Social Software: the Runtime Effect

In yesterday’s post I alluded to the idea that Barack Obama’s recent US Presidential Election win could, in no small part, be attributed to his effective utilization of social media, including the use of tools and technologies like YouTube, Facebook, blogs, and even PayPal (and other online payment solutions). Citing James Surowiecki’s 2004 text The Wisdom of Crowds, I indicated the characteristics of crowd wisdom, and outlined the four criteria that separate wise crowds from irrational ones.

Social networking guru Clay Shirky describes the phenomenon of group dynamics mediated through Web 2.0 technologies as a “Run-time effect:”

You cannot specify in advance what the group will do, and so you can't substantiate in software everything you expect to have happen… [but social patterns emerge] that …are core to any software that supports larger, long-lived groups.

…there's this very complicated moment of a group coming together, where enough individuals, for whatever reason, sort of agree that something worthwhile is happening, and the decision they make at that moment is: This is good and must be protected. And at that moment, even if it's subconscious, you start getting group effects. And the effects that we've seen come up over and over and over again in online communities.

I would assert that this is the group run-time effect that was leveraged by the US Democratic Party, and that ultimately galvanized such a substantial number of voters to become involved in the democratic process. Shirky describes a number of ways in which these social patterns manifest themselves including:

Table 1 Run-time effects of groups

Pattern	Characteristics	Example
Identification of enemies	The identification and vilification of external enemies as a driver for group cohesion	The Open Source movement in the mid-Nineties versus Microsoft, as personified by Bill Gates
Veneration	The nomination and worship of an icon or a set of tenets. The pattern is, essentially, we have nominated something that's beyond critique	Negatively criticizing Lord of the Rings on a Tolkien newsgroup or discussion forum

These group patterns emerge on the Internet, not because of the software, but because it's being used by people.

An Idea whose Time has Come

I would suggest that one of the primary reasons that social networking software played such a significant role in the 2008 US Presidential Election was precisely because of the nebulousness and loose structure of the read / write Web. But before we can look at this, it’s worthwhile to understand the role of traditional media in distributing information. As I’m not a broadcast media expert, I will investigate this through the filter of Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky’s Propaganda Model.*

First presented in their 1988 book Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media, the "Propaganda model" views the private media as businesses selling a non-media product — readers and demographic groups — to other businesses (advertisers). The theory postulates five general classes of "filters" that determine the type of news that is presented in news media. These five filters are:

1. Ownership of the medium
2. Medium's funding sources
3. Sourcing
4. Flak
5. Anti-communist ideology

I would strongly argue for the position espoused by Herman & Chomsky in Manufacturing Consent that as mass media news outlets are run by large corporations, they are under the same competitive pressures as other businesses. According to the authors, the pressure to create a stable, profitable business invariably distorts the kinds of news items reported, as well as the manner and emphasis in which they are reported. This does not occur as a consequence of market selection: those businesses who happen to favor profits over news quality tend to survive, while those that present a more accurate picture of the world tend to become marginalized. In a nutshell, the Republicans had the politically conservative Fox News to deliver their campaign messages (reflecting the vested interests of powerful lobby groups, trans-national corporations, and the military-industrial complex in maintaining the status quo).

However, ranged against this (probably for the first time in history) was the availability of an alternative set of media channels to disseminate information combined with a new generation of voters familiar and comfortable with the media supported by the Internet.

And that’s what I’ll look at next time.

_________________

References:

Herman, E.S., Chomsky, N (2002). Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media. Pantheon Books.

Shirky, C. (2003). A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy. A speech at ETech, April, 2003. [Internet]. Available from: http://www.shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html Retrieved 14 October 2008.

Surowiecki J. (2004). The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies and Nations. Doubleday.

* …and yes, I’m aware of, and entitled to my own biases – IMFB

--

Citing texts: great reference site

If, like me, you reference your research in your blog posts (and I suggest that you do, for reasons ranging from trustworthiness, competence of the author to elucidate on a topic, as well as not been accused of plagiarism), you probably know the irritation of formatting your references correctly.

Personally, I use the Harvard Style (because that’s what was specified in my under- and post-graduate programs) but you may use APA, Chicago, or one of myriad others.

While undertaking research for a blog post recently, I encountered a little gem of a resource online; it’s called CiteULike and as it says in their FAQ:

CiteULike is a free service to help you to store, organise and share the scholarly papers you are reading. When you see a paper on the web that interests you, you can click one button and have it added to your personal library. CiteULike automatically extracts the citation details, so there's no need to type them in yourself. It all works from within your web browser so there's no need to install any software. Because your library is stored on the server, you can access it from any computer with an Internet connection.

Like Delicious, CiteULike is tag-based, and has a flexible information filing structure. It also supports BibTeX formatted references, as well as the ability to generate bibliographies.

Fantastic!

Even this level of functionality is a godsend for nerds like me. But, as the saying goes, there’s more. CiteULike will also take your reference details and format them according to a style of your choice.

______________

References:

CiteULike Website http://www.citeulike.org

--

Collective Knowledge and the Wisdom of Crowds

Today, I’m minded to discuss the concept of the effect of information-sharing on the collective consciousness and individual decision-making (and yes, friends, this series of posts will probably allude to the use of social software in the success of Barak Obama’s recent US Presidential election campaign, and maybe even a little about how we can leverage social software technologies for e-learning).

Now read on…

In his seminal 2004 book The Wisdom of Crowds, James Surowiecki discussed the aggregation of information in groups, resulting in decisions that, he asserts, are often better than choices that could have been made by any individual member of a group. The author suggests that typically people look for what he calls the “single decision-maker;” an acknowledged expert who uses their judgment to provide solutions or answers, whereas the better strategy is probably to look for “as diverse and wide a pool of decision-makers as [possible].”

Table 1 Characteristics of crowd wisdom

Cognition	Market judgment, which Surowiecki argues can be much faster, more reliable, and less subject to political forces than the deliberations of experts or expert committees.
Coordination	Common understanding within a culture allows remarkably accurate judgments about specific reactions of other members of the culture. For example, knowing the Rules of the Road has the benefit of optimizing traffic flows.
Cooperation	How groups of people can form networks of trust without a central system controlling their behavior or directly enforcing their compliance.

However, we know that not all groups are wise. Consider, for example, violent mobs, investors in stock market bubbles, or property developers in Ireland in the second half of this decade. According to Surowiecki, four criteria separate wise crowds from irrational ones:

• Diversity of opinion
  • Each person should have private information even if it's just an eccentric interpretation of the known facts.
• Independence
  • People's opinions aren't determined by the opinions of those around them.
• Decentralization
  • People are able to specialize and draw on local knowledge.
• Aggregation
  • Some mechanism exists for turning private judgments into a collective decision.

Clay Shirky (2003) asserts that there was no real means for any group to meet these four criteria until the emergence of social software:

Prior to the Internet, the last technology that had any real effect on the way people sat down and talked together was the table. There was no technological mediation for group conversations. The closest we got was the conference call, which never really worked right -- "Hello? Do I push this button now? Oh, shoot, I just hung up." It's not easy to set up a conference call, but it's very easy to email five of your friends and say "Hey, where are we going for pizza?" So ridiculously easy group forming is really news.

It can be said that e-mail, blogs, wikis and so on are not social per se: Shirky considers that these technologies enable other communications channels including broadcasting (spam), one-to-one (SMS texting), and one-to-many (blogs), as much as collaborative interaction. More accurately, network-based internet technologies are not necessarily social, but they can support social patterns.

More…

_________________

References:

Shirky, C. (2003). A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy. A speech at ETech, April, 2003. [Internet]. Available from: http://www.shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html Retrieved 14 October 2008.

Surowiecki J. (2004). The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies and Nations. Doubleday.

Blogs as an e-learning resource: some reflections

As you’ll know if you’re a regular reader of The E-learning Curve Blog, I haven’t been corresponding with my usual regularity; this isn’t a case of blog fade, but rather is because of unusually heavy work commitments.

It’s uncomfortable for me not to be able to correspond, as I’m serious about my commitment to the activity, and in my view it’s a great discipline to set yourself a target of writing 500-1000 words a day of publishable material. Much as in my daily attempts to run or go to the gym, I believe that if you can find a good reason not to undertake this task, sooner or later you’ll find a bad excuse, and then the whole thing falls apart.

Even though I have not had the time to blog, I have been keeping an eye on my blog stats, and I’m pleased (even gratified) to find that the number of hits on my blog has not reduced by any significant margin.

Interesting.

What can this suggest? Intuitively, I would consider that if a blog isn’t updated frequently, then access and usage would drop off over time, but this doesn’t seem to have been the case.

Based on my blogs metrics, the number of hits via RSS – the daily feed – have gone down: obviously if I’m not posting regularly, the RSS doesn’t update, and subscribers have no new content to access. The other useful metric – number of hits through searches – has increased to the degree that it’s actually compensating for the fall-off in RSS-based or return viewers.

This suggests to me that an appreciable number of people are using my blog as an information-, knowledge- and learning resource, which, as far as I’m concerned, is the core value of my blog, and it’s certainly the reason that I subscribe to the blogs I read on a regular basis. I tend to write in what I call part-works and occasional series. For example, I will take a topic, such as open-source software for learning, and undertake a multi-part exploration of the topic over a period of time (usually about two weeks or so). This, I feel, enables me to cover a subject in some depth, but without overloading the reader with too much information in any given blog post.

In my occasional series posts, I will return to a particular theme over time. I find that this approach is especially useful when discussing new or fast-changing stories like elearning and the current recession.

It seems that what has emerged over the last year or so is that I have created an archive of material that addresses the needs and concerns of a significant number of other learning and development professionals. Hopefully I have also managed to challenge some preconceptions about the e-learning industry, and inspire others to enter into a dialogue with me about the nature of our profession, with the ultimate aim of enhancing the role of elearning as an means to educate.

--