Faster Future: Possibilities now and beyond: human

Showing posts with label human. Show all posts

Tuesday, June 11, 2013

Big Data: 98 per cent as good as gut feel

The Human Face of Big Data.Via Brian's Books

Not so long ago I was given a demonstration of a very clever bit of kit to analyse big data. By gathering evidence about your expressed preferences shared through social media it could make predictions about the preferences you don't articulate.

Scary clever.

The person presenting proudly told us how their analysis had identified the right kind of music to attract the target market to a new energy drink.
Let's say they picked Artist X as the ideal brand amabassador.

Funnily enough, Artist X was exactly the person the product's brand manager had come up with from their own 'analysis'. I'm sure they had some evidence. Some charts with brand positions. Some brand truths. All that malarky. But they had much more. They had stuff no one had written down, no one could easily define. They had what they felt.

And where was all this processed? In the 'gut' of the brand manager - someone living and breathing and believing the brand.

The vendors of the clever big data cruncher marvelled at how Artist X could be proven to be a 98% fit with the requirements of the brand.

I fear they may be wrong.

I suspect the brand manager was 100% right and that the dimensions of data captured by the tool has gaps - gaps that only guts can currently fill.

You process big data every day - with staggering accuracy. When you drive a car or walk along a crowded street you are processing huge amounts of information and making decisions on it. In real time. If only big data could do that? It's getting better. Our weather forecasts are one example. But it's not 100%. There's still room for your gut - and it's important room.

One final example. When I started out as a local newspaper man, my first sub-editing job was to go through what were called the village columns. We'd call it user generated content today. Reports from local correspondents of village fetes, whist-drives, bowls matches, bring and buys, church services - that kind of micro-local news. It was mostly hand-written (semi-scrawled) and often on unlined paper. And it was my task to correct, amend, headline, and guestimate. I'd mark it all up with instructions for the guys who would set the pages (using ems and picas, font names and point sizes).

And then I'd have to estimate how much I needed to cut or add, what depth I should set images to (for example) to fill the number of pages I had been allocated, accounting for the adverts booked on them. It was a task that was not unlike estimating the number of individual straws in a decent sized haystack.
Yet, within a few weeks, I could mark up all that separate, different-looking, miscellaneous copy and have the output fit within 5 or 6cms of the final column each week. All done without the aid of any big data analysis.

Big data has a hugely important role for organisations (and for governments) moving forward. Who controls it and to what ends it is used will occupy us for years to come. But throughout that process let's not forget the extra value that something human adds.

Tuesday, February 21, 2012

The Revolution Will Not Be Automated

The revolution will not be automated.
It will not be delivered as a turn key solution or As A Service.
There will be no button to hit, switch to throw or command centre from which to run it.
The revolution will be hard, human, challenging, changing work.
Without the will to undergo cultural change all the tech will do is smear a little make up on the corpse of the past and prop it up in a chair. That won't fool anyone for long.
Treat me like a customer and I will buy your stuff. Treat me like a partner and I will help you make it.
Show me the console with a 'treat me like a partner', button.
Show me the console with 'understand behavioural change' on it.
Hell, show me the console with 'make better messages' on it - let alone 'make better products and services'.

There's a marvellous scene in Monty Python's Holy Grail in which Arthur's Knights arrive at a French castle and ask the guards if their master will join Arthur on his quest for the Holy Grail.
They say it's not very likely he'll bother since... "He already has one."

They were lieing too.

Thursday, September 09, 2010

The web and the silo of the self

Our digital tools of connection and discovery - the web and its reliants - are not here to make our lives faster.

Whenever it feels that is what they are delivering this is more a result of the sometimes over-stimulating abundance of choices they uncover - and our fear of missing out on something.

That abundance has always been here. People who face the same issues as you existed before the web enabled us to discover each other rapidly and effectively. Sources of information we could refer each other did too.

The existence of the abundance is not the cause of our occasional feeling of being swamped by opportunity - or information overload, as the less-connected world would have it. (image courtesty eggman)

Enabling the discovery of all our available, relevant connections is also not the cause of the 'drowning' sensation.

Some of the solution is effective filtering.

But the greater key is attitude towards our personal responsibility for knowledge acquisition and retention.

In the silo'd world of one-to-many channels (broadcast/mass production) we felt the pressure to acquire and hold the knowledge we needed in the silo of ourselves.

In the many-to-many networks of the web we are allowed a more distributed view of knowledge.

Humans who share lives each hold composite pieces of a shared memory - which can be readily assembled into a greater and agreed whole.

Mark Earl's book Herd describes this. You will recognise it in the experience of swopping stories at a family get-together. Each member of the group recalling a different detail of the same story - completing the jigsaw for all to see.

The web offers a similar opportunity for knowledge - with each node retaining for recall important pieces of a billion jigsaws; nodes being people, documents and things.

For an individual to know everything at once is an impossible godlike dream.

To know that everything known is knowable by us all is a reality of the web.

Those feeling swamped should stop setting themselves impossible personal targets and start accepting their part in our collective knowledge bank.

What you know and are willing to share is more important to all of us than what you don't.

See also: The internet simple shows us the way the world actually is.

Wednesday, April 07, 2010

Twitter Follower Optimisation (beware the TFO)

Just as search engine optimisation grew up to secure ever-larger audiences for websites, so it is inevitable that we will see a new Twitter-inspired industry emerge: Twitter Follower Optimisation (TFO... from now on).

Right now 'social media gurus' are analysing the optimum key terms in tweets which lead to an increase in your follower numbers - and also identifying the ones that increase the rate at which you are 'dropped'.

Part of the TFO process may include some sensible stuff about the kinds of things to say about yourself in your bio, what you should call yourself, what kind of avatar picture you can get away with - and which are the appropriate links to display on your profile.

But too much will focus on training yourself to tweet the optimal words - just as SEO strategists will advise on how to sprinkle key terms in your long form content. iPad. (see what I mean?)

I'd like to say this will be a short-lived industry. But such is the growth of Twitter that there will be Twitter virgins for many years to come - many eager to bag a large follower collection rapidly.

Ultimately the approach will fail. TFO focuses on the attraction of an audience toward a specific node. This was a reasonable strategy for the nodal world of websites. But for the interaction-heavy, node-light world of the likes of Twitter, it is a fail.

Three reasons:

One: Optimisation techniques will surface the lowest common denominator key terms for tweets which attract and tweets which repel. Lowest common denomators don't fit the long tail world - and the adhoc self-forming niche community world of Twitter is certainly long tail. One man's Leeds Utd is another man's Manchester Utd.

Two: Humans want to talk to other humans. Adding in follower-optimised terms makes you talk less like a human. Humans want to follow other humans.

Three: Twitter is less about attracting to a node, more about adhoc discovery of interaction between nodes.

This is important. Twitter is interaction heavy and node light. Your profile - effectively the hub of your interaction - is as much of a node as you get to have in Twitter - it is no heavier in content and meaning than the average business card. If you have a presence at all, it is as the sum of your interactions.

'My followers' (and I'm always uncomfortable calling the people listed under 'followers' mine - they are just as much the 'property' of anyone else they follow- and just as little) aren't attracted to me-the-node - to my business card.

They haven''t signed up to the @davidcushman club. They are attracted by my interactions - with them and with others. I can't get them to follow me on my own. It's their choice based on how I interact with others.

If they like the look of enough of those interactions they will follow - to get easier access to those interactions - more opportunities to join in.

To this end the equivalent of 'Site' in SEO is not 'Follower' in TFO - but your profile. You may be able to optimise a tweet but perhaps not a node - and you certainly can't optimise the two-way flow of the interactions - because you offer only one part of it.

No - when the TFO experts come knocking, show them to door. Learn the basics about your profile but, more importantly, deploy the basics of just being human via Twitter.

Perhaps if there's anything to optimise, the focus should be on who you follow, not who you hope to bag to follow you.

Tuesday, March 16, 2010

The internet simply shows us the way the world actually is

I had lunch with Gregory Lent today. We have known each other digitally for some time. He is the artist responsible for the work on the cover of my book. This was the first time we had met in person.

Greg is a truly fascinating, very warm and very wise man. His twitter profile tells us: 'Emptiness consultant, transformation ecologist, artist, economist ... pro-intelligence'. Not average.

Our conversation, our interaction, resulted in a phrase which Greg seized upon. And on reflection it is one you may also feel is worthy of further consideration.

"The internet simply shows us the way the world actually is,"

...is what I came out with. Or at least something very similar to that.

That could be a very interesting stub. The internet reveals to us how connected we are, how connected we could be, how connected we should be.

It reveals to us our interdependency. It demands we collaborate. You can't participate without others, you can't distribute without others. You can't publish to yourself. You can't be a disconnected individual node when you are part of the web.

On the internet you can't achieve without others, without one another.

Think how an idea is distributed and evolves online: If it is not passed on from one human to another it goes nowhere. You can't blast it out, it has to be handed one to another. It may go global. It may reach us all. But it has done so at a very human, hand-to-hand scale. From one person who cared enough about it to pass it on to another human they cared about.

The internet makes those connected to it part of a whole. And it makes it a real, tangible thing, in a way we could only believe in or conceive of in the past (the Buddha, as Greg points out, tells us nothing exists in isolation, more recent philosophies introduce ideas such as 'without context there is no meaning').

In so doing, the internet (perhaps more specifically the web of humanity woven upon it) makes real what was once the realm of the transcendental philopsopher.

It makes this truth of our collective self accessible to anyone who chooses to connect. It can be accessed not only through philosophy, but also through action - by learning from connecting.

It makes real what we instinctively know. It provides the evidence.

Imagine the next generation: in which almost everyone understands humanity as a collective, not a series of national, political, language, religious or other silos.

How will that change politics, the law, education, the structure of business... us?

Monday, January 25, 2010

10 Reasons Why Your Social Media Strategy Will Fail

I compiled this for a presentation - with the real-time help of @vero @andrewspong @picklejar - and thought it might be useful to share here. By all means add to it by making comments on this post.

Your Social + Media Strategy Will Fail If:

You think of yourselves as owners rather than as an enabling platform
You don’t place social + media at the heart of what you do (it can’t be layered on)
You fail to listen – and join in
You don’t go where your communities are
Your message doesn’t match your actions (authenticity)
You try to use peer-to-peer for push/broadcast (you can't use it, you can participate in it)
You set yourselves up as a ‘brand’ or ‘corporation’ rather than as a human - and speak like a brochure.
You approach it as a purely comms medium and make it just one department’s responsibility.
You fail to think (honestly) about what’s in it for the user
You don’t give it enough time (don’t do campaigns, do relationships)

Monday, December 21, 2009

The threat of SEO to the real-time web

Image via Wikipedia

The brochure, the news report, the press release, the 'professional' communication. They all have something in common - they lack a human voice.

I have often railed against this particular form of insanity (ie when we wish to communicate with humans, so many orgs choose to do so by massaging out the humanity from their messages).

On the Internet this form of received professional speak got replaced (for a large chunk of folks, you know the ones, the 'internet marketers') by a new form of stilted inhuman syntax - writing for seo.

'Don't repeat key words more than 'x' times, do place your keywords in order 'y', don't, do, don't, do.

Don't be flawed, don't be natural. Don't write like you think, don't write like you feel. Don't be human.

And then the real-time web: Lower effort to post. Lower effort to connect. Lower barriers to revealing ourselves. Lower barriers to less guarded spontaneity. Oliver Cromwell would approve.(pictured)

As one of the founders put it: "the trouble with Twitter is that with it you run the risk of revealing the real you."

That risk is the risk you have to take if you care to connect with other humans.

It is a risk that seo drives out.

Now that google is prioritising the real time web in its returns it was inevitable that the SEO pros would wade in.

'Order your 140chars thusly', they will ordain. And I will studiously ignore them.

I am part of a real time web - a very human part. Part of the real time web (as it emerges as the eighth mass media) is its ability for us to become not only the connections, but also the way in which the connections are formed.

Focusing on seo in tweets interrupts that.

It'll fool the automota. But if you aren't worth connecting with no amount of pro-seo styled tweeting will mask this to the humans behind the accounts.

In the old world of site-as-destination there was value in 'driving traffic'. In the new world of user-as-destination the only value is in creating real, enduring human connection.

Only humans, expressing themselves through authentic human voice, can do this.

Tuesday, December 15, 2009

Twitter makes it easier to be human

Twitter has announced it is trialling a new business tool. It should mean an end to faceless accounts such as @brandX.

Instead the same account can share multiple users. Multiple human users.
And when a different human being 'takes the helm' you'll know so, and what they tweet will be individually ascribed against that particular human.

So where @btcare currently has to update their profile to tell you which human you are connecting with, now the metadata with each tweet reflect its use by each individual human.

Now, not every business is going to go for this. Can't imagine the multiple heavy users at Zappos or Dell turning in their IDs, for example.

But a lot will. And what I think is truly wonderful here is that with this tool Twitter says loudly and unequivically that Twitter is a human, person-to-person environment where broadcasting your brand = fail.

It's a breadcrumb trail for those orgs who would otherwise default to voice-of-the-brand blandness.

They are led by the nose toward finding out what Twitter is all about. And in doing so they just may discover the principles of this human way, this better way of being part of the lives of their communities of users.

"It's up to business to accomodate itself to (the human shape) of twitter, not for twitter to accomodate itself to business," as @stephenfry put it at #140conf

One small experimental step. A giant leap for businesskind.

Wednesday, November 04, 2009

Alan Moore on the 'the toxic tail end of the industrial age'

On November 17 I will be speaking at Monitoring Social Media in central London. Which is nice. If you're in London or anywhere close-ish, you should come.

So will the author of Communities Dominate Brands Alan Moore.

Alan, a very good friend of mine, and a collaborator over at 90:10, is also speaking at London's MIT Enterprise Forum on the same day, following in the footsteps of Guy Kawasaki, among others. There you go - two good reasons to be in London that day.

For the detail, go here.

But for a taste of the thinking... here's Alan:

We are witnesses to a structural and transformational change in society, what many describe as the toxic tail end of our industrial, mass consumer, mass media era. The tragic legacy of the last 150 years is that humanity has been thin sliced and deconstructed almost to the point of destruction. Human beings have become little more than individual units of capitalism – pawns of economists and unfettered capitalism.

But the fact is, “I needs we, to truly be I,” wrote Carl Jung, and this is why we as a species are at the barricades of a communications revolution, in which humanity is renegotiating the power relationships between; people, organisations, and even governments. As social philosopher Richard Sennett argues, we want to, “recover something of the spirit of the Enlightenment on terms appropriate to our time”.

The tools of the revolution are digital communication technologies, but the drivers are about human connection and human identity. Technology does not come out of nowhere, it is indeed a human invention in the first place, and these technologies succeed to the extent they meet fundamental human needs. The rise of the networked society is no accident, and a new philosophy is needed now to enable individuals and organisations adapt to a new way of doing, trading, educating, living.

Therefore, our imperative is to de-school ourselves in a philosophy and a way of thinking and acting that has delivered us into a cultural, ideological and economic cul-de-sac. We need to liberate ourselves from how we were once taught to think and live our lives, stemming from the ethos of industrialisation and the mass consumer society.
Don't miss him.

Thursday, September 03, 2009

Why we need an Adsense that values relationships

So why don't I have Adsense on my blog? Google keeps pushing it at me. Why don't I take this free money?

The first reason is simple and mercenary. The payment I may receive via Adsense is too low to tempt me. The return on my time not sufficiently rewarding. ( I know, I've tried in the past).

That may be because there are insufficient advertisers for the Adwords related to the stuff I blog about. And that means the ads served seem rather less like the helpful content that Adsense promises and more like the spam it seeks to avoid. (image courtesy)

And I don't want to put you off, dear reader. I value our relationship more than I value a few cents from Google.

A lot more actually, which is where RoI comes in. Or perhaps we should call it RoR - return on reputation and/or relationship?

By allowing advertising which could sell you something I have not tried myself, I can't give it my endorsement.

I can't recommend it to you. In fact an ad may pop up for a product or service I will actively recommend you do not use. Each time this happens our relationship is damaged and my reputation with you is diminished.

Adsense takes no account of the value we both place on this.

I'd like to think the niche nature of this community is such that should I recommend a product, service, event etc you will give it quite serious consideration.

Our conversations can be – and regularly are – one to one. And this is the reality of the future online as more and more we become The Eighth Mass Media - the publishers, advertisers, marketers, distributors, connectors.

You'll give me the time of day because over time you have come to learn from experience that we share the same thirst for knowledge about certain things, have similar problems to solve etc. We are one of my favourite things - a community of purpose.

In short, we have a relationship in which we exchange trust to build reputation.

I described a simple model previously which could value reputation using something like Adsense. It may be worth reviewing again.

I think if a model could be devised and implemented which raised the valuation of reputation and therefore of our recommendations, one to another, it would kill the incumbents.

Who would stick with the few cents of Adsense if instead you had a way of being rewarded for the recommendations you give freely to those you know will value them?

It’s a micro-relationships model, but not a micro-payment one. Car manufacturers have been know to pay up to £300 to large media outfits for a lead which results in a test drive. We as individuals will come to expect equal returns in our niches.

That’s mostly because our recommendations come with our reputations and micro-relationships tightly bundled to them.

We don’t give our recommendations lightly. False recommendations are taken personally. We lose friends. Your recommendations would become ultimately worthless. And we understand that recommendation is in the eye of the perceiver – and we don’t want to lose face by giving friends something they perceive as ill conceived. (Yes, I do think my recommendation to you is more valuable than a recommendation from some form of mass media broadcasting at the lowest common denominator of its audience.)

We know our friends (our communities of purpose) in ways advertisers – even Google – can’t touch.

The future is not in-context, related, targeted. It is in conversational flow (with all the real-time that suggests), peer-to-peer recommendation and consistently and constantly validated reputation - otherwise known as human relationships.

Tuesday, August 25, 2009

In search of a new philosophy

Alan Moore is pitching a proposal for next year's SXSW. If you like the sound of it, vote for it.
His 'No Straight Lines Thinking' approach is a rallying call for a new philosophy more appropriate to the networked world.

Disclosure: Alan is a good friend to me, and someone I have worked with in the past and would gladly work with in the future - a true believer in the power of the network.

He says:

The core areas (to investigate) are these:

System breakdown: We are witness to a structural and transformational change in society.

The wholesale pursuit of material wealth has in fact come at a terrible cost for society

Threat: the current unsustainability of humanity

The true nature of humans and the technology of man: their intimate relationship

Liberation Day: We need to examine the various solutions and tools that can enable us to thrive and survive, to take back that which makes us whole as people, individually and collectively.

Simplexity: The digital and highly networked world seems to have created a more complex way of living. We need to learn to deal with this complexity, by understanding how it works.

Deschoolling: Our imperative is to de-school ourselves in a philosophy that has driven us into a cultural, ideological and economic cul-de-sac.

New Philosophy: We need a new language to help us understand the deep context of the change we are in

The no straight line universe: We need to explore its shape we need to feel it; physically, intellectually, and emotionally

And there's a video to explain a little more:

Sunday, May 10, 2009

The world is mostly light, with specks of dark

My wife and I were out cycling today. And somewhere between town and home her handbag went missing.

Her handbag contained her purse, all those cards, her mobile, cherished photographs - all those things of value and sentiment contained in any woman's handbag.

We realised it was missing the moment we got home. And straightaway we retraced our journey hoping against hope that we'd spot the missing bag where it had tumbled to a rest.

No such luck.

On returning home once more there was only one thing for it. Forlornly my wife was calling the police, to report her bag missing and initiate the process of card cancellation, mobile phone stopping and all the rest, when... a knock on the door.

A wonderful couple on bicycles. With my wife's handbag.

Had we checked our home phone's messages we'd have noticed they'd been trying to call us to tell us they'd found the bag, even as we were out scouring grass verges in the hope of spotting it.

They would take no reward. We didn't even get their names. All I could do was leave them my card and tell them that if they ever needed a favour they should call me. I hope they will.

The world is a place of light. We live in a society of people who do good to each other as a default state. Humans help each other. Always have, always will. It is what has made us so successful as a species.

I tell this story because it reminds me of a simple lesson: The world is mostly light with specks of dark, not vice versa.

Not the world you see through the lens of mass media is it?

But it is the world you see through the lens of the social web - where people come together to solve shared problems to mutual benefit.

Often people drop everything to help each other in the 'web of flow' that Stowe Boyd describes. And just as often those who experience life through the filter of mass media choose to belittle that notion as some kind of free lunch.

But it is more than that. It is our somewhat self-serving natural state. We help strangers because we are driven by ideas enshrined in Buddhist karma or the Christian creed - do unto others...

We do good because we want to live in a world that would do good to us. Doing good has an upside for all.

Don't believe me? Ask yourself what you would do if you found a handbag in the street. Pocket your haul? Or hand it in/trace the owner? For 99% of us the answer is that we would do the right thing. You do it out of goodness. You do it because you'd like to think the same would happen for you.

News just in: It does.

The mass media scare story would tell you NOT to have your address in your handbag (look at the excitability over what private data your daughter may be sharing in her facebook profile). The from-the-centre scare story would tell you not to leave your phone unlocked because a thief could access your contacts book. And yet without either of these the very kind person who found my wife's handbag could not have traced us to return it.

And the reality is that 99% (ok, I'm guessing) of people who would find your stuff would go out of their way to get it back to you.

Does the real risk of the bad guy really demand our defensive walls are built so high?

Why do you think police forces are so small relative to the size of total population?

Most people are good and do good.

The relentless reporting of the bad (that we have voted for with our purchasing of mass media, and which performs the role of warning us against 'evil') colours our view of the world - makes us think it's darker than it really is.

But living in social media reveals the light, the generosity, the goodness of the human state. The web - where it makes sense to any business or organisation to make like a human - is also the place that reveals us as human almost as much as our real experiences of real life.

It is one of the reasons I am starting to ponder if the web is media at all.

At its simplest it always has been just a place where people get together to do what people do.

And that, for the vast, vast majority, is co-operate.

Friday, April 24, 2009

I'm loving it. Macdonalds delivers!

Good service comes in human-sized packages. It's best served distinctly un-supersized.

My daughter likes a Macdonald's Happy Meal. She chooses relatively healthy options - tonight opting for carrots and fruit - which is more than can be said for her mother and father...

I used the local drive-thru. And when we arrived home to eat discovered that my wife's craved-for Big Mac was missing from the order. I'd definitely paid for it - I'd even kept the receipt.

So, I made a quick call to the restaurant.

This is not the first time this has happened.

In the past I've been asked if I can 'pop back to pick up another'. No. I can't. I'm eating my dinner.

Usually the best you can hope for is a credit against a future purchase - on the say-so of a name you get quoted to jot on your receipt (and who you are to assume will still be there in a forthnight when you may want your next fix).

On this occasion, however, when I was asked if I could pop back, and I asked, as I always do, "no, could you deliver it?" I actually got asked for my address.

This is a first, for me at least.

And within 10 minutes a Big Mac (and some fries thrown in gratis) were hand delivered by private car.

I told the member of staff I was impressed. And I am. So I'm telling you.

(And for the info of Macdonald's HQ I'm talking about the Huntingdon, Cambs, UK restaurant.)

I'd like to think this is a new policy being implemented globally (after all, at the end of the day when your order isn't filled and you are charged for it, Maccy D's pockets cash for something they haven't supplied).

But I doubt it. It's likely the decision of a local manager responding to local conditions. And while Maccy D staff feel they have the freedom to act like humans and not simply follow the company rule book, they'll go from strength to strength.

I am put in mind of Fight Club.

The rules of corporate customer service:

No1: There are no rules of corporate customer service.

Wednesday, April 15, 2009

Social media is good for you

Does the rapid stream of news that constant digital connectedness brings us (via social networks and the likes of twitter) make us less compassionate? Does it mess with our moral compass?
That is the suggestion of a report from a NeuroScience Group.

And I'm sure they have reams of evidence to support this. And please do investigate, by all means.

But my common sense nags me to question this. Compassion is a powerfully human thing - it's part of what drives our social selves - compassion for others brings us together to help each other. And it has ever been so, since the first family units gathered together for protection and to achieve things together.

The argument made (as is often the case) is that we are replacing real face-to-face experiences with digital ones.
But that isn't how it works, is it? We use social media, digital means, to augment our human relationships, not to replace them.

They enable long distance ones, they reinforce local ones, they lead to physical meetings with physical people, which then reinforce what may have started as purely digital relationships.

The argument also assumes that our digital represenations of ourselves are less human than our 'real' selves - a whole other area for philosophical debate touched on in yesterday's post and the comments on it.

So I thought I'd offer some relatively hard evidence to counter this.

Intuitively, using social media should make us more human, not less (the clue is the in the name here). So here's my evidence to support that claim:

Over the course of my career I have been asked to complete several psychological personality profiling tests. They are always based on Jungian principles.

Traditionally I would turn out Red/Blue on the many and various colour wheels these generate. For those not in the know that roughly translates as creative, leader, director, (in the main) with a good dose of detail, logic, calm, introspection. There's lots of negative stuff about arrogance and aggression in that red/blue stuff too which - much like star signs, we like to ignore about ourselves. But you get the general picture. (the four-humours style diagram shown here is from MrDynamics.com )

But that was in the days before I immersed myself in social media - in constant connectness to others.

I retested four years ago - not long after my daughter was born. This time around I came out much more yellow/red. Yellow people are more sociable and demonstrative. I put that down to becoming a father - making me a softer (more rounded?) individual. Less competitive/demanding/strong-willed etc

Four years on and I have just retested. And after all this time deeply ingrained in social media I've turned out to be massively yellow-green (caring, encouraging, sharing... sound anything like the kind of things we all enjoy about social media, to you?)

It's not neuroscientific research, but it is real, it is testable, and it does offer some evidence that the long term use of social media strengthens some really important human attributes: compassion, very much included.

Caring, encouraging, sharing, sociable. Surely these are the nobler aspects of humanity?

If these are nurtured by the use of social media then I have to conclude social media makes the world a better more moral and ultimately more human place.

Carry on tweeting everyone - your moral compass is safe.

Thursday, November 20, 2008

The more digital we become, the more human we become

The more digital we become the more connected we become, the more human we demand.

And the more human we become.

I spoke at Mobile Content 08 in London yesterday. It was a great event with a stella line-up: fjord's Christian Lindholm, flirtomatic's Mark Curtis (author of Distraction), msearchgroove's Peggy Salz, Sean Kane from Bebo, Melissa Goodwin from ITV, Ray de Silva from Vodafone and Graham Thomas from T-mobile. Not to mention Day One's chair JonathanMacdonald (ogilvyone and chief node in the Every Single One of Us project - which you MUST check out) Day Two's Tomi Ahonen (Communities Dominate Brands and mobile legend) and in attendance, Day Three's Andrew Grill (London Calling). And many more, of course.

I opened with a talk on mobile's role in the eighth mass media - which is why the line about the more digital we become the more human we become was so appropriate.

Here's the accompanying slide deck - though you won't find the line in it.

Mobile's Role in Eighth Mass Media

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own.

But the fact that The Power of The Network equates to the power of humanity is written through the idea of the eighth mass media.

As we become the connections and the way the connections are made we are reconnecting with our human selves.

We connect in a network - in adhoc self-forming communities of purpose. There is nothing from the centre. And the centre has a tendancy to dehumanise.

The government line is very different from an MP's opinion.
Company policy is very different from an employee doing what seems right and reasonable.
Brand voice can't compare to a human conversation with someone who cares about what they are doing.
Search engine optimisation can't beat my friends' recommendation (and of course their friends' recommendations)?

Now that we have the ability to organize ourselves through the tools to connect, what we are demanding is more human interaction.

Our connectedness in, through and beyond silos is tearing off the hard corporate masks and revealing the soft human faces. And we're ready to reach out and touch that warm flesh.

The digital future is a very human place to be. And for this, it is ever truer to who we are.

Wednesday, October 01, 2008

Clay Shirky on how algorithms caused the credit crunch

I had the great good fortune to meet and interview Clay Shirky (author of Here Comes Everybody) yesterday at Incisive Media in London.
He was in town for the AOP conference among other keynotes - and meetings with Government Ministers, no less.
So to get a one-to-one for any length of time was fantastic. We had a scheduled 20mins... but things got interesting so we stretched it...

The result is the video you see below. At least, that's part of the result. It's part one of seven. The interview lasts over 35mins in total and Clay answers not only my questions, but all those put through comments on this blog or via twitter over the last few days.

I'll be adding the next six parts over the next week or so - and for those who can take it all in one go - I'll add the full and unedited (and higher quality) version to google video before too long (youtube limits me to 10mins a pop, anyway).

In part one we talk about Clay's journey - what is in his background that makes him place the human element so high in his consideration of group forming network theory. (image by matlock via flickr)

And the new ways value are created in self-forming communities of purpose leads us to Clay's fascinating analysis of what the bankers did wrong and what they can learn (how social capital mitigates risk) from reconnecting with humans.

Hope that's whetted your appetite: Now hear from the man himself. And if you've missed Clay on his current trip to the UK, you can catch him again here. (blog of the event here) And you can buy his book, here.