with himself: "You can't be a pimp if you fall in love!"

Now is the Time on Sprockets when we Blog

2007-11-25T18:41:00.000-08:00

I used to have four blogs:

Blogdor: my moderately-noviced ongoing foray into social / organizational systems dynamics
Thatched Roof Cottages: travel log
More Different S: philosophy/writing
Consummate Vs: comedic idiocy

... and maintained none of them.

I've consolidated them all under the header of Consummate Vs, because only a comedic header is appropriate for a blog that I know ahead of time I will never post to. Separate threads will be broken out by keywords (same keywords, same threads).

Bullet Points are a Privilege, Not a Right

2007-06-18T10:53:00.000-07:00

From a recruiter email that wound its way to my inbox:
Requirements:

Must have worked with "Infopath 2003" and a Project exp on Infopath 2007
or at least very good understanding of Infopath 2007
Infopath is the main Skill.

(Unless you are Louis Borges. If you are Louis Borges, lists, bulleted or otherwise, are in fact a right.)

LOL Cats

2007-06-18T10:48:00.000-07:00

The phenomenon of LOL Cats. It's funny not because the pictures are cute, but because it's a dead accurate depiction of the teenage chat room patois your pets would use if they could express their retarded thoughts.

Examples:

Also:

It is fun to spend entire days annoying your friends by communicating in LOLspeak. Example:

I am supposed to pick Danyel up from the Montlake bus station. I ask him to text me when he's 10 minutes away, so I can start driving.

SMS comes in: On mai bus, ridin UR roadz. Etea ay tennis minnitz
Traffic is bad, and I am delayed.

His arrival: I HAZ A MONTLAKE!

Five minutes later: INVISIBLE GIRLFRIEND!!!!!!!!!!!

Ways to Die in Your Home-- The Musical

2007-02-06T11:04:00.000-08:00

Rules:

must be a song title (or band name, or album name); may include surrounding lyrics
must be a way to die -in your home- (So "in the jungle / the mighty jungle / the lion sleeps tonight" does't count)
must be a primary, not secondary, cause of death (so no "slipped while putting on Blue Suede Shoes"-- rule can be broken if justification is funny enough).

Ways to Die in Your Home, General

Zombie
(if diabetic) Pour some sugar on me
Take my breath away
Maneater
(bitten by) Karma chameleon
You dropped a bomb on me
I'm too sexy (for my pulse)
Be still my beating heart
Winona's Big Brown Beaver
She's a maniac!
Smoke gets in your eyes
Jump
Love bites
Tainted love ("if only there was a song called 'tainted meat'")
Hunka hunka burnin' love
Sabotage
Barracuda
Magic Man
That old black magic
Love will tear us apart (again)
I've got my love to keep me warm (ineffective!)
Worldwide suicide
The macarena
The... Larch
Rock lobster
The boxer (picture "Pulp Fiction")
Peace train
Lightning striking again
Criminal (Fiona Apple)
Killing me softly with his song
Crash (Dave Matthews)
Walking on broken glass
Fast car
That girl is poison
Cats in the cradle (they kill babies)
Everybody was Kung Fu fighting
Pachebel's Canon
Rock me (as in Biblical stoning; let he who has no sin cast the first power chord)
Rock me, Amadeus
Go, Go Godzilla

Natural Disaster / Plague

Great Balls of Fire
Millions of peaches
Ice, Ice, baby.
The tide is high
Chariots of fire
Heat Wave
Rapture

Illnesses

He gives me fever
Cat scratch fever
Saturday Nigh Fever
Heart of glass
Achey breaky heart
Lump (think: oncology)
Groove is in the heart (how tragic... they say it's hereditary)

AAAAIIIiiiieeeeeee

Walking on sunshine
Walking on a thin line
Hangin' 'round
He ain't heavy, he's my brother "Oh, wait-- he IS heavy!"(AAAAIIIiiiieeeeeee tumble tumble tumble CRUNCH)

"Clue" Version

Sledgehammer
Brass Monkey
Monkey Wrench
She bop

Death by Trogdor

Burning down the house
Beds are burning
Disco inferno
Burnin' for you
She's on fire, my baby's on fire
Doctor, Doctor, can't you see I'm burning, burning?

Darwin Awards

Why don't we do it in the road
All she wants to do is dance (and doesn't eat)
One burbon, one scotch, one beer (repeat)
Highway to Hell
Highway to the Danger Zone
Cocaine
One toke over the line, sweet jesus
(Died while) Fighting for my Right to Party
Tripping on a hole in paper heart
Learning to fly
Dancing on the Ceiling

Not Politically Correct

Baby hit me one more time
Hit me with your best shot
Little red corvette (picture baby + matchbox car)

Situations Which, if Not Carefully Monitored, May Cause You to Die in Your Home:

Celebrate good times, come on
Hurts so good
She's so heavy
Do that to me one more time
Blister in the sun
Everybody hurts

Things Which will Make You Wish You had Died in Your Home:

Losing my religion
Shiny happy people

Most Existential way to Die in Your Home:

Time keeps on slippin', slippin', slippin' into the future

Band Names: Ways to Die in Your Home

Fine Young Cannibals
Sting (saved by: The Cure)
The Beatles
The Rolling Stones
(comic book style) Wham!
The Scorpions
The Cranberries
AC/DC
Bjork

Album Titles: Ways to Die in Your Home

Jagged little pill
Automatic for the people

If Your Software Won't Let me Lie (Pt II): Lying to Your Parents

2007-01-20T11:22:00.000-08:00

Wouldn’t it be great if you could know exactly where your kids are all the time? All day, every day? Wouldn’t it be great to be sure they’re not ever getting up to anything you wouldn’t do, and they’re never in any danger… ever?

Really?

Here is an article about how parents in Japan will soon be able to monitor their kids’ whereabouts by tracking them with the GPS (Global Positioning System) device on their cellphones.

The Customer is Not Always Right

There is often a chasm of difference between what the customer thinks he wants, and what he actually wants. It’s the designer’s job to trace the customer’s expression of his needs (“I want the software to do these 25 things and be colored blue”) back to the premises, or root needs, that underlie them (“I want the software to be profitable, keep a 75% returning customer base, and look professional”).

At face value, it probably sounds like an excellent idea to most parents to be able to track the exact location of their kids 24 hours a day; they might, for example, imagine thwarting a kidnapping or a burgeoning drug addiction. Imagine a world, though, where this technology really worked and was adopted widely and used constantly. When you were a kid, did you ever sneak out? Lie about where you were spending the night? Did you go on a road-trip adventure that your parents never knew about? A disreputable party? What if you hadn’t been able to do any of those things, ever? What if you had spent your entire teenage years never once able to lie to your parents about your whereabouts? What if you yourself had to live with an entire generation of people who had never been allowed to break the rules?

That’s an exaggeration, of course. I'm just illustrating that individuation (the process by which children break from the mold of their parents’ social conditioning and experiment their way towards developing a unique self) is contingent in no small measure upon screwing up (and madly brainstorming your way out of it), breaking rules, and lying. Any software that seriously impedes kids (or anyone else) from doing these things will damage their ability to become full people who make meaningful and interesting contributions to society.

Fortunately, We’re All Brilliant Liars

The good news for kids, with respect to control technologies, is that any assortment of kids will always be smarter, quicker, and more resourceful than their parents; and they will always have access to more cutting-edge technology.

Likewise, the general human masses (kids or adults) will always find clever ways around any roadblocks that official technology produces… within weeks, usually, of the general adoption of that official technology. Any new control technology (e.g. Digital Rights Management [DRM]) takes about 1-3 year’s turnaround to move from inception to market. It takes, on the other hand, 2-4 weeks for a distributed team of 500 of the world’s bored hackers to come up with a workaround, distribute it on the net, and break the control. Is sharing protection (DRM) on copyrighted iTunes tracks bugging you? Go online and download one of a dozen third-party, free pieces of software to strip the protection from them. There are so many iTunes-hacks out there, they’re in competition with one another for sleekest user interface. I'm not saying this is a good thing or a bad thing; it just is. Distributed groups of hackers are smarter, and exponentially faster, than companies or government organizations who move through formalized processes to market.

So if we can crack DRM within a month, kids will have no trouble whatsoever in getting around more intrusive control technologies. They're better with technology, and their motivation to override anything that seriously restricts their freedom is greater than our idle need to share our copyrighted iTunes tracks. This is easy to illustrate. I recently read a story about how some middle and high schools are trying to staunch the overwhelming tide of collective technology by instituting “no cellphones in school” rules; kids are already thinking of innovative ways around that. Also, I'll link again to the story about Spanish high school kids hacking each others’ cellphones to gather blackmail material on other students. Over Thanksgiving I spent a long plane ride chatting up a fairly average, hip young middle school kid who could out-talk me in processor configuration and out-code me in Visual Basic. Think that kid is going to put up with his parents (who are Luddites by comparison) tracking him with the GPS device on his cellphone?

The likely scenario is that kids will hack together a half dozen little apps you can upload to your cellphone to make your GPS broadcast coordinates of your own choosing… making it twice as easy to lie to your parents about where you are than it was before you got the GPS phone in the first place.

So, to recap: people have to be able to lie to each other, at least sometimes and under some circumstances. If you produce software that doesn’t let people lie, they’ll either not use it (e.g. presence, where we block anyone from IM who we don’t want to have full access to our daily rhythms), or they’ll hack it to pieces so that all of the validity of the data is ruined/corrupted. In other words, if you ask for too much control, and you get none; you get a wobbly system, overcompensating for the original overcompensation.

How Much Information is too Much?

Let’s break personal status information down into three categories that might be projected by social software:

Time Grain: frequency with which status information is updated
Detail: specificity of information (“at school” –vs- “In the janitor’s closet with young attractive French teacher”)
Level of Aggregation: high aggregation would refer to status information that reflects the status of a large group of people (“Flight 714 is over Albuquerque (and my mother is on that flight”); low aggregation information refers to three or fewer individuals (“My mother is the gift shop in the C wing of the Huston airport.”)

To create status-broadcasting tools that won’t cause overcompensation, you can only emphasize two of those variables at once. The more specific you get with those, the less specific you must be about the third. Some examples:

The Weasley’s clock in the Harry Potter series, which had a hand for each family member, pointing to one of several wide, vague categories: home, school, work, in mortal peril, etc. (Note: a few years back, Microsoft research created an actual workable manifestation of this clock.) (+Aggregation [by individual], +Time Grain [updated instantly], - Detail [five broad categories])
A technology which uses GPS to track the location of school busses (+Detail [exact location], +Time Grain [updated instantly], -Aggregation [tracks a formal group])
Dodgeball (see previous blog entry). (+Aggregation [individual], +Detail [exact location], -Time Grain [user rarely broadcasts information, and at her own discretion])

The bigger or more formalized the group you’re paying attention to, the more constantly and specifically you can broadcast information about it without major sociological backlash. The more individual or personal the information, though, the more vital it becomes to allow people to obscure the truth about themselves—to whom they chose, and when they chose.

If parents demand GPS tracking for their kids, companies will produce the functionality and it will sell. It just won't last or work very well; it will send the social system into a couple of wild swings, and then die out. Digital solutions that are actually going to last and incorporate themselves into the fibre of social life just have to incorporate themselves into our prexisting social patterns. As before: the nature of our relationships has to define the interface, not the other way around.

If Your Software Won't Let me Lie, I'm Not Going to Use It (Pt I)

2007-01-09T11:20:00.000-08:00

Presence Information: Typically, presence data takes the form of a little icon next to your name in IM and some email programs/web services. It tells other users when you are online, offline, away, or busy.
Social Penetration Theory: A fairly simplistic model of intimacy, and how it evolves. A personal graduates their level of intimacy with another person (which is irritatingly, but accurately, summarized by the catch-phrase “Into-Me-See”) like peeling an onion: by adjusting the type, frequency, and privacy level of information that they share with him/her.

Argh, finally. This new piece of mobile software, “The Swarm” (still in development), proposes a presence model which starts to jive with how people negotiate social boundaries per-person, and over time (see: Social Penetration Theory).

The thing is, we define our relationships on a daily basis by the degree, consistency, and nature of information that we share with one another. We make distinctions:

by time grain: I tell my employer (in July) that my cat was hit by a car (in June). I tell my mother on Thursday that it happened on Monday. I call my sweetie the minute it happens.
by detail: I tell my employer I had a nice time in Cancun. I tell my mother about the lovely hotel and the awful prices. I tell my sweetie, at comedic length, about trying not to gawk at the giant, disfiguring mole on the nose of the maître d'.
by sensitivity: I tell my employer my meeting with the new client was "awkward." I tell my mother that the client turned out to be an "old friend" from "those shady years." I tell my sweetie that the client was "that guy who was nice enough not to press charges."

Presence information is just that: it's information about what you're up to, right as it happens. As such, it is a very intimate handshake to be making with someone who you've just met at a party and casually invites you "to IM sometime." Combine this with the growing ubiquity of presence data in mobile/social digital tools, and you have a problem.

For those of you who don’t know, I just finished a contract with the Real Time Collaboration group (now Unified Communications) at Microsoft. I was often neck-deep in usability research around presence and presence models. Some presence models are much more granular than here, gone, away, busy: some interfaces pull detail about what you're up to out of other programs (Outlook, for example); some let you write your own status messages.

They also allow for a tiny bit of individual regulation. When you add someone to your IM contact list, they see your presence information; if you don't want them to see it anymore, you block them or remove them from your list. This leaves you with binary options per individual: you give someone all of your information, or none of it. That's polar and awkward. Do I really want my old workmates seeing the status messages I write into Google Chat to make my friends laugh? (“Luke, I am your Puff Daddy.” – Puff Darth) Do I want the guy I met at the conference see what time I get home at night (status icon changes from away to online)? Would I rather, instead, block them from chatting with me entirely? How does sharing, or explicity blocking, this information change my relationships with these people?

The point is, we human beings like to, er, temper reality to degrees when we allow individuals into our personal information space. In other words, we like to lie. Lying, or at least withholding lots of things as we see fit, is an essential part of social functionality. In a sustainable presence model, the nature of the user's relationships dictate these intimacy-defining information exchanges-- not vice versa.

The presence model in The Swarm is (from what I can see in the full, brief article) one cognitive step closer to aligning presence with relationship onion-layers. It allows you to customize your status information per individual. Your boss sees you're home sick; you mom sees you're taking the afternoon off; your friends see you're playing "Brazilian Nurses' MudWrestling Deathmatch IV."

Stay tuned for: If Your Software Wont' Let me Lie (Pt II): Lying to Your Parents

Norman L. Johnson: Remember his Name (Fame!)

2006-12-29T21:21:00.000-08:00

Terms:

Agent: one entity in a collective group of entities that are doing something together. Agent-based models attempt to simulate how entities with (maybe) unique characteristics (like individuals in a crowd) move and make decisions together to produce unexpected collective results (like rioting).
Resilience or Robustness: the ability of a system to spring back from external disturbances (e.g. a city design is robust if the city can continue to function even after a bomb destroys 15% of the central streets and buildings).
System: A group of components working together in an organically-organized way (maybe) to operate as a collective entity with its own unique nature. Examples: the body of a bird, or a public school. This is a larger topic which I’ll address in a future post.

Ok, this is really disturbing. Lots of people do not seem to know about Norman L. Johnson. Even my friend who arguably knows way more than me about social systems has, reportedly, not heard of him.

Inconceivable! Norman L. Johnson produces fantastic stuff. He’s a researcher at the Los Alamos National Laboratory. Even intermediate-level readers can get usable fundamental conceptual building blocks r.e. systems theory and collective intelligence from his papers.

Here, for example is a reference to his work on the uses of diversity in social systems. (The following explanation refers to an article that I’m pulling out of my memory, not specifically to what’s in that link, so there may be some incongruencies.) Johnson shows that systems move through three lifestyle phases, where they show varying degrees of productivity and robustness.

When I reference these concepts in conversation (which I do a lot); I typically use the example of a social system of house builders. Here is how that system might evolve:

Formative (infant) stage:

You pluck 30 house builders out of the ether, throw them together in the woods, and tell them to start building 2-bedroom, 1-story houses.
These individuals (or "agents") haven’t worked together before. Their roles aren’t defined (What are my duties?), their relationships aren’t defined (Who do I like? Who do I take orders from?), and the process itself isn’t defined (What materials? What layout?). This system of people will build fairly mediocre houses (poor productivity), but will be highly creative (everything is experimentation until something works), and very robust (change the circumstances, change the goals, and they can easily switch gears).

Mature stage:

The same builders have been working together for six months.
They’ve done this enough that they’ve established some processes that work. Joe mans the nailgun. Mary monitors the resources. Barry lifts the heavy stuff. Alice and Bill don’t work together or they bicker. However, not all of the combinations of roles, relationships, and system processes have been tried yet, so experimentation is still taking place. Thus, this system of agents is now fairly productive (but not maximally productive), but still pretty robust. If you suddenly swap out 30% of the workers with new people, the group can still shuffle itself around and adapt.

Senescent (geriatric) stage:

The same builders have been working together on the same project, in the same environment, for ten years.
This group is incredibly efficient. They have tried everything, and they now know the optimal, maximally-productive way of producing 2-bedroom, 1-story houses in the woods. They know exactly what their roles are when they show up to work without thinking about it at all; they haven’t had to experiment in years. The tradeoff for this productivity is a sore deficiency in robustness. If you up and airlift this crew to New Mexico and tell them "Now build me 4-bedroom, 2-story houses in the desert," they will just plain fail. The system will break.

You can use these simple concepts to extraordinary effect in interpreting the behavior of, for example, neural nets, agent-based models, or your local PTA meetings.

Here are lots of Norman L. Johnson's publications. His credentials are scary-impressive, but his writing is sublimely intelligible and accessible to Even Normal People Like You. I’ll probably be cracking some of his articles back open and overviewing them here (eventually).

So that's who Norman L. Johnson is. All right? All right.

Metacognition: Helping People be Stupid in Public Forums

2006-12-07T11:17:00.000-08:00

As of this entry, I’ll be kicking off posts by summarizing any new vocab words up front for newbies; other folks can scan past them.

Newbie (or n00b): a newcomer to a field. Internet lingo term used sometimes amiably, sometimes as a pejorative. : )
Meta: a tricky concept. A “meta” idea is, roughly, an idea that is about a subset of itself. For example, “How Joe writes blogs” is meta to its subset, which is “how Joe’s Dec 11, 2006 blog entry is written.” The first sentence in this entry (about putting term definitions in blog entries) is meta to this list.
Metacognition: the study of how we think (i.e. thinking about how you think about things). When you take classes on how to study, or meditate to observe and silence your thoughts, that’s a metacognitive process.

Metacognition is particularly interesting to social systems folks, because we treat crowds as a kind of semi-thinking organism which may be influenced and eventually trained. When an individual learns how to learn (i.e. gets meta to learning), he greatly magnifies his operational intelligence. When an individual learns how people learn, or how they reason or make decisions, she becomes able to create very influential (even Machiavellian) political policy, for example, or social software.

I recently stumbled on an excellent, highly intelligible blog called Creating Passionate Users. It focuses on metacognition, with an emphasis on using metacognitive tools to achieve goals in various computer/network applications.

Last week (Dec 3) featured an interesting post is called How to Build a User Community (pt 1) by Kathy Sierra. Sierra proposes a way to encourage participants to stay active, learn, and feel needed in online user forums as those people move slowly up the ranks of expertise. It could, though, just as easily be applied in a number of other organizational situations.

Her suggestions focus around encouraging late-beginner-to-intermediate users to try to answer (the inevitable flood of) newbie questions in public forums, without fear of being looked at as foolish if their answers are wrong. I like this: it’s an approach that encourages smooth and circular information flow, while capitalizing on some inherent human drives (to not look stupid or be irritating, to participate, to be useful.)

Here are her main points; see the blog for a full explanation. There’s also a lengthy scroll of reader discussion at the bottom.

Encourage newer users–especially those who’ve been active askers–to start trying to answer questions
Give tips on how to answer questions
Tell them it’s OK to guess a little, as long as they ADMIT they’re guessing
Adopt a near-zero-tolerance “Be Nice” policy when people answer questions
Teach and encourage the more advanced users (including moderators) how to correct a wrong answer while maintaining the original answerer’s dignity.
Re-examine your reward/levels strategy for your community

About This Blog

2006-11-16T21:19:00.000-08:00

This blog is a vehicle (a hub) for rants, discussions and resources having to do with social and organizational systems dynamics, and (often, but not always) how said dynamics intersect with developing social technologies. This broad topic includes: collective intelligence, social software, smartmobs technology, social engineering, social networks, etc.

These ideas are getting a lot of academic and corporate action right now. They’re working their way into scores upon scores of developing mobile devices and cutting-edge internet tools. At the same time, “social systems” as a coherent discipline is still hovering on the periphery of public awareness like a shy prom date. The ideas are generally portrayed as esoteric and academic, and even when they’re presented well, they can be a serious mental stretch to think or talk about. Either you don’t get it, or it’s like reading science fiction.

So, social systems concepts are whizzing around everywhere. They’re the foundations behind half of the hardware tools and applications we use all day long, and are developing with dizzying speed, but very few people without master’s degrees can use the basic lingo. This blog, and my associated website, Yggdrasil, are written so that anybody at all can access social/organizational systems ideas and start to grok their implications. The site/blog also provide tools for laymen and intermediates to talk about the ramifications of (or logically dismantle) those ideas in a public forum.

Moreover, it’s a place for folks to access and logically dismantle my social/organizational systems ideas. The more public debate my posts generate, from friends, strangers, experts or the idly curious, the happer I am.

So, in other words: comment, folks.