Social context, Facebook Likes, activity and action streams

This post began as a comment on the following post by Adina Levin, but quickly became too long, so I am posting it here instead. Read Adina's post on social context first (excerpted here).

Where is social context?
In yesterday's post on the problem with Facebook Like, I wrote that Facebook is trying to be the sole provider of social context. This got me thinking about the various places that social context may be represented in a networked system:

1. in the object or message (which ActivityStreams helps enable)
2. in the context where it is created
3. in the contexts where it is seen and used
4. in each node of the social graph
5. in sets of social graph elements
6. in decentralized elements of the social graph (e.g. aggregated/syndicated profile elements)
7. shared understanding in participants minds
8. unshared understandings in participants minds

Facebook's model is seeking consolidation in two places. By replacing a metadata-rich, standardized, ActivityStream based representation of the message with a proprietary API call, Facebook is foreclosing opportunities for the adding of context in creation and in viewing and utilization (items 1-3 in the list).


By acting as the sole provider of social graph and profile services, Facebook is seeking to own those aspects of context (item 4, 5, and 6 in the list). Is Facebook doing anything to enable the exchange of subsets? (item 5 in the list)

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What is context? Is it a matter of where or what or something else?
Interesting post — it raises for me the question: What is context? or perhaps, what is the value of context. I am guessing that context means original context, but that begs the question: What's the value of preserving original context? And in the question of context is the presupposition that shared context is valuable (shared context or shared understanding) — but that is a normative claim and the post also argues for diversity and difference.

Several kinds of original context then spring to mind: context tied to to original intent; context tied to original audience addressed; context tied to object references; context tied to linguistic references; context tied to original activity or practice; and context tied to social or public in which the content is produced.

Any one of these may arguably supply context, if context is meant to include:

• what does the author/contributor mean (to be doing, saying?)
• what does the content mean to communicate (internal references, external references)
• what is the content's social status (what social or audience does it tacitly address, and what contribution does it make to what practice within that context)
• what routine practice does the content refer to or belong to, that might help in understanding its meaning
• how might one respond (convention, activity, situation, and other kinds of interpretive context external to the content)
• who is involved (audience context so important today because intended audiences are always involved or presupposed)
• there are certainly others

On the loss of context
As I'm not a huge fan of the value of content of original production, being rather more interested in creation, production, interpretation (re-contextualization), I don't mind loss of context as I believe:

• that there's no particular normative privilege involved in original intent — the contribution was made online and w some understanding of what this results in!
• there's no normative claim in consensus or agreement, or in other words, the original context doesn't preserve truth or rightness of interpretation; the contribution is made online and thus w an expectation of multiple uses and interpretations
• neither the intentions of the contributor nor the interpretations of the reader supply "truth" — the online world is a communication space in which contest and commentary are assumed — and therefore context as a supplier of original meanings vs context as a referential system that informs interpretive schema are each valid forms of context

Which leads me to believe that context needs further critical reflection. What about context is so important?

An alternative to context: frames, and communication and action
Systems theory provides one way around this — communication. A difference is a difference that makes a difference. The question, then, for social interaction design, would be: what action is possible, what communication can be made more probable?

I would then (no surprise here) nominate different types of action, activity, and social practices as contextual frames of reference, from local and onscreen user interface selections and actions on up to routinized social practices meaningful only over time and within the shared practice of a number of actors. Both action and communication can be pretty clearly articulated, and neither requires a regression to original context, be that of intent, reference, linguistic claims, or what have you.

I know that this contradicts some of the common assumptions made in system design about context. But I don't think we developed these paradigms with social action in mind — I think they were conceived to facilitate effective and efficient user interaction with systems of information (applications). Thus the very notion that original context ought to be preserved is a problematic one — it assumes that meanings ought not go astray of originally intended activity.

We assume, often, that this original context belongs to the object — that, too, is problematic, for much of what is going on is not object centric but is embedded in ongoing communication and social practices (actions).

An example: games and rules
Game rules, for example, better supply context to action and interpretation than do objects — and as Wittgenstein showed long ago, such rules are tacit. Frames can refer to other frames — a move may be understood within its application context or by means of its reference to another frame of activity — in this case, the game.

In social gaming, the game itself may be understood by participants as a social pastime in which several members are contesting supremacy, and this in turn may be a social interaction whose consequences are known only to a small group of individuals in which long-standing social contest for status is re-enacted repeatedly by gaming (game within the game).

Thus the entire question of context may be reframed in terms of action and communication, each of which can involve application-specific meanings on up to social and cultural references. Context might then be better understood within the practices that reframe and recontextualize online contributions, thus permitting ongoing action and communication. Social theory doesn't have a special place for original context, for action supplies its own context.

Practical reflections: activity streams, action streams
Finally, and to get practical for a moment, some thoughts on the matter of activitystrea.ms and Facebook's monopoly of distributed social web activities are warranted. Activity streams supports a broader range of activities than does the anti-social Like. The Like is a one-size-fits-all solution to Facebook's need to venture into social search and socially-contextual advertising and marketing.

Likes eliminate differences of kind and of degree: liking is simple affirmation and association with an item at a minimum, passionate and loyal commitment and dedication at a maximum. But the Like itself neither captures nor represents the degree. And Liking fails to capture nature or kind: does a person Like because s/he identifies with the item, brand, cause, person, etc; own or want to possess it; feel social affinity with the scene or culture it is associated with; mean to gesture or signal activity or engagement (in a game, an offline practice, etc); or what have you.

Activity stream meta data would permit a greater number of updates and qualify them by attributes that supploy more context around the update — which in turn would enable richer and more differentiated interpretations and responses. But these updates, too, are unilateral and monological. Social web updates are a monological system of self-referential declarations. Updates are posted into the open and held open because there is no action possible on them that transforms the update into a move of some kind — a social action.

A transactional system would offer coupling of action updates and closure of activities in which the simple yes/no response essential to social action and communication would be represented within stream updates. A dialogical system would not only solve some of these context problems (not just the where but the what of social context) but would facilitate forms of social networking around messages themselves: distributed or federated, dis- and re-aggregated.

Activity and action streams might not solve the audience context problem, but would permit greater linguistic differentiation of statement types and corresponding responses (invites: accept/decline; offer: accept/decline; news: like/share; purchase: buy/do not buy; and so on). Language itself supplies context, in its grammar and in its role within communication practices.

The fact that so much social web content is treated as information, not as communication, is re-inforced by the loss of context. But could be addressed if we were to standardize the handling of linguistic types and enable reciprocation — or response. The fact that present-day streams now dominate social web activity just seems to beg for this solution of transactionality around coupled messages.

What's there to like? Facebook Likes and social object relations

Facebook's recent F8 announcements concerning the Like button, connected pages, and Open Graph api have resurrected some discussion around social objects. I wrote last week about social objects from a theoretical perspective, and want to clarify a few top-line points that I think are worth consideration, particularly given Facebook's apparent semantic and social search strategies.

There are two approaches to social objects. One is theoretical, and one is practical. I will only touch on the theory of social objects briefly here, focusing instead on a few practical implications of an object-centric theory.

In Facebook's Open Graph Protocol from a Web Developer's Perspective, Dare Obasanjo does a nice job of recapitulating one view of social objects relevant to Facebook Likes. He cites a post written by Hugh Macleod in 2007: social objects for beginners

The Social Object, in a nutshell, is the reason two people are talking to each other, as opposed to talking to somebody else. Human beings are social animals. We like to socialize. But if think about it, there needs to be a reason for it to happen in the first place. That reason, that "node" in the social network, is what we call the Social Object.
Example A. You and your friend, Joe like to go bowling every Tuesday. The bowling is the Social Object.
Example B. You and your friend, Lee are huge Star Wars fans. Even though you never plan to do so, you two tend to geek out about Darth Vader and X-Wing fighters every time you meet. Star Wars is the Social Object.

In this view, the object structures relations and is the reason for communication. It represents a shared interest, and for all intents and purposes serves as social navigation. Tags are a similar kind of navigation, useful for finding people with a common interest. And this would seem to be the purpose of Likes on Facebook: a digg-like vote of interest that facilitates people finding and creates possibilities for connection.

But I disagree that the object of shared interest is necessarily the reason for interaction and the object of communication. Objects do not create reasons for connection, nor do they ground communication and interaction. I believe it's the other way around. Communication and interaction may take up objects as a topical theme, but the interest is as much person to person as it is person to object. You may invite a friend to dinner, but this is not because you are hungry.

Objects do not proscribe and structure social relations — objects are subordinate to relations. And interests between people are relational, not object-oriented. The object may supply a shared topic, object of interest, navigational or activity context, but need not itself be the object of communication. Instead, it facilitates connection and helps to create possibilities for communication.

The issue I have with the social object description cited above is that it conflates object and motive. Objects are viewed as causal, of social interaction and social relations. I don't see how we could ground social interaction in objects, or even object worlds, in a manner sufficient to the psychological complexity of human social motives. Objects are not equivalent to the relations in which they are taken up.

In fact, one of the oft-cited theorists of social objects, Karin Knorr Cetina, makes this very point:

Objects of knowledge, the ones important in the present context, are characteristically open, question-generating, and complex. They are processes and projections rather than definitive things. In our interpretation, objects of knowledge seem to have the capacity to unfold indefinitely; in this sense they lie at the opposite end from pure tools and commercial commodities.

Her paper is about object worlds — she uses the example of day traders and stock market representations — not about objects as things. I think we may have misread her discussion of objects to be about things, when in fact it is about relations we take up with things, their meanings, and their representations.

Nor do I think that objects completely supply context, for context in social interaction, too, is relational. If you invite your friend to dinner, two contexts of social interaction are now relevant: the dinner as object, and the invitation as social action. Action can as easily supply context around social objects as any objective relation, or objective property. This is the approach taken by activity streams, and the reason that activity streams supports more than one expression of action. Liking alone risks digg-ification of shared social interests, and a loss of intent and meaning.

Adina Levin makes this point in a post about the Like

But that's what Facebook's "Like" gets rid of. See, there's an alternative vision about social context. And that is that Facebook is your one and only source of context. Thomas Vanderwal suggests, in the discussion of Facebook's recent announcement, that Facebook is not doing such a great job of this today: "The social graph is dangerous without context and much more dangerous w/ partial context." ActivityStreams fosters competition among services that want to provide social context of various sorts, and Like forecloses that competition.

But it is not only context around social objects that is lost, as Vander Wal suggests. It is loss of action, too. Which is one reason for my interest in action streams. Action streams would not only be like-able social objects; they would be actionable social objects. Actionable social objects not only permit more linguistic and expressive (e.g. gestural) actions — invites, offers, announcements, etc — they capture actions on them. For example, an invitation action object could be accepted or declined. This would not only add power to objects, but would capture some social relationality — in the form of reciprocity or mutual interest. Social objects today are still only asymmetrical — two-sided liking is not required for them to serve as interest pivots between people.

There are a couple reasons a double-sided object relation model might be interesting. The first is preemptive: we avoid inundation by system status messages telling us everything about what our friends now Like. The second is enabling: we get better social data. Social data is one of the reasons, if not the main reason, for Facebook's Likes. Facebook will preside over a world of social objects related to people whose interest declarations will given them a reason to advertise by interests served up on page context, within streams (presumably), and across its open graph (presumably) contexts.

As Obasanjo writes:

In the social media space, a few people have focused on the fact that this data is put in place to enable sites to be added to Facebook's social graph. However there is little reason why other social networking services couldn't also read the same markup as a way to add those web sites to their social graph. For example, Yelp is one of the sites that now supports the Open Graph Protocol so when I click like the Pro Sports Club it is added to the list of "pages" I'm a fan of on Facebook. However I could just as easily see that being a [Twitter — Like] button which would add the Twitter account for the gym to my following list along with tweeting to my followers that I liked the gym. It would only take adding a markup element to what Yelp is outputting to indicate the Twitter account of the page being liked. With my Windows Live hat on, I can imagine going to Amazon or IMDB and clicking a [Windows Live — Like] button which would add the movie to my list of favorite things. There are a ton of possibilities this opens up in a totally decentralized way without forcing services or users to be locked into a particular social network.

Unfortunately, the Like represents a pretty thin expression of interest. It fails to capture degrees of interest, or how much you like something; motivation, or why you like it; or social relations, or who you like who likes it. In this, the Like still suffers from the long tail assumption that people are alike who like the same thing — or that likeness between objects is reflected in people who like them being alike one another. Not so, of course, but this is the state of social targeting today (objects of interest are consumer segments; consumers identify with what they like).

It's unfortunate that the Facebook Like is so close to social bookmarking, to retweeting, to diggs and the like that we still cannot capture more of the differences of kind and degree that would make the social web really interesting. But who can fault Facebook for drawing up a semantic and search strategy around the vote of interest. One-click solutions are simple interaction solutions, if not too simple. The majority of advertisers and many marketers, too, will be satisfied with the metrics Facebook will be able to offer about audiences pegged to shared Likes.

But I think that the future of social marketing still resides in a system better able to provide social relational information captured from actions, interaction, and communication. For the grail in social marketing is not the individual, but the social graph, and in particular, who to market to in a social graph. For the power of liking is not just that we like something, but that we like to be liked, too.

SxD: Social Objects

This is just a quick post on social objects. The concept of social objects is pretty widely used in social interaction design, but we're missing a solid definition of what social objects are. Or, whether they really even exist.

The most common use of the term "social object" refers to shared online resources around which interactions develop and coalesce. Examples could include gifts on Facebook, videos, or what have you. The object sort of serves as a shared object, a focus of attention, an actual digital object, and so on. And the object plays a role in governing or informing interactions; we know what objects mean and what to do with them (give them, comment on them, play them, etc.)

But the definition of social object is a bit too fuzzy for me, and for a couple reasons.

Firstly, as designers, the object plays into our interest in having an object language -- things to design and design for. We are biased to think in terms of objects; objects belong to the world of interface design. So there is a possibility that where there is actually other stuff going on, we focus on the object out of our own interest. (By analogy, consider the anthropologist who focuses her attention on these social objects: a ceremonial mask, money, a wedding ring, a football. How much of the rituals, pastimes, social and cultural practices belong to the object and are explained by object properties? Not much....)

Secondly, objects are easily confused with their properties, attributes, qualities, uses, and so on. This is just how language works. We name a thing and give it attributes, and having done so we have a stable concept. Plato's ideal chair, vs all real chairs. Concepts then substitute for the real thing. It's possible that we're actually talking about the concept of social objects, and not social objects as used.

Which is a more accurate description of gifting on Facebook: the relationship between two friends and the practice of giving gifts on birthdays, or the graphic of the beer mug? The more accurate description of user interaction would be that which explains the practice of gift giving, the symbolic act of presenting a gift, the Facebook tradition of recognizing birthdays, and the social space in which gifts are seen by others such that birthdays create a cause for a stretch of social interaction.

We know that social objects are a shared cultural resource -- their meanings are culturally context-specific. We know that many social practices involve social objects. We know that in the digital domain, social objects are unique in that there is no original object but many copies; that an object can appear in many places at once.

For example, I give you a beer mug and it is on your wall but in my stream also -- same object, but not really, since one is the one I gave you and yours is the one you received. We're really talking about a representation, not an object. In other words, the object represents the act.

If the social object is sometimes the representation of an act, then perhaps the focus should be on the act, and on interaction practices, less on the object. The act of recognizing a friend's birthday by gifting a graphic beer mug is a better explanation of the user activity. The object is merely a representational vehicle by which the activity is sedimented into a mediated, visible, socially recognizable form.

Social objects, then, might be better understood as common forms. Forms in which many kinds of graphics, rich media, even textual forms (for a tweet is a social object as soon as it is retweeted) permit diverse kinds of social interaction. The object, in other words, is not an object, but a form.

If social objects are a form of representation, we can expand our understanding of what they mean. If a form has visual content, it is an image. If it has linguistic content, it is a text or an utterance. If it is a video, it is televisual.

If it is a gift using a graphic, such as the beer mug, then it is both a symbolic token (as described by traditions of gift giving -- the gift is an object with meaning inherited from the tradition of gift exchange, and specified by meanings belonging to the object: price, ownership, status, utility, etc) and an image. The beer mug graphic indicates "a drink" (this is basic theory of representation stuff: the image is a beer mug); the act of giving it refers to "get you a drink for your birthday". The interaction, in other words, is a symbolically-mediated one, referencing a content (get you a beer) and a cultural practice (on your birthday).

We can now see that the interaction situates and contextualizes the object. Not the other way around. The object doesn't tell us what's going on, nor does it define uses and interactions. Those belong to practices -- namely, practices in which objects are used.

There's another reason that the object should take a subordinate role to the interaction. Tweets are social objects. Tweets are utterances that take a form, and which, given that twitter is a distribution platform, can be circulated, referenced, recontextualized (posted to streams, blogs, surfaced in search, etc), and so on. We miss out on the significance of the "commodity" form of mediated talk if we think in terms of objects. Because we think of objects as things.

But clearly, anything that can be mediated and used as a shared resource can be a social object. And this includes tweets, things, and much more. So if the world of social objecst includes linguistic statements, gestural tokens (emoticons), signs, numbers (is a follower number a social object? it certainly is the object of a lot of social activity!), images, graphics, avatars, and on and on. We would have to admit that not only is the idea of social objects so broad as to be almost meaningless; but that it's lost any critical or explanatory power. A concept too big to give us any guidance.

So that's where I am on social objects. We need a better description. Personally, I think we can borrow from linguistics, semiotics, and anthropology. I would argue that the interaction domain has primary importance, and that the subdomain is symbolically-mediated interaction.

Within this, then, types include:

• linguistic statements
• symbolic tokens
• currencies
• representational objects
• images
• gestural signs
• signs
• numbers
• rich media (video, etc -- stuff playable online)
• bookmarks
• avatars
• etc

Using the disciplines I just mentioned, we would be able to use:

• linguistics for linguistic statements
• semiotics for signs
• representational theory for representations (looks like something) and images (is of something)
• cultural anthro for exchange practices and their token objects
• media theory for numbers (stats, counts, etc)
• and so on.

The types are then unpacked in the contexts of their use, in their contribution to interactions, in their meanings, and as expressions of intent and guidelines for interpretation. And, most importantly, we would be able to account for the enormously innovative and unique ways in which symbolically-mediated interactions can refer to all manner of meaningful activities online, from social games to Second Life (which is, kind of, a total social object world!), from gifting to retweeting, and so on. It's a bigger project, but the online world is incredibly rich. And I'm convinced that we might misinterpret what's going on around it if we allow ourselves to think of objects as objects.

Twitter promotional tweet strategies

As some of you know, I find the conversational strategies of branding and marketing on twitter fascinating. And of using feeds/streams for talk-based marketing in general. But I'm just now catching up on twitter's recent announcement, so take this post with a few grains of salt. I may not have this entirely right. But I thought I'd share some thoughts on the implications of twitter's new platform on marketing and the twitter ecosystem overall.

The Altimeter Group has a great overview from which I'll excerpt the introduction:


First Take Analysis: What Twitter’s “Promoted Tweets” Means To The Ecosystem


Summary: Twitter has launched Promoted Tweets, combining paid and organic media. Brands can now advertise promoted tweets on search pages, however the community has power over which tweets will appear measured by Twitter’s new metric called “resonance” which factors in behaviors like the retweet, at, hash, avatar clicks. Brands can now purchase CPM based ads to promote these popular tweets at the top of a Twitter search term –even in categories they aren’t well known in, influencing awareness. Marketers beware: unlike traditional advertising or social marketing this is both a combination of earned media and paid media. For Twitter this experimental move makes sense as it taps into deep pockets of online advertisers without jeopardizing sanctity of the community as users will self select which tweets will resonate and thereby become promoted ads.


How it will work, a likely use case scenario:

1. Twitter users will continue to interact with each other, and popular tweets will receive a high ‘resonance’ score from Twitter. Some of these Tweets will be created by brands, and some by the users themselves.
2. Tweets with heavy resonance can be purchased by advertisers in a CPM basis to appear as the first ’sponsored’ Tweet on a search term. The sponsored tweets will be clearly labeled and have a different background color.
3. These promoted tweets will only stay if users continue to resonate with them, those that don’t will disappear and a different tweet with resonation will appear.

(Read the original post. As usual, the Altimeter Group has done a fabulous job breaking this down.)
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Twitter's promotional tweet strategy will create a very compelling opportunity for brand managers, customer service, sales, marketing, and community managers. It will permit more experimentation, more learning, and more insight. It will also create new risks, for the platform introduces a new set of practices to twitter that will inevitably raise the stakes around transparency, intent, authenticity, and reputation. These will be true not only for participating promoters, but for twitter users themselves.

Any doubt cast on the authenticity and intent of a tweet will rub off not only on the originating promoter, but on all those who "resonate" with it. Any doubt as to the motives of participants will also impact originating promoters and resonaters. These are characteristics that attach to the "speaker," and to speech. The same will be true of interpretation, or as we might say, the "listener." Not only will there be questions around what a resonater is doing by promoting promotional tweets — there will be questions about what to do with it (pass it along or not). For example, Does the resonater really agree with it? What aspect of it? Am I supposed to take this seriously, and reflect this user's interest, or not?

These are fine-grained questions, but they are intrinsic to the very nature of twitter's system of talk.

Some sample issues and questions

• What's the credibility of the twitter user promoting a promoted tweet?
• Is the twitter user gaming the system — Digg-like?
• Does the twitter user genuinely resonate with the promoted tweet?
• Why is this promoted tweet resonating?
• How do I look if I promote this tweet?
• Can my followers tell if I'm promoting this tweet because it resonates genuinely?
• Can they tell if I am being facetious — that I'm promoting it tongue in cheek?
• Will I lose followers?
• What is the reputation capital risk of promoting promotional tweets?
• Will there be a perceived difference between promoting retweeted promotions vs the original promotion?

Some implications of promotional tweeting
The odds that a Digg-like group of marketers emerges to circulate promoted tweets and to create resonance by combining large follower networks, a karmic — and measurable! — social contract and mutual commitment to circulate one another's promotions, seems high. This will immediately raise the risk of a two-class order of users: genuine users and promoters.

• Twitterers belonging to the promotional order will make it onto lists that are to their benefit, but used also by others to unfollow.
• In an effort by genuine users to clear their names, protect their standing, and more immediately, to avoid their own inclusion on promoter lists, a follow/unfollow episode may ensue.
• Some third parties might possibly then provide tools to help genuine users in bulk unfollowing those who have been identified as promoters. They could do this by providing lists, or managing databases of promoters so that they can be easily unfollowed.
• Opting out will now become a cultural practice and code of conduct, as in: "If I ever catch you promoting a tweet I will unfollow you on principle."

Marketing opportunities: conversational strategies
The new system of conversational promotion will create some compelling opportunities. These will hopefully not only include messages but also short-form narratives, games, stories, puzzles, and more. The most creative campaigns will hail from agencies and brands willing to take the user's side and deliver content that is an interesting read if not also a compelling activity. Some brands may invent participatory dramas, interactive story-based offers, group or affinity marketing strategies using shared discounts, rewards, and incentives. Those smart enough to try to leverage social graphs will design strategies that percolate through twitter followers as well as Facebook pages, etc. Visibility will be lensed and market segments will be defined in terms of their responsiveness and activity as well as traditional valuations of consumer interest.

Marketers will see here an opportunity to create multi-modal and multi-wave conversational campaigns. These would include messages targeted to different audience segments, tests of content style, offer, brand message and image, call to action, and so on.

• A marketer might create and test a dozen different tweets to track and measure resonance.
• Tweets might be sent at different times of day, be targeted to reach influencers, be designed to resonate with existing intra-day news and events, hashtags, conferences, and other ecosystem attributes that are known to accrue fast distribution
• Marketers should benefit from much greater insight into messaging effectiveness
• Marketers should be able to learn from resonance:
• times of day
• days of the week
• repetition
• contextual topics, themes, events, etc of use to the campaign
• competitive analysis
• responsive vs non-responsive influencers based on individual influencer behavior and attention
• responsive vs non-responsive influencers based on individual influencer network speed, reach, and resonance

ROI: Go for it, or engage with transparency?
Promotional strategies will unavoidably butt up against the choice between using or targeting effective promotional communities (Digg phenom) and more organic, and dare we say "transparent," strategies. The former will deliver the numbers, and make any marketer pushed to simply show the numbers happy. The latter will more likely result in honest and credible brand capital. A two-tiered community of social media professionals will continue to emerge, separating those committed to good content and interaction from those hot in pursuit of numbers. Both will have to deal with SEO, and twitter realtime search, but the former group will develop skills in organic conversational strategy, while the latter will preside over a network of promoters with high follower counts and "guaranteed" results.

Marketers may seek new ROI criteria for:

• Influencer and network reputation capital (amenability of influencer to promote; which promotions; around what interests, topics; style)
• Resonance capital (in speed, reach, and distribution; aggregate traffic; conversion; new follower counts)
• Marketers may have to consider effectiveness of circulation by highly resonant promotional "communities" vs organic and "authentic" resonance
• Marketers may be called out by twitter users for leveraging promotional communities
• transparency might then involve not only the messaging, but tactics of promotion
• the rapid and proven traffic gains of using promotional campaigns will be weighed against risks of backlash from users who perceive a brand to have sold out by using these new promotional tactics

What do you think? I'm all for a distinct class of commercial tweets if it helps to sustain twitter's platform model. It beats the corruption that would be inevitable if commercial tweeting were indistinguishable in form and delivery from normal tweeting. Norms are bound to form around use of promotional tweets. Influences on those norms will come from the brand strategists and experts consulting to companies interested in promotional twitter campaigns. They will also be influenced by those who can leverage the platform's inherent weaknesses to game and guarantee results. Twitter now has its own search facet, a search engine facet, and a new form of tweet — so lists, third party client accommodations, and of course tweeting practices are all affected. The user experience need not be at risk, but is clearly in play.

Is Clay Shirky on complexity too simplistic?

From a recent post on The Collapse of Complex Business Models, Clay Shirky argues that mass media may continue to see its business cannibalized by new media if it fails to recognize the inherent dangers of overly-complex production models.

"The 'and them some' is what causes the trouble. Complex societies collapse because, when some stress comes, those societies have become too inflexible to respond. In retrospect, this can seem mystifying. Why didn't these societies just re-tool in less complex ways? The answer Tainter gives is the simplest one: When societies fail to respond to reduced circumstances through orderly downsizing, it isn't because they don't want to, it's because they can't.
....

"Diller, Brill, and Murdoch seem be stating a simple fact — we will have to pay them — but this fact is not in fact a fact. Instead, it is a choice, one its proponents often decline to spell out in full, because, spelled out in full, it would read something like this:

"Web users will have to pay for what they watch and use, or else we will have to stop making content in the costly and complex way we have grown accustomed to making it. And we don't know how to do that."
....

"Bureaucracies temporarily suspend the Second Law of Thermodynamics. In a bureaucracy, it's easier to make a process more complex than to make it simpler, and easier to create a new burden than kill an old one.
....

"When ecosystems change and inflexible institutions collapse, their members disperse, abandoning old beliefs, trying new things, making their living in different ways than they used to. It's easy to see the ways in which collapse to simplicity wrecks the glories of old. But there is one compensating advantage for the people who escape the old system: when the ecosystem stops rewarding complexity, it is the people who figure out how to work simply in the present, rather than the people who mastered the complexities of the past, who get to say what happens in the future."




I have been offline for a few weeks working on a book tentatively titled Principles of Social Interaction Design. It's nigh on a first draft, and if you have ever attempted to write a book, you know that I'm eager to be well past nigh.

Ironically, paradoxically, or sensibly, I've had to be off social media in order to write about social media. I find that certain perspectives and insights come only with a good break from online habits and with a bit of critical distance. So it is with a bit of distance that I'm posting today. But there was a piece recently by Clay Shirky that I found interesting (I've allowed myself to lurk on google reader) and worth a few thoughts.

Shirky's piece is on complexity, and in the vein of the collapse of complex societies, as popularized by Jared Diamond. I'm no anthropologist, but I do like systems theory, and I'm very much interested in systems theory and social media. So there were some arguments in Shirky's piece that I couldn't connect myself. I'm compelled to write them up because they strike me as troublesome.

Clay writes, in essence, that complexity will be the downfall of mass media. But he writes also that tradition-bound methods of the past will be the downfall of mass media, too. And this is what bothers me. The argument is that old, bureaucratic, and overly complex systems of production, publishing, and distribution will succumb to new, simple, and future-oriented (read: internet) models of production.

I can buy one or the other, perhaps, but Clay seems to have conflated to arguments into one: old is complex, future is simple. Either simplicity trumps complexity, or future trumps the past. In fact, there have been many old and stagnant regimes that have failed. As well as many new and simple technologies that now beg for greater complexity (to wit, twitter's recent announcements). Both Google and Facebook are admittedly complex, and becoming increasingly so. The societies of the Mayans, Incas, and the Romans achieved high degrees of complexity, but so too did those of the conquering Europeans. Was the gun not a complex instrument of warfare; the galleon, a complex mode of travel; the Church, a complex bureaucratic institution; not to mention financing at the time?

I fail to see the intrinsic flaw in complexity, and the argument that simplicity beats complexity strikes me as, well, too simplistic. If complexity fails due to its complexity, then what new simplicity is needed to bring about this failure? Surely complexity would undo itself on its own. And if simplicity is better, is this not a comment on simplicity in process, or experience perhaps, and not necessarily a comment on production or organization? For if the experience is simple, what's wrong with hidden organizational or procedural complexity?

Complexity corresponds to greater organizational differentiation. The more complex an organization, the more responses it has for a greater number of environmental events or external change and stimuli. In systems theories, complexity is an intrinsic characteristic. The question is not complexity, but adaptability. Complexity, if it stands in the way of correctly perceiving phenomena, and if it prevents proper and commensurate responses to those phenomena, is a bad thing. But only on the basis of the response to change; not in and of itself.

Simplicity, in design, in user experience, in processes and interaction models, are generally-speaking, a good thing. There's no harm in wrapping a complex set of algorithms, processes, operations, and functionalities with a simple user interface. But this does not make the system simple. It makes its use simple.

It seems that Clay is for the simplicity of user experience, and against the complexity of bureaucracies unable to adapt when faced with environmental change. Both of which I can agree with. But I see no causal relation between these two dispositions. And I definitely fail to see how we might apply the laws of physics to get from one statement to the next, as Clay seems to do when citing the Second Law of Thermodynamics. That, to me, strikes me as facile, if not a somewhat bizarre failure to distinguish causalities and levels of analysis.

I'm harping on this only because I have a problem with certain internet myths — one of which I think is the myth of simplicity. Simplicity in structure is not the same as simplicity in process. Complex operations can be made simple if sequenced and stepped well. Complexity in organization can be made simple if its presentation is designed well. Complexity in relations can be simplified if navigation is familiar and sensible.

The world is only becoming more and increasingly complex, and in ways that are unavoidably tied to system interdependencies and connectedness. Simplicity, in itself, is not an antidote. Nor is simplicity in argumentation.