Watch This.

And what will allow this to happen is social media. Mark my words.

I’m at Wordcamp SF right now with lots of other social media and blogging fanatics. Tomorrow there will be the developer’s day and I intend to bring up some more philosophical questions, so I wanted to poll everyone…anyone have any good questions for the Automattic people or the WordPress fanatics?

Social Media Socialism

Wired has a great article up on the general philosophy at work within the internet community, and especially the Web 2.0 and social media communities. They address a number of good points and the article is definitely worth a read.
One thing stood out to me:

Communal aspects of digital culture run deep and wide. Wikipedia is just one remarkable example of an emerging collectivism—and not just Wikipedia but wikiness at large. Ward Cunningham, who invented the first collaborative Web page in 1994, tracks nearly 150 wiki engines today, each powering myriad sites. Wetpaint, launched just three years ago, hosts more than 1 million communal efforts. Widespread adoption of the share-friendly Creative Commons alternative copyright license and the rise of ubiquitous file-sharing are two more steps in this shift. Mushrooming collaborative sites like Digg, StumbleUpon, the Hype Machine, and Twine have added weight to this great upheaval. Nearly every day another startup proudly heralds a new way to harness community action. These developments suggest a steady move toward a sort of socialism uniquely tuned for a networked world.

We’re not talking about your grandfather’s socialism. In fact, there is a long list of past movements this new socialism is not. It is not class warfare. It is not anti-American; indeed, digital socialism may be the newest American innovation. While old-school socialism was an arm of the state, digital socialism is socialism without the state. This new brand of socialism currently operates in the realm of culture and economics, rather than government—for now.

The type of communism with which Gates hoped to tar the creators of Linux was born in an era of enforced borders, centralized communications, and top-heavy industrial processes. Those constraints gave rise to a type of collective ownership that replaced the brilliant chaos of a free market with scientific five-year plans devised by an all-powerful politburo. This political operating system failed, to put it mildly. However, unlike those older strains of red-flag socialism, the new socialism runs over a borderless Internet, through a tightly integrated global economy. It is designed to heighten individual autonomy and thwart centralization. It is decentralization extreme.

So, today’s question is: Is our online community communistic/socialistic?

Online Realities

Back in the early days of IRC and Usenet, I used to confront people over racism, bigotry, and general nastiness. The inevitable rejoinder was that I was being a control freak and a Nazi, and that what they said or did didn’t count because it “wasn’t real”, it was “just the internet”. I have never understood this, as I feel the internet is just as “real” as any other abstractions (and more so than most). We established rules for basic social interaction because they allow those interactions to take place; once we abandon civilization, its fruits are useless to us. I always thought that this was evidence of poor moral character, that these were people who did not understand that there were reasons beyond “getting in trouble” to not act like a savage, and so once that threat was gone they saw no purpose in being civil. However, I have seen people with a deep understanding of ethics offline act like total asses online. Their defense, again, was that the internet was not real.

So the question is: is online life subject to the same kind of cares and duties as offline life?

Identity in Social Media

With one person having accounts all over the internet, all with little bits of information which define who we are to the people there, is identity thus distributed? Identity IRL is about memory and perception, but online memory is archived and perceptions are in bits and pieces. Even lifestreams only show us tiny bits of mostly disconnected ideas.

How about it? Do you feel like your identity is distributed or singular?

Madwaxer on an earlier comment says

my constant frustration has been with censorship.
my hope is that in the near future a new means for posting through dark net sites than can be relayed through http web services with a add on that can help it silently. word press has some pretty cool tools maybe this would be one. perhaps even a desktop application that encrypted memory can be assigned and relay data via udp,tcp or through vpn connections.

Online privacy as a way of avoiding censorship and oppression is a common argument, however the rebuttal is true anonymity also gives power to those who would harm others. Complete freedom would let stalkers and child porn distributors run free and unnoticed, but there are also those who would misuse the rules to suppress free speech.

How do we find a line between these notions?

So Roy made a suggestion that we start having questions and prompts to attract more participants, and it seemed like a great idea. Then it occurred to me that there have been some great leaps in technology since I built the original site, so I decided to make some real changes. So here it is, the new Project, open to all. Just join in with any service supported by Google Connect and you will have an author account on the blog. Use the simple quickpost on the front page or use the admin page (accessible through the meta menu on the bottom left) and post to your heart’s content. Just try to stay on topic and for posting guidelines check out the FAQ.

Thanks and enjoy!

Hello everyone! The membership drive has been pretty successful, and the ranks have been culled. So now it is time for more of the promised changes.

1. As with my other sites, I am moving the Project to a new host. This will require some downtime, and hopefully there won’t be any problems, but there is always the chance of disaster.
2. I am going to be re-building the site on the new host with a focus on fast, easy responses using the P2 Theme from Automattic. After this, every day or two I will post a short “prompt” or question, which everyone will be encouraged to answer.
3. Under this new structure, there will no longer be a discrete line between Project members and the rest of the social media community. Anyone will be able to register and post their questions and ideas. However, the Project will still be moderated and, if anyone causes problems they will be removed by one of us admin types, so don’t think I am turning this into 4chan. The goal here is to have an open community that everyone can participate in that attempts to address the philosophical implications of social technologies, and anyone not interested in doing that should go elsewhere.

If anyone has any concerns or suggestions, comment or get in touch with me. Expect these changes to be implemented over the coming weeks.

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OMG we’re all gonna die of swine flu!

No, actually, we’re not. In fact, very little will happen at all. So why is it being so blown out of proportion? Think about this…more people die every day from…well, everything, than swine flu. Name it. Even the common cold has a higher body count. More people have died of being blown up in space shuttles than Americans have died of swine flu. Just think about that. Space shuttles. How rare is that? Swine flu is even rarer. So why is everyone freaked out?

I’ll tell you why…because humans are a panicky bunch. Oh, sure, we like to make myths and stories about ourselves being fearless warriors and unstoppable killing machines, but really we are primates who evolved to live in cooperative groups. We did not gain dominance through martial prowess but through our tendency to work in concert and run when outmatched. Those that didn’t run are no longer with us, genetically or actually. When we try to make humans into these mythic creatures, these warriors, it very often breaks them. Post-traumatic stress disorder, emotional disassociation, and periodic depression are common symptoms of broken humans, but of course there are matters of degree; some are not broken but merely bent, and these often make very good soldiers but very poor humans. While this is regrettable, until humans learn a different way to resolve disputes, it is also necessary. Some must give up their humanity so that others may keep their lives.

But the rest of us are a fearful lot. We repeat unlikely things because they scare us rather than because we know them to be true. We spread fear and inspire chaos. And, even worse, we give license to ourselves and each other to act in idiotic and horrendous ways, all because we were afraid.

So enough. Quit it. You are spreading panic and making everyone anxious for no reason. Quit tweeting and retweeting the latest stupid update on swine flu. Stop making Google Maps mashups. Stop posting the latest WHO and CDC figures. Stop. Even if there were a real danger, this chicken-little crap would not be helpful. Save it for the zombie holocaust…I am sure Tom from accounting will get a big giggle out of your last tweets of “OMG ZOMBIES WDFFBKW” as he chomps your brains.

And on that note…celebrities aren’t celebrities here, so quit letting the media lead you by the nose.

That’s right, I’m talking about Oprah and Ashton and whoever else wants to ply their dirty little trade here. They don’t get it, and most likely never will. Narcissists don’t do well in social media because they give nothing back. Look at the so-called celebrities’ profiles…look at the ratio. Look at how much they interact. Ashton at least seems to make an attempt…most of the “celebrities” seem to think that Twitter is just another place for them to play “look at me!”.

The real celebrities of our ranks are those who interact, who have ideas, and who actually do things. Robert Scoble, Howard Rheingold, Tara Hunt, Leo Laporte, Chris Brogan, Brian Solis…we all know the names. The people (and many more, some of them I am lucky enough to know personally) are the real celebrities of social media. And I know some of you are groaning about me listing all these A-listers and crowing about “internet fame” like it’s “real” fame, but hear me out: I don’t know what “real” or “unreal” fame is. All fame seems to be an abstraction; we made up the concept and apply it as a social construct. And on the basis of this construct I say that “internet famous” (I am talking about the Jason Calacanis kind of web famous, not the Numa Numa guy kind, in case you are confused) is more “real”, or at least handed out for better reasons and according to values I am more in agreement with, than the fame dished out by Hollywood, TV, and the music industries. I like our kind of fame…it comes because a person is smart, cool, funny…not because an executive someone decided to promote them and turn them into a cash cow. I will take the Gillmor Gang over The View any day.

And for my final trick, I will also rant about #amazonfail.

What the hell is wrong with us? Do we so enjoy schadenfreude that we will leap to offense just on suspicion? I was just as guilty in this one…I jumped up on the issue when it first surfaced in the stream and posted, tweeted, and argued as I usually do about anything remotely related to gay rights. And we were wrong. While Amazon dealt with it horribly and I am still unsure as to whether it was a hack (as was claimed on livejournal) or an honest error on their side, we allowed our collective righteous indignation to flow out and attack with no real information.

Why care?

Well, I am a bit shocked at how easily we are all directed. We make a huge noise about how we have taken control of the conversation, but we are really just spinning in circles. If some of our pet theories are true and there is a collective intelligence going on in social media, then this intelligence has just woken up, is barely sentient, and reacts like an anxious teenager: eager to embrace every fad, governed and led around by emotional reactions, and unsure of its own place. If we are to take advantage of this new world, then our “smart mob” needs to get a lot smarter.

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Recently, I butted in on a tweetstream. A woman boasted about how she’d been worried about her drunk friend, and that she’d driven close behind her to make sure she got home safely. My retort was that if she was so concerned for her friend’s safety, why was the friend driving drunk? Why weren’t her car keys confiscated, with her ensconced safely in a cab?

Needless to say, things got heated. She was tweeting in the USA after a long hard night out drinking with her buddy. I was tweeting across numerous timezones fresh eyed, sitting in the morning sun in South Africa.

I softened my tone.

Let me rephrase that. In MY opinion, I softened my tone.

From where I was standing, I felt like I was offering the peace olive.

That’s not what she took out of my communication. All she could hear was the supercilious, snide, judgemental haranguing of some creep on the southern tip of a continent she couldn’t even stab at on a map.

I’ve since blocked her Twitter account. I have no interest in following the thoughts of a partygoing condoner of drunk driving.

But heck… What if we could have aligned our meanings? What if we could have shared access to our inner thoughts? We both tried. But with varying levels of skill and intent.

A fundamental in communication is verification that one’s message has indeed been delivered intact.

Because signifiers — the ‘carriers of signs’, the ‘deliverers of meaning’ — are slippery beasts, they shift, and are differently understood from person to person.

The trouble is that we tend to take our signifiers for granted. We don’t really think for a moment that the signifiers we use — our very words — might run the risk of being misunderstood. We are, after all, communicators, no? And signifiers are, after all, the pack mules of communication.

When I say the word ‘Love’, for instance, it is a signifier that carries a vast payload. So vast that it’s unlikely you’ll understand it the same way I do. I might be issuing it as a declarative verb. I might be INSTRUCTING you to go out and love!

You might have ‘heard’ a noun, a wishy washy, ‘Ah, love is such a joy.’ Or a vicious, ‘Love is disgusting, and causes pain and misery.’

As the sender of a message, I trust and pray that the message I THINK I’m sending is the same one you’re receiving.

There’s a fair amount of hard work we can do to try and encode our intent into a message. We can provide context. We can use logical thought progressions. We can ground our speech in practical, real-world examples. We can seek verification from those who receive our message.

But ultimately, no matter how skillfully we encode our messages, the slippery nature of signifiers always eludes us. Put simply… It is impossible for you and me to calibrate our understanding so that what I grasp in the privacy of my own head matches what YOU grasp. You may SAY you get my meaning. I may even AGREE that your summary of my meaning is indeed what I intended. But the signifiers we use are too slippery for certainty.

This puts pressure on our social media communications. As an avid Twitterer (or Tweeter, or twit, or whatever signifier you’d like to assign to the concept), I’m well aware of the power of the shifting signifier to cause great misunderstanding and anger.

Here’s the rub. In social media, we’re confined to conveying loads of info in very small channels. Twitter gives us 140 characters to convey our message. So we use ‘lowest common denominator’ words as our signifiers. We simplify our language to fit all of our meaning in. Which means that we lose richness. We dumb down. And even so, our basic words have so much slippage that we’re misunderstood.

I’ll try and summarize this post as a tweet:

‘@royblumenthal: D’ya understand what I think I said? And if so, could you lemme know what you think I said? Significant? And don’t drink’n'drive!’

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