Massively Networked

SXSW 2010: We are all bees

We’re all bees now, apparently.  Hive mind may no longer be a metaphor but a gadget-mediated reality when we all peer into Foursquare apps to see which locations are trending and who is setting the trend so we can be sure to fly off to where the (usually) King Bee is hanging out. When we arrive, we’ll check in and report to the others our location – signaling we’re in the know by Tweet name-dropping “w/ @briansolis @scobelizer”.  Congratulations – you’ve unlocked your Super Swarm badge at The Speakeasy.

Foursquare debuted at last year’s SXSW capturing interest among those who saw the potential of a location-based service (LBS), especially given the mass adoption of the iPhone with its geolocation features. Gowalla followed shortly thereafter, offering a similar ability to check in your location, share tips and get stuff: points for showing up, rewards for being a loyal visitor and cred for taking your game to the next level.

Foursquare and Gowalla are racing to gain the greatest market share in this critical early stage. Perhaps moreso than any other product or service, an LBS in the social space is only as valuable to its users as the numbers of their friends using it. I can own a Mac or PC or both because each may serve a different purpose – one I tend to use for multimedia and one I use for business. Even with social services like MySpace and Facebook there can be a reason to engage with both – one I use to connect with my musician friends and the other I keep for family and work friends. With LBSs however, I can only be in one place at a time so it doesn’t add any value to be using two services. It will be interesting to see if Gowalla can overcome Foursquare’s first-mover advantage or if it gets assimilated.

DIY civil works for the 21st century

Residents of Kauai heard news that flood damage in much-touristed Polihale State Park would take the cash-strapped state two years and US$4 million to remedy, likely forcing several businesses to shut down. Eight days later the repairs were complete. For (almost) free. Did the state realize the potential impact on local business, get really clever about sourcing supplies and kick the project into high gear? No. Residents affected by damage volunteered their time and donated supplies to get 'er done. Welcome to DIY civil works in action.

Horatio Alger bootstrapping, lack of stigma attached to failure and openness to change provide much of the scaffolding for the mythos that shapes attitudes in the United States - so perhaps it's no surprise that Hawaii residents felt empowered to ignore the state's answer and find a way to fix the park themselves. What makes this story potentially more interesting is when you align it with the current growing economic crisis and other DIY movements afoot. What happens when economic necessity meets DIY culture and a technological platform that enables massively networked coordination of resources?

John Geraci, founder of DIYCity.org, has a practical vision for participatory civil engagement by creating open-source tools that can draw upon the collective intelligence of city residents to find ways to create the city they want. Much like the Kauai example, citizens would be drawn together by a common frustration - say, inefficiencies in the public transit system - and collectively assemble the human and technological resources to make public transportation a better experience.

Unlike Kauai, however, the DIY civil works projects need not be in response to a crisis. These projects could simply start with the question "What would improve your experience of the city?" or "What would make your life more enjoyable? More fun? More satisfying?" The emergent nature of massively networked communications can coalesce a movement toward positive and creative changes that could not have been anticipated by rational, bureaucratic processes.

Moreover, the coalescence and focusing of human intent is only part of the DIY equation. The other part is enabling the physical environment to participate in the communication. Right now there are hundreds of projects in maker/hacker spaces that are bootstrapping technological innovations on the cheap. Many of these projects leverage wireless technology, inexpensive circuit boards and radio frequency tagging to create environmentally-responsive communicants that can be embedded within physical spaces. The Arduino open source electronics platform, for example, puts creating something like an iPhone-like accelerometer within the reach of a reasonably intelligent tinkerer.

Take the kind of focused human intent found in the Kauai example, empower it with inexpensive and accessible creative resources, feed it all into a massively networked platform for communication and collaboration - and, like the folks on Kauai, we need not wait for the state to set the agenda any longer. The tools for 21st century DIY civil works are in our hands right now.

April 14, 2009 Update: A great example of DIY civil works from Estonia

Thought for the day: Investing your social media currency in derivatives?

My friend Risa forwarded me the "Social Media Marketing Madness" Hubspot cartoon on the left. "I'm a marketer," the first cell says. "I blog about marketing," says the next. "I have a podcast about marketing bloggers," "I tweet about podcasters that talk about marketing bloggers," and finally "I have a Facebook group for Twitter users that tweet about podcasters that talk about marketing bloggers."

Might be funnier if it weren't so true that the currency of social media is heavily invested in derivatives. And we all know how well the investment in derivatives is working out on the economic stage right now. I'm just sayin'.

Social media in a world of massive connectivity

Social media is nothing new. Social commentator and sci-fi author Bruce "global microbrand"* Sterling noted in his talk this afternoon at SXSW that in the early 20th century H.P. Lovecraft, the writer of odd sci-fi and horror, set up an amateur author network of what might now be analogous to a blogger network. In addition to his sci-fi writing, Lovecraft cultivated a network of devoted followers who often relied on him for life advice. Lovecraft was perhaps an influencer of his time.

The difference now, of course, is the massive connectivity enabled by technology. This is a fact that Sterling partially laments for ushering in an era where he's speaking to "the people formerly known as the audience" as 100s of attendees twitter away while he talks. He partially sees it as beneficial as well - by opening channels of communication that can perhaps be credited for the relative political stablility in these environmentally and economically unstable times. From the laughter among audience members at unfunny moments, I wonder whether they thought he was being serious or just hyperbolic about what are likely to be near-future challenges such as increased violence, repeated unstable weather patterns, and shortages of necessities like shelter. Maybe it was just nervous laughter, I don't know. In any case, I share Sterling's ambivalence about the broken attention span massive connectivity enables, as well as its capacity to draw together the raw materials of human innovation to solve some of the critical challenges the current environment is beginning to generate. 

Ambiguities, of course, are resolved in actions, and we have a lot of raw materials to work with. Among Sterling's suggestions are to engage the elderly who are "going to be the backbone of the social web," given their free time and the limited effort it takes to "hit the return button." He also suggested frequent mini-SXSW-style BarCamps potentially generating ideas, local micro payment systems, health festivals to take care of the sick who can no longer afford to care for themselves, young people squatting in abandoned buildings to create a space of their own, energy "barn raisings," and better refugee zones than the local stadium for when environmental disasters hit.

Social media in a world of massive connectivity used to coordinate meaningful action, in the end, might be what knits together broken attention spans. As familiar structures begin to dissemble, I hope many will be motivated to step up instead of dribble away their attention until it's too late (publishing industry, case in point). I'm rooting for us.

*Sterling noted that he used to call himself a journalist and author. That has now been supplanted by his niche celebrity as a "global microbrand" as the publishing industry loses its hold on the distribution channels and patriarchical structure.

Thought bubbles: DIY (& die?), governing the leaderless revolution, decentralizing conscious intent

   Thought Bubbles shares bits of news, ideas, links and random scribblings. Feel free to email me your own.

I've spent the entire month of February so far hosting a googolplex of viral and bacterial creatures, kicked off by the flu week one - thus the long break in posts. I'll get back on it soon. In the mean time, some items I might write more on later:

DIY - & die?: March's Wired columnist Clive Thompson is enthusiastic about the maker culture revolution wherein "everything you want could soon be micromanufactured just for you." Yea! - right? Well maybe not so much, or at least not so fast. Sven Johnson shares several examples of DIY manufacturing gone wrong. You might want to think twice before putting those darling necklace beads you ordered from Etsy in your mouth.

Governing the leaderless revolution: "Thanks to the internet, the tools for revolutionary change are at our fingertips, but as of yet this revolution has no name, no leaders and no formal agenda. We have barely tapped into its potential to become the advanced operating system that will allow us to catch up with the future." -from a SpaceCollective.org project. Brings up questions about governance and organization in a dynamic, emergent system. Kevin Kelly has some thoughts on governing the swarm as well.

Decentralizing conscious intent: Interesting juxtaposition (to me, anyway) of two TED presentations - Elizabeth Gilbert talking about relating to genius as an external entity that communicates inspiration and Juan Enriquez talking about the rise of a new, technology-enhanced, hominid species "homo evolutis." Both these talks have in common the notion that we as human beings are informed and formed by forces not wholly governed by our conscious intent.

Technology is the game-changer

Nobel laureate economist James Tobin (quoted in this week's Economist) predicted the current financial trajectory in a 1984 lecture, tying it to the adoption of computers to facilitate transactions: "[W]e are throwing more and more of our resources, including the cream of our youth, into financial activities remote from the production of goods and services, into activities that generate high private rewards disproportionate to their social productivity.  I suspect that the immense power of the computer is being harnessed to this 'paper economy', not to do the same transactions more economically but to balloon the quantity and variety of financial exchanges...I fear that, as Keynes saw even in his day, the advantages of the liquidity and negotiability of financial instruments come at the cost of facilitating nth-degree speculation which is short-sighted and inefficient."

The Economist article goes on to consider that financial services need to adapt to the economy of which they are part. I.e., we have to take into consideration the kind of innovation enabled by new technologies and adapt, in this case financial services, accordingly.

If you read this blog, you know I believe the current economic system is fundamentally broken and making adjustments to how financial services are or are not regulated isn't going to be a long-term solution. I don't believe that because I hold some ideological point of view that makes a certain system right or wrong. I believe that because we're embedded in a world that's informed by our technology (as Tobin eluded to) and that technology has reached the point where it's a game-changer.

The ordering strategies and rules of engagement that facilitated life in the relatively slow-moving paper economy won't work in a massively networked world. A successful future economy will be based on an ethos entirely different from one that relies on regulation to monitor the acquisition and distribution of assets. This ethos will be informed by technology that allows transfer of information approaching the speed of thought, rapid prototyping, low- or no-cost creation and distribution of many goods and services, time shifting, social networks, the "wiring" of the physical world, and virtual worlds that are independent of physical location. How this plays out depends on if we have indeed reached a critical mass of folks who are tuned in enough to this reality to know how best to engage the new game.