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Academic Proof vs Social Proof

December 9, 2009 by Ian Leave a Comment

: photo by spacepleb

How do you justify getting a degree in the age of social proof?

I’m not going to pretend to know the statistics nationally, but of the graduating class I came from, two people I’m aware of did the “right thing” and went to college to get degrees. One in sociology, one in psychology. Both of them are still working retail because there are no jobs requiring the degrees they have. It’s a little unsettling. But then, I wasn’t one of the two who got the degrees.

Instead, I worked. I intended to work until I found something worth going to school for – I still do, and the options are narrowing as my experience increases and my tastes settle – but now I’m wondering if it’s not possible to simply use the experience I have as a foothold to the career I’ll eventually retire from. It really makes me wonder how useful the post-secondary educational system is.

A part of this comes from my frustration with the education system itself. My father’s a teacher and has been for his entire adult life, nearly forty years I think. I’ve seen a number of the struggles he has with the system itself, the bureaucracy behind the scenes, and it makes me a little worried for the students who have to put up with the end results of this. I’m convinced it’s time for an overhaul, but I admit there’s little I could contribute to the doing of that.

Instead, I think it’s important that businesses begin to more adequately recognize when someone’s had better training in one direction or the other. In some instances, there is no substitute for a degree. Accountants, software designers – there are things you learn from concise, critical study that simply cannot be taught on the job. The degree, the certificate – these things still have merit, but their arena has to change, and employers need to recognize this.

Similarly, work experience provides a number of benefits degrees do not. Soft skills, prioritizing beyond the current assignment, forward thinking – the workplace has need of these abilities far more than the schools do, and for certain jobs – strategy, marketing, sales, perhaps even reaching as far as executive positions, given the right kinds of experience, it may be more effective to consider someone’s real life decisions and knowledge beyond the classroom will inevitably be more valuable.

I think one of the troubles with the acceptance of work experience and real-life CV-building experience might be the question of scale. There is a lot of standardization in schooling, if someone’s passed, they have proven their ability to keep up with accepted norms, and like any machine, business relies on standards and metrics. Life experience provides none of this clean-cut, rationed demarcation, which will likely prove the biggest frustration for recruiters trying to pull in the talented rather than the credentialed.

But at the end of the process, when the dust settles and the new workplace adjusts to new venues for education, the same will apply as does today: there is no clearcut benefit in pushing yourself or anyone else down an educational path they’ll waste, when they could be gaining other valuable learning simply by sitting up and living in a way that’s attentive to their needs and highest good.

The Bank of Social Capital

December 4, 2009 by Ian Leave a Comment

: photo by woodleywonderworks

Are all withdrawals from the bank of social capital account closures? Amanda Chapel seems to think so. It seems she may know something I don’t about how these things work, having sent out a tweet earlier today that bluntly calls Chris Brogan a hack.

[tweet] OF NOTE – @ChrisBrogan‘s scam how to, “Trust Agents,” falls to #3,133 in Books on Amazon. Surely a case study in short-lived fad.

In defence of hacks everywhere, let me riposte. Chris-gate has already with a lot of feedback, and it may certainly have affected Brogan’s credibility in the community centred around him, but does it prove the work he does is a fad? No. Does it make the work he did on Trust Agents with Julien Smith nil?

We bandy the idea of social capital around, but I’ve yet to hear anyone compare the concept to banks. We all know how stable they are lately. The reason this goes together is probably pretty simple; you have money/capital, you bank it somewhere. Duh. Only instead of institutions, we bank in ourselves.

Or do we?

We amass social capital with our every action. The ways we do this are fairly complex. And talked about. And acted on. But what we all inevitably see is people dropping the ball and making mistakes. Some of this is positioning and consistency. Everyone makes aberant posts sometimes; we forget to phrase things in a positive manner, we make too strong a request for action or perhaps we even demand, rather than request. Perhaps, in some instances, So often, when we run into a trusted image missing a step, we treat the transgression as a cardinal sin, fault the person for their mistake and terminate all contact.

Idiots. Yes. You, me, we’re both guilty of this.

People mess up. It’s total hubris in our own judgement of character to believe that this final judgement is an accurate, appropriate response to a single faux pas. Do I think Amanda Chapel’s a jerk? Yes. Does this mean I’ve stopped following her Twitter feed? No. Similarly, I’ll continue to read Chris’ blog, and comment as I feel is appropriate, because the usefulness of the information – the positive balance he retains with ME still outweighs how annoyed I’ve been with his recent trend toward self-service. But a single account-closing action still hasn’t occurred.

Because, as much as it’s easy to conceive of the Bank of Social Capital being you, and you, and me, all of us holding our own money in a virtual pillow case, our actions in the social network actually increase the value we have for and with others. The trouble in calculating this actual value is that we don’t hold the ledger. Every single person we interact with does, on our behalf. Just as we hold all of theirs.

Community is not a zero-sum game. Believing we can proclaim that any person’s single actions devalue them so thoroughly they become wholly irrelevant is pride at its best.

The Reversal of Disclosure

November 30, 2009 by Ian Leave a Comment

: photo by NJ Scott

Back in the day, businesses had secrets. So did you, but yours were a lot less fun to expose. And then the internet came about, and very swiftly, it became impossible for businesses to keep their secrets. Which, naturally, means that everyone feels like spilling theirs. And, as is the case for every first-run test, everyone did it poorly.

I had a blog. Actually, a LiveJournal. Those were the days. Plastering my mood, whatever music I was listening to, and whatever I was thinking all over the web. I didn’t care because no one else did, it was the Summer of Ones and Zeroes. Privacy was gone in its traditional sense, and instead I got to hide behind any of nearly fifty screen names I once kept active, secure in the belief that anyone digging for my indiscretion would surely be foiled by the sheer amount of other noise that sounded exactly like me all over the web. I spent nearly ten years keeping myself hidden in the murk behind cascades of creative pronouns and the use of everyone else’s screen names in public. It was geek subculture at its finest.

Naturally, it all came crashing down. Just as the eighties had killed the buzz left by the sixties, the Summer of Ones and Zeroes fled under the sheer dominating weight of the Digital Millennium.

I remember the first time I heard of someone getting fired for their blog. They had written a scathing commentary on inter-office politics on LiveJournal and hit the publish button without ticking the box that said “Friends Only” – ruining a career in thirty seconds.Forgot to replace his boss’s name with the usual pseudonym, which was similarly unflattering and appeared on a few hundred angered entries.

Back then (read as about eight years ago) no one had any idea of exactly how permanent the net was. Once a post disappeared from the first page of your blog, it kind of disappeared forever into the mists of the backdated entries, and not too many of us thought much about the repercussions of our actions.

Businesses didn’t seem to have the same problem, really. They always had secrets, but they in general had the know-how to keep them, or at least do something constructive with their disclosure. The common practice of stamping everything with Trade Secret and litigating the snot out of passers-by who meddled was in full effect. What happened to that? Just like with my friend who lost his job, the internet happened. Leaks develop, and the magnifying capability of the Great Index in the Clouds makes it nigh impossible to hide certain things.

Now, however, something even curiouser is happening. Companies have blogs. Company representatives have blogs, about their industry and their businesses. Public personalities are enhancing business in a massive way, turning multinational corporations into the friendly Mom and Pop stores of old – it’s a wonderful phenomenon, even ig it is a bit disconcerting.

Everyone has the capability of becoming a respected publisher. The Huffington Post is overtaking newspapers. Twitter scooped CNN this time last year. And seemingly without a gun to their heads, the small fry are all changing their focus. The purely personal blog is disappearing., slowly but surely.

The personal blog is getting censored by its writer, and being slowly replaced by professional blogs. Even me. I haven’t written a personal update in months, and I find I’m getting a lot more even just in the doing of writing about productive things instead. It feels sort of like if I were Henry Rollins, suddenly becoming an investigative journalist at times. But it’s an interesting experience to take note of, this change from the geeky rant to the respectable practice.

It feels like the internet just left its screaming childhood and is finally going to college. I wonder what it’s majoring in?

The Meta Human

November 26, 2009 by Ian 1 Comment

: photo by Kevin Spencer

Are you a Me Too person? I’m a Me Too person. I like to be included in things, whether I get thee by my own merit or gate jump my way in. Being Meta is all about the act of Me Too. At the risk of being self-referential, I love the idea of acting Meta. Not just blogging about blogs, or sending out tweets about Twitter, but the whole concept implied by meta itself. Perhaps I should explain what meta is, first, then maybe you’ll see the appeal.

As it applies on the web, and more recently on blogs and other applications, meta data consists of anything attached to a slice of real content – a blog post, a tweet, a picture you post on Facebook or Flickr – that is not actually the content itself. Tags, locations, author names, just about anything you can imagine pertaining to the content itself, can be made into metadata. If you’ve ever watched the news and seen the banners and tickers on the bottom – guess what? You’re looking at CNN’s metadata for the news you’re watching! What counts is less what people add to content as metadata. What counts, in the end, is what gets done with this extra information.

Meta data can include you in a lot of things. Some of the best examples of human metadata are business cards. We see a lot of Mr or Mrs or Ms, quite a few notes about degrees, PhDs after names, all of these bits we label ourselves with in order to create a platform on which to do our work. Metadata has been around a lot longer than the internet, but as it often does, technology has given us an appropriate, specific category into which to shove all of this extra information until it’s situationally relevant for us to pull out of our collective hats.

So what’s the big deal? How does this apply to being a me-too person? Meta is all about self-inclusion. It’s a force we often don’t recognize, at least when applying it to our community lives. Look at any of hundreds of pictures on Flickr – people have tagged the hell out of them in an effort to include themselves in someone else’s work. They comment, self-referential or not, to be noticed and maybe followed back to their home bases. But that’s ok, because that’s how community starts.

When we think about metadata often we think about how we can use this stuff to our advantage. It’s very useful, including the PhD on all of your contact lists where it’s deserved, because if you’re ever looking for smart people, you know where to start. For the same reason, it’s useful to fill in all of those boxes, required or not, when you comment on people’s websites, because commenting implies you want to be found, and leaving avenues for people to find you is a good idea. It makes you available, and being available is one of the major components of playing the me-too game.

The Meta Human isn’t just a phenomenon, for most of us it’s a reality. Technology gives us a lot of tools to make ourselves available to others. Profiles, social networking, personal branding – it’s all metadata, but so many people spend so much time and effort in attempts to make their identity fit the meta thoroughly, include everything meta in everything they do. From Tweeting about taking a shower, to slapping photos of your last drunken stupor on Facebook, people are intertwining their personas with the public record by attaching all of this extra junk to their timelines.

It does a lot of damage, as well as doing a lot of good. In the end, the people who will come out on top are those who learn not just to read the content, but who know what to do with the metadata attached to it. Which pieces to ignore, which to catalogue for future use. And, more importantly, an appropriate time to call on all of this secret handshake style contextual content as the hidden key to open which secret door.

All of which begs two questions:

How are you controlling what meta gets attached to your data? (and)

What are you doing about all of the extra stuff you’re soaking in along the way?

Why People Lock horns Over Twitter

November 24, 2009 by Ian Leave a Comment

If you do anything in public, you likely get a lot of exposure to arguments. I’m not necessarily talking about actual, empirically provable points here; social animals love tests of prowess, and people place a lot of weight on debating skill. People grumble over parking spots, evangelise for coffee spots and hotels, There are many varieties of tiff, but one of my favourites to stumble on is people who are arguing for the exact same point, from different positions.

This week, Robert Scoble picked on Chris Brogan, about the king of You’re Doing It Wrong’s Twitter habits.It was a running gag from the Web 2.0 Expo, but if the helpful advice in the comments is any indication, not a lot of people got the joke. Scoble being usually so inscrutable, it’s not surprising.

The crux of the argument (I’m picking, here, because this rift is everywhere) is that both of these guys, very smart dudes that they are, picked up the same instrument and proclaimed it was useful for two different songs. And we’re not talking about any froittoires here, we’re talking a ninety-voice electronic keyboard. From the original:

Because I can’t find his good blogs and videos. Why? Because he does so many conversations. Look at his Twitter home page. All you see is @replies. This is what makes Brogan Brogan, because he’s going to answer you no matter how popular he gets. But, that means I can’t find the good stuff he publishes.

Big deal, right? If you’re having a conversation, it’s a conversation. Obviously this appeals to me, look at my Twitter home page and you see a lot of the same thing. As Chris says in the speech Scoble had embedded;

There’s this great opportunity for serendipity. It’s the one thing that I use to describe Twitter that’s different than what we were doing before. […] Twitter does add new people all the time. […] There’s so much value in not what your friends are saying, but in what people are saying topically about a location. […] What should you be doing on these platforms? Number one, you should be listening far more than you should be worrying about what to say. Spend twelve times as much time talking about other people as you do talking about yourself.

Ah, there we are. Chris just told us what to do. Now, what he’s suggesting is what anyone who knows anything about being a compelling conversationalist has been saying for ever: be the one asking the questions, and you’ll be the one people are interested in. How often does Brogan answer questions? All the time, when asked. How often is he asking questions of others? All the damn time. Forget the @replies here, every link I’ve seen is a retweet – but everything good always ends up being a directed, short, worthy of thought question. It’s a very potent approach to beginning and maintaining conversations.

But why does this particularly bother other people? Well,

Actually it was that realization that made me open up two new Twitter accounts: scobleblog is a feed of just my blog posts and scoblemedia is a feed of just my videos and podcasts I’m on.

It’s this approach that finishes the entire argument for me, and really tells me it’s all about the same thing. Scoble has a massively tech-based background. He works at Rackspace after all. It’s no surprise that he sees Twitter as a massive opportunity to aggregate wisdom and distill information into indexable, findable glory. You know what? He’s totally right.

But what about Brogan? Well, he’s a media dude. He’s all about human business. Published a book about the things companies – from the people up – can better themselves by being trustworthy agents of change. Does anyone question why he’s doing what he does, connecting with people every chance he gets, communicating with people, being a person before a businessman? Here’s the kicker. He’s totally right, too.

So where does this leave us? Simple: “To someone with a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.” This is how everyone seems to approach social media as a whole, not just Twitter. Truth is, web applications are more like Swiss Army knives, every one of them. And then they connect, as Facebook and Twitter do, to other applications. That’s where the real fun begins. But that’s another post.