Identity Integrity

A recent tweet from @mashable led me to an article by Jeremiah Owyang entitled The Future of the Social Web: In Five Eras.

Interesting stuff as always when analysts try to extend current technological and media developments into trends and then recommend future strategies, but the following quote about online identities didn't strike me as self evident:

Today’s social experience is disjointed because consumers have separate identities in each social network they visit. A simple set of technologies that enable a portable identity will soon empower consumers to bring their identities with them — transforming marketing, eCommerce, CRM, and advertising.

The concept of a single, integrated online identity is intriguing in concept, but I'm not sure that's what people want. If that means never having to re-enter basic data about themselves or being able to update all identities at once, then it would be a major improvement in efficiency.

But beyond that I think we want and need separate identities - or at least highly variable transparency of our complete identity - depending on the relationship and context.

Facebook recognized this and developed controls that allow us to control what is seen by personal friends vs. colleagues vs. family members. My LinkedIn profile isn't an exact mirror of my Facebook page because the audience and organizing purpose are different. And if I had an avatar in Second Life, it wouldn't be my virtual doppelgänger - I would definitely be a little taller and look better on the beach.

Another obstacle to a unified identity is business models: each social network has a strong incentive to maintain control over its data, which would argue against the creation of independent data stores that serve to multiple social networks. Look at job boards today: millions of man-hours could be saved and service could be improved with a centralized "job search identity" that would serve all of the job boards, but how would that benefit any of the operators of those boards?

So I'll wait and hope. And keep working on my avatar's abs.

It's True, Your Honor

Now we learn that Twitter could harm moral values. And it's science!
We may be approaching the end times that Bill Murray and the Ghostbusters foretold some twenty five years ago:

Fire and brimstone coming down from the sky, rivers and seas boiling, forty years of darkness, earthquakes, volcanoes, the dead rising from the grave, human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together, mass hysteria!

Does Twitter make me déclassé?

In a recent New York Times Magazine article, Virginia Heffernan ruminates on a provocative talk about Twitter given at the recent South by Southwest Conference in Austin, Texas. Much of her article focuses on the social class implications of the address, but I'm more interested in how the growth of digital social networks may actually work to impoverish us and our relationships.

"Swampy, boggy, inescapable connectivity" is how Heffernan describes her current Twitter entanglement with over 250 people (which in her case is at least partly for professional reasons). She reflects further:

The connections that feel like wealth to many of us — call us the impoverished, we who treasure our smartphones and tally our Facebook friends — are in fact meager, more meager even than inflated dollars. What’s worse, these connections are liabilities that we pretend are assets. We live on the Web in these hideous conditions of overcrowding only because — it suddenly seems so obvious — we can’t afford privacy. And then, lest we confront our horror, we call this cramped ghetto our happy home!

(There is a sweet irony to this Chicagoan that this comes from the New York Times since the last sentence echoes my opinion about the source of the love New Yorkers - and particularly Manhattanites - express for their place of residence.)

Twitter is only the latest development in the relentless and seemingly inexorable march toward greater population density and more frequent interaction. I'm reminded of Henry Thoreau's contention that "too frequent society leaves us overly familiar and uninteresting to one another."

My abode is anything but an isolated shack in the woods, but I think Thoreau understood something about a basic human tendency to substitute quantity for quality in our interactions. As long as we are immersed in a stream of chatter we are less likely to recognize that what we are consuming and producing is vapid and empty and crowding out people and activities of more substance.

Can there any good thing come out of Twitter?

At least one. I don't know if it's the smiley face or what, but I feel protective just watching the video.

Tweenbots

Team of Rivals

Last night my book group discussed Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln. My commitment to read the entire 750 pages between December 25th and January 8th flagged, but I still read over 400 pages, which put me squarely in the dark early days of the Civil War after the Union was routed in the Battle of Bull Run.

Much has been made of the title of the book and Lincoln's supposed genius in co-opting his rivals into his cabinet, but the deepest impressions on me were quite different.

• As James Oakes wrote in a NYT Op-Ed piece, the practice of offering cabinet appointments to party rivals was well established before Lincoln. Furthermore, the cabinet was often dysfunctional due to the rivalries referred to in the book's title.
  
  
• Defining fully the essence of Lincoln's genius is beyond my ken, but I was amazed at his innate goodness, his devotion to principles and causes beyond himself and his ability to get difficult people with their own agendas to do what was best for the country.
  
  
• Lincoln and his contemporaries were more educated (in my opinion) than are the vast majority of the best and brightest in our country today. By educated I mean that they were familiar with the big ideas of humanity and those that set them forth, not just stuffed with data, most of which is of trivial value. That should shame us who have so many more resources than they did, but it is a tribute to the devotion of these men to improve themselves, particularly when you consider that one of them was a penniless farmer born in a log cabin in Kentucky.
  
  
• Lincoln wanted the respect of those around him, but he focused on gaining the substance that would command true respect, not merely polishing the surface to attract fame, its counterfeit cousin. "...I can say for one that I have no other [ambition] so great as that of being truly esteemed of my fellow men, by rendering myself worthy of their esteem."
  
  
• The commitment to preserve the Union was a sacred duty for Lincoln and his team of rivals. They saw the success of the audacious experiment that was the United States of America as being absolutely indispensable for the betterment of all mankind, not just those subject to its rule.

We're now off to Victor Frankl but I plan to finish the book. Great read and great ideas. I'm glad our next president has read it.

The Cult of the Amateur

Yesterday I attended a business presentation that made me think. That alone sets it apart from nearly every other presentation that has consumed my time during the past year.

Andrew Keen spoke about his new book, "The Cult of the Amateur: How Today's Internet is Killing our Culture." Looking past his world-weary, atheistic and self-loathing British persona, Keen proposed a provocative idea: namely, that Web 2.0's "empty vessel" filled with user-generated content is killing important cultural institutions that create great music, writing, movies and so on.

I agree with his assertion that creativity and talent are relatively rare and that a democratized (or populist) approach to creating content is bound to create rubbish; one need only survey individually produced websites and blogs to realize that giving little Billy the tools to write and publish his thoughts does not make him William Shakespeare. The self esteem and relativist cults notwithstanding, not everyone has a genius inside him or her that is waiting to be liberated.

However, I haven't read his book yet, so I can't speak for his presentation there, but in person I felt he didn't quite do justice to the rest of his subject. Keen's argument on behalf of "professionals" and "the elite" as superior cultural institutions didn't wash with me and put him in the untenable position of defending movie studios and TV networks as suppliers of superior creative products.

I felt his argument would have been stronger had he focused on how the "Cult of the Amateur" is killing the financial underpinnings of today's media when there is no alternative business model in sight. YouTube is fine for distracting silly bits, but will it produce a complex, expensive important film like (insert your movie equivalent of Shakespeare here)?

Free market libertarians charge -- quite rightly, I think -- that Keen doesn't discuss the power of the market much in his book. To me it doesn't seem necessary for his argument: Keen is warning about the impact of Web 2.0 on the media choices available to the market, not the market mechanism for choosing among them.

Parents of young children who are worried about nutrition often comfort themselves with the old saw that kids will eat what they need. The oft-ignored corollary to that truism is that children will only be able to eat properly when they have a selection of good, nutritious foods from which to choose; a child faced with choices that include lots of junk food will make entirely different choices.

So the question is which version of the future can present the best selection of media choices from which to choose: today's professional environment or Web 2.0's nonstop amateur hour? The answer may not be clear but the question certainly is.

The pernicious culture of nice

Nice is destroying civil society in America.

I’m not talking about kindness. Nor am I talking about courtesy. No, nice is another beast altogether, a pernicious and corrosive counterfeit that has gotten its nose into our social tent and needs to be shooed out into the sandstorm.

How, you might ask, could nice be so bad? It’s so…nice.

I’m not a curmudgeon. I believe in being kind – being warm-hearted,, considerate, humane and sympathetic – and think that the world suffers greatly from too little kindness. Kindness benefits the world twice: because it arises from love and concern for others it benefits those who are kind as well as those who are on the receiving end of kind acts.

I’m also a fan of courtesy, nice’s better-bred cousin. Courtesy is the behavioral expression of tolerance and a necessary social lubricant. Without it our social interactions with others who are different than ourselves are fractious and unpleasant. Courtesy is far short of kindness, but it doesn’t pretend to be anything more than what it is.

I first discovered my dislike of nice while driving. I’ve lost count of the number of times I have driven behind people who are nice. Nice enough to stop in the middle of the street to let someone turn left in front of her. Nice enough to stop for jaywalkers. But it’s not just in traffic, it’s everywhere.

The defining characteristic of nice is indulgence. Nice only cares about its host, not the object of the niceness and not those around him. As a result, as a society we end up with two groups of people: those who are nice and those who have been indulged in , and even rewarded for, their bad behavior. The rest of us put up with the often unpleasant and dangerous results and run the risk of being excoriated for not being nice when we insist that others behave lawfully and correctly.

So remember, if you really care about yourself, other people and society in general, don’t be nice.