Ian M Rountree

Freelance Copywriting and Digital Marketing

The Need for a Three Dimensional Economy

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Trik or Treat. on Flickr
Photo by peasap.

Just like declaring any technology dead has become a bad joke, talking about alternative economic models seems to be popping up more and more. What we’re seeing is exploration into concepts like Whuffie, or a Relevance-based economy, the kinds of systems that look so good and tempting on paper that we’re willing to buy into them, support them – but they haven’t taken off yet. Like the ideal of Communism, non-capital economies are not fully formed enough yet to be worth adopting on a broad scale.

There are more aspects to the current economic model than most people suspect. This is one of the reasons why systems like Whuffie can’t take off until they become inclusive, rather than replacement systems. We need to explore not just alternatives, but additives to our current money-for-property system, because as society expands and changes, physical property is being diminished in its importance.

The obvious system is linear. It exists on a continuum of “Money <> Product” where the exchange is similarly obvious; the more complex, or impressive the product, the more money it’s going to cost. This means you basically have one choice to make. Do you want to keep your money and have nothing, or do you want to get the physical item, the souvenir of the transaction that you want to enact, and forgo the agile utility of liquid asset?

Money economy is simple. It’s not, however, complex enough. Not in today’s society.

We’re not going to get rid of money any time soon. The playing field is not level enough between the have’s and the have-nots to allow such a ubiquitous, obvious capital to die. So what about adding another layer? We’re doing this already, with social capitals like Whuffie. Whuffie is a social proofing system (there’s a full explanation on Wikipedia, as well as the Whuffie Bank) by which a new continuum is proposed: that of “Action <> Respect” where respect becomes a universal capital, and the time and effort your actions entail becomes the trade for this capital. It’s a brilliant system, because respect is virtually  impossible to fake.

Replacing the monetary system with another linear system is a failing concept because of complexity issues. However, when we add to the one-dimensional monetary system another, totally offset system like the Whuffie-based Action <> Respect economy, what we see is a more accurate representation of how people make decisions. Like in a pure relevance economy we can’t expect people to make decisions solely based on money, here is an example  of what this two-dimensional system may come to look like:

I want a television. I look at the brands and models available. Five sets all cost the same in my size range, and all of them fit my budget. How do I decide? I choose based on the company’s image. I’ll pick on Samsung because I know there are good people working there. When all the prices are the same, price alone cannot aid my decision.

This feels like a much more human decision making process. I’ve now removed money from the process, because it’s irrelevant in this transaction, and replaced it with a differentiator involving reputation. Far more thorough. But what happens when the reputation metric falls over? After enough time, with all of the major corporations eventually getting involved in the social space, democratizing their brands and building personalities, the idea of Whuffie will fall apart in the corporate sense, because someone will eventually come up with a new system where no publicly visible missteps are made. While I admit this is a reduction of rationality, let’s say the scenerio is proven, and reputation does become a reliable commodity. What then?

Real depth.

What will that look like? How will we make decisions? I suspect it will look a lot like it does now. Let’s take a fairly complex scenario about purchasing and break it down:

I need to replace a laptop. I do the research, figure out what my real needs are, and find that both an Apple MacBook Pro, and a very high end PC, such as a Toshiba or even an Alienware would suit my tasks. Budget is no object. How do I decide? I take the question to my peers, who return with a resounding support of Apple from the set who likes Apple, and some mixed reviews of Toshiba, a couple of Alienware droolers, and someone offhand giving me a very intense explanation of why I need to consider an HP. What do I buy? The Apple fans always say Apple, so they failed to differentiate. The Toshibas always give mixed reviews. The Alienware droolers are doing my shopping for themselves, but that one dude who suggested the HP had damned good reasons for doing so. We’ll assume it also helps that I did my research following the tip, and found the information to be accurate. So I’ll go buy the HP.

We took care of money by presupposing it’s not an object. We took care of reputation by adjusting for our reactions from our friends. Relevance does not apply because my needs are straight forward enough that any machine on the market of a certain calibre will accomplish my goals. How did I make my decision? An outside force, not the company I was purchasing from, grabbed my attention with a real, human plea about quality, experience, reliability, or something else that actually, legitimately makes the brand stand out over the competition.

We ask our friends for approval of purchases all the time. We budget with our families. We save. We do research. Are any of these things recognized as part of the measurable economic process? Sure they are. There are multinational corporations banking on being the most innocuous, convenient option. Wal-Mart choices. This, I’d say, amounts to the third dimension of a real three-dimensional economy. The “Convenience <> Information” continuum, and it’s the most difficult one to master.

We say all the time in the shop that there’s nothing so dangerous to profit margin than an informed consumer. It’s true, even if it’s an oversimplification. At the moment, consumers who qualify as informed, do minimal research on Google or Bing or Yahoo and come away mostly with answers backing up their assumptions, because no one’s taught them how to use search effectively, and our culture is not exactly encouraging of reliable dynamic thinking like changing your mind based on Wikipedia. There are good reasons for this – for now. But those reasons are shrinking.

Any economic model not sufficiently complex to cover the agile way in which humans make decisions is a failing, imperfect system. This process is simpler than we think; all we have to be able to do is plot the options in a space, and relate that space to our own needs, expectations, and resources. This kind of relational thinking is exactly why we are what we are, and where we ourselves fit on this grid is what makes us as individuals who we are.

Rational thinking is linear. Placing money on the opposite side as physical goods is obvious, and rational. It worked for a long time as the easiest to communicate system, when there were so many barriers to acquisition. Now, however, with all of the barriers crumbling and every wall to commerce falling as quickly as society can allow it to – and with so much diversity in product and method and resource now available – a linear system, any purely linear system, must be called obsolete.

And now I’ve fallen into my own trap.

Where do you see opportunities for more relational thinking? Economics isn’t just for transactions of goods. Economy of effort, of time, these things have the same implications, and require the same skills and know-how to navigate effectively. But we have to do so in a manner that allows us to be conscious of where the effort we’re putting in goes. Where is your effort going?

Children's Games and Social Media

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Follow the Leader - FlickrI was always crap at Simon Says. I was the kid who could only ever think of three things to have people do – stand up, sit down, run in place – and I’ve learned to mark this down to both an inability to develop internal go-to lists, and a dislike of having to issue mindless rapid-fire commands. Yet as I watch people tweet their lives away sometimes I wonder exactly how useful these skills are in real life? Like learning trigonometry, I had always figured it was something to get good at or avoid, but now I’m not so sure.

Like it or not, Social Media is here to stay. I hope someone comes up with a better, permanent term for what’s going on, because I dislike that buzzword, but there you are. I’m fortuitous to be getting into networking just now, because I have a nearly three year old son, and while considering the things we need to make sure he learns, at the same time I’m watching the foibles of high-powered people online, and seeing a lot of parallel.

One of the many things I dislike about Twitter’s ecosphere is the MLM phenomenon. It sounds like a pyramid scheme on the outside (and runs like one) but the behavior of the people involved, or at least the visible output of the bots, looks an awful lot like Simon Says. Rapid fire information with little available content driving people who are unlucky enough to get sucked in to useless products or a hookup to the scheme. It’s a social failing, but it’s one of those pendulum behaviors – those who understand just enough are exploiting those who don’t yet know.

How many pundit blogs do you read? I don’t specifically mean political pundits, I mean Apple and Google and Microsoft fanboy blogs as well. Notice anything about their habits? Suggesting certain new products, dropping bombs on others. For some reason this always reminds me of Red Light, Green Light.

The less said about Michael Arrington’s apparent tabloidism the better – but the entire leak culture feels like one big game of telephone.

Corporate recruiting feels a bit like Red Rover.

It’s amazing how often this kind of thing happens. Perhaps it’s early training, rearing it’s head on our adult lives. On the other hand, like just about anything, when you know just enough about how these habits form, you can exploit them. And when that gets old, you can become a benefactor and teach others either to exploit the habits, or how to avoid having these habits exploited.

Until you know where your habits come from, and what the tells are, how are you going to ensure you’re not being taken advantage of?

Otherwise, it’s duck-duck goose, and someone’s got their eye on turning you into the next goose.

Photo by Mykl Roventine

Personality Thieves – The War for the Identities of the Internet

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Big Ass Feed Icon
photo by Danny Sullivan

Robert Scoble posted an interesting discussion topic on his Facebook wall, asking the deceptively simple question: Who will win the Identity war in 2010?

The question was asked with specificity towards tech platforms, like Twitter, Facebook, Google and so on, but it’s an important question to ask of ourselves: to whom are we giving the leverage of our primary identification on the web?

Like a lot of others who are best suited to interface, I’m an adaptable person. This is both a great help in my work, and a hindrance with my friends for one simple reason; when I spend time with you, I’m going to start to sound like you. If I spend an evening watching QI, I have a flare-up of British in my speech. If I spend too much time reading Justin Kownacki, I get ornery. Too much Seth Godin and I fall afoul of sweeping inspirational pessimism. I’ve been accused of having a weak identity, but I don’t think that’s it, primarily because I’m not alone in this behaviour; I just happen to display it as a very visible means of communication. I’m in the habit not only of speaking your language, but speaking your accent as well.

Identity is a touchy subject for a lot of people. We like to be ourselves, but easily fall afoul of pop culture epidemics. Every teenager falls into a category during high school – those who try not to get branded as “outsiders” by their peers, which makes demarcation an impossible process to avoid; it only goes away when everyone stops participating, and it’s not human nature to remain intentionally ambiguous. Social networks make this even more difficult to avoid – Twitter has lists, Facebook has the friend system, as do so many other networks. It’s not a bad thing, but as with so much else, awareness is the key to safe navigation.

The idea of identity, of finding peers to connect with, is so easy to reconcile with our daily lives that technology has adapted it as a mode of operation – we can’t ignore this. Peer to Peer filesharing. Friends lists. Contact lists, address books, RSS feeds, folders, libraries, right down to the DLLs that run your computer programs. Grouping is everywhere. And because it’s everywhere, it’s possible to manipulate.

I recently read an article on Brad J Ward’s blog from last year about “FacebookGate” where a group had severely infiltrated student-run graduation groups for various schools – for who knows what purpose. Perhaps data mining. Maybe stalking. It doesn’t matter. What matters is this event as a demonstration of the very demarcation we use to identify ourselves being used for purposes we did not choose when we claimed the label in the first place.

It gets worse: Over the last month I’ve seen both Chris Brogan and Amber Naslund suffer outright plagiarism. Brogan’s world saw a hack marketing an eBook made out of a collection of Chris’ blog posts. Naslund had a blog post ripped right from her site and posted, no claim of attribution whatsoever, on another site. This goes beyond casual emulation for the sake of communication; this is outright personality theft.

So how does this apply to technology as a communicative and cultural force? In practice. I make a habit of signing up for every social networking site I can lay my greedy hands on, whether I’m aiming to use it or not. I’ve been trying to snap up my own names as a username for the last three months as well, for branding purposes, it just makes sense. Now, think about that for a second. Think about what I just said.

Branding purposes.

Sounds funny, doesn’t it? We talk about personal branding all the time, but it’s always as an external force, information we’re carefully aligning outside ourselves on networks, website after website, trying to make a name for ourselves. We get annoyed if our names are already taken, but how do we fight back? Not by making a mass acceptance of the fact that our personal brands are facets of our identity – that would be silly, applying a business term to ourselves – but rather by setting up “Verified Accounts” and other measures to make sure the people represented by certain usernames really are themselves. It’s a good thing, but it’s still external.

Scoble’s question about who will win the identity war this year – and it will be this year, it has to be, or it will never come – is a big one. I answered by asserting that it won’t be the creation of utility that wins. If we’re looking for utility we already have a mesh of social networks for that. Facebook for friend gathering Twitter for grapeshot conversation, LiveFyre for in-depth enquiry. FourSquare and Gowalla for relational location. We build our online identities out of these things, among many others (personally branded websites, I’m aware, are a big deal as well. I’ve got mine, did you get yours?) and often forget that the idea of identity is more about accessibility than it is about utility. We use these networks to get our words out to others, to track interest in what we say based on how, when, and how loud we say it.

Whatever wins the identity war will provide the greatest power of accessibility and cross-feeding to the largest number of people with the least amount of hassle. Google’s profiles are a great start, but it’s not quite enough. If I know El Goog half as well as I hallucinate that I do, they’ll improve it; I can see the potential there for the perfect outward-facing home base meshed with the ultimate inward-facing dashboard. I wonder if they do, too.

Maybe it won’t be Google. Maybe it’ll be something, or someone else that brings up that killer app.

I just can’t wait to use it once it’s there.

Do We Need Networks for Everything?

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I’m not asking a question about speed here; I worry that with the profligate new networks like Twitter (and its environs in the form of apps, API [ab]users and tools), LiveFyre (with its massive potential for both quality content and for trolling), and FourSquare and Gowalla along with other location-based get-off-the-computer social networks… I worry that the beauty of the centralised network, which I still feel is the best way this can work, is deteriorating.

There’s a speech in He’s Just Not That In To You, where Drew Barrymore is lamenting having to call a guy, leaving him a voicemail, to which he responds by email, so she Facebooks him – and so on, apoplexy. Is this really happening? I mean, I email people. Or I IM with them. If you have any of my four IM accounts, they’re always on because I’m a BlackBerry user and I’m a geek like that. People can pester me wherever they wish to, through whatever network, and are likely to get back one of two things: An email, or an IM. Because that’s what works. I like centralisation, even if I do enjoy being in the loop. I’m far from anonymous: Yes, I’m on LinkedIn, yes, I have a Flickr account, both of which are very disused, as well as a Fiend- I mean FriendFeed page which is similarly disused and mostly remote controlled by Twitter. I’ve even put up a couple of very low quality YouTube videos. I’m on Twitter all the freaking time. By all rights, I should be one of those people who’s all over the place and simultaneously impossible to get a hold of.

But I’m not. Because I think that practice is stupid. Still, businesses start up every day building new and diverse networks with new calls to action, innovating the methods by which we communicate with each other and leaving a startled majority of us wondering what happened to the email we used to be getting and no longer are.

Networks with plans have limits. They’re sort of like gods that way, the pick an element to be divine in, and sort of suck at everything else. If you want to kill a god, hurl its anathema at it and watch the sparks fly. Facebook? Clearly, Mafia Wars. Twitter? Probably spam bots. The thing is that these networks keep popping up, no matter how much damage the originals absorb, and whether these parent concepts survive the onslaught of abuse.

But do we need them?

For me to hold my interest in a given network, I have to treat it like a friend. Sure, my friends are on the network, and I interact with them, but the network entity itself has to have some meaning to me, I have to be able to get along with it, cultivate an interest in maintaining it. Since I started using Twitter in earnest, almost exclusively to connect with people otherwise entirely out of my reach, I’ve entirely abandoned FriendFeed – Twitter did a better job. Sorry, I’m a fair-weather networker. I’ve also scaled back on Facebook almost entirely – I haven’t posted a status update in days, and going to the web interface is a chore. I check statuses of my friends when I have thirty seconds at work, again on my BlackBerry. It takes energy to cultivate more than this, and I’m not scaleable and I know it.

So when I got introduced to LiveFyre, I decided not to do what I did with Twitter – which was get on, dive in, and then get annoyed that it behaved differently than Facebook, which at the time was my best networking friend, and subsequently abandon the thing for almost a year. I’ve taken a bit of time to analyze before diving in, and I’m not sure I like what I see. There’s nothing inherently wrong with LF itself, other than being a  very directed outlet for specific kinds of content, which makes it more like a community blog than a social network.

The problem I’m having is with the idea that there must be all of these networks for everyone, and if you want to catch all of your friends, make sure you have everyone in your contact list accessible as often as you feel they need to be, you have to set up so many listening posts you’ll go into stack overflow. It’s a futile exercise. But it’s necessary one in a lot of instances, isn’t it?

But it brings me back to this:

One. How useful are global networks – I’m talking about the Facebooks and MySpaces of the world here, where the entire call to action is “Play Nice With Others” – when it comes to quickly and reliably getting accurate and succinct information from your contacts to you?

And Two. How much utility can there ever be in balkanized echo chambers when the limits of the available actions are so heavily built into the systems that no out-of-purpose use is possible?

You're Not A Big Deal

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When we barely know someone and are first exposed to them, they seem like a big deal. This is the case whether it’s a friendly introduction or our first sighting of a new celebrity on the red carpet. But as we gain more and more information about them, they shrink.

This might sound a bit counter-intuitive; your friends and family, whom you know most about, are likely a pretty big deal in your life, so why is it that as we learn more about those on our social peripheries, their capabilities seem to diminish? Simple: there’s a threshold of acceptable mystery that we pass through. If I know nothing about you, I can neither accurately praise nor criticise you; all I can do is pay attention, gather information, and decide on a firmer course of action once I’ve done my recon. Once I have this information, I can do one of three things: dismiss you, cultivate you, or destroy you.

Dismissal is really simple, more so in the age of social media; If the process by which I’ve discovered you is your twitter account or your blog, the unfollow button is simple to find. It used to be harder to dismiss people, but when friendships can be lost in meatspace entirely because someone accidentally hit the unfriend button on Facebook – well, it shows how superficial we are with our outer-valence contacts, right?

Cultivation is the long process, it’ how we gain friends worth keeping for an appreciable amount of time. If you’re aiming to do this, you can’t just grab every piece of information about someone in hopes you find something useful. You also can’t be cultivating people and hope to use them for anything; if you’re hoping for a business transaction, whether you’re on the end that’s buying or selling, you’ve got to keep people in the zone of casual disinterest where the acceptable mystery lives, otherwise there are expectations. Sort of like being stuck as friend guy when you’re really rather date a girl – once you’ve passed the mysterious proximity barrier, it’s difficult getting back out to the distance needed to do good business, unless you build that expectation into your friendships by strongly separating your professional and personal lives.

Destruction is, deceptively, even harder to achieve than cultivation. Most of the time you’re stuck burning your bridges, having little real effect on those you’re trying to hurt. Why are you doing that, by the way? If you just don’t like them, dismiss them. If they did something do hurt you, dismiss them. Why go to all the extra effort? Because maybe they’re a threat. The trouble with this is that you first have to define threat. Socially? Commercially? Technologically? Internet aside, it’s a pretty big planet, and unless someone has you cornered, it’s not hard to divide up the world into your own little chunk. The trouble with this is that mutual connections rarely give a crap about petty squabbles, which is where destruction gets so messy; unless you can convince your peripheral friends there’s a real benefit to them in helping you out, someone will always try to fuel both you and the other party.

Why is any of this a big deal? Because recognizing the process can demystify a lot of things. Exposing yourself to people, especially those you initially conceive of as bigger than yourself, can either be enlightening or distressing. Being aware of what makes the lustre on celebrity eventually disappear can help get past the depression of realizing your heroes are just louder versions of yourself.