Notes on Collective Intelligence, Social Consequences of Technology, and the Decline of Culture

Wisdom of Crowds excerpt

http://www.randomhouse.com/features/wisdomofcrowds/excerpt.html

This new book by James Surowiecki explains how groups make better decisions than any individual in certain circumstances; a situation where individual excellence is less important. As a designer, it would be good to understand when to use this approach and when not to. Collaborative work, in particular, will benefit from tools that embrace this distinction.

Smarter than the CEO

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.06/view.html?pg=2

Also by Surowiecki, argues against lionizing a single employee as “the boss”:

Instead of looking to a single person for the right answers, companies need to recognize a simple truth: Under the right conditions, groups are smarter than the smartest person within them.

He mentions that a limiting factor to anyone’s success is their access to and digestion of the right information:

Even when executives are smart, they have a hard time getting the information they need – at so many firms the flow of information is shaped by political infighting, sycophancy, and a confusion of status with knowledge.

Perhaps with better information tools the individual will be more important again? Surowiecki doesn’t think so:

The evidence is clear: groups – whether top executives evaluating a potential acquisition or sales reps and engineers analyzing a new product – will consistently make better decisions than an individual. Companies have spent too long coddling the special few. It’s time for them to start figuring out how they’re going to tap the wisdom of the many.

Many-to-Many: Ethnographic Disruptions

http://www.corante.com/many/archives/2004/05/30/ethnographic_disruptions.php

People in the U.S. are concerned with one-to-one communication because the technology and finances allow it; but others in the world concentrate on many-to-many communication, connecting social groups to other social groups one connection at a time (think the Latin American cell phone trend where people buy shared plans; rent out their phones on street corners).

Seth Godin, the Curse of Great Expectations

http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2004/05/the_curse_of_gr.html

How the ability to benchmark everything in his life has failed to make Seth happy; the pressure of making sure everything is optimized is a new one, enabled by technology and stressful to our bodies and minds. Also how benchmarking doesn’t produce innovation, merely improvement.

What really works is not having everything being up to spec…what works is everything being good enough, and one or two elements of a product or service being AMAZING…Instead of benchmarking everything, perhaps we win when we accept that the best we can do is the best we can do–and then try to find the guts to do one thing that’s remarkable.

Same argument as needing exceptional people, and disagreeing with Surowiecki’s points above.

Peterme: Thinking About Audience Segmentation

http://www.peterme.com/archives/000343.html

Notes how websites often try to constrain your path by “who you are”, called “audience segmentation”; not recognizing that on the Internet identity is a fluid thing, and the differentiations we make between execs and grunts in the real world is mostly unmatched on the web’s public sites. Collections of public sites, however, may provide individualism to the web.

Excerpt from Dark Age Ahead, Jane Jacobs

http://www.randomhouse.com/catalog/display.pperl?isbn=1400062322&view=excerpt

Jacobs, author of a famous book on creating good culture, Death and Life of Great American Cities, argues that our culture is headed for another Dark Age, in danger of losing its collective knowledge, which has been stored, instead of in its people, only in its documentation. But a book about love will never be the same as experiencing it yourself:

Writing, printing, and the Internet give a false sense of security about the permanence of culture. Most of the million details of a complex, living culture are transmitted neither in writing nor pictorially. Instead, cultures live through word of mouth and example. That is why we have cooking classes and cooking demonstrations, as well as cookbooks.”

The danger is all our information fails to enrich our social and cultural lives, instead focusing only on our efficiency and productivity. The movie The Corporation explores this as well…a horse is a horse, but can it also be more?

Explorer Wade Davis on Vanishing Cultures

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2002/06/0627_020628_wadedavis.html

Davis reinforces the threat of losing culture and shares his term, “ethnosphere”:

Just as there is a biological web of life, there is also a cultural and spiritual web of life–what we at the National Geographic have taken to calling the “ethnosphere.” It’s really the sum total of all the thoughts, beliefs, myths, and institutions brought into being by the human imagination. It is humanity’s greatest legacy, embodying everything we have produced as a curious and amazingly adaptive species. The ethnosphere is as vital to our collective well-being as the biosphere. And just as the biosphere is being eroded, so is the ethnosphere–if anything, at a far greater rate.

Some people say: “What does it matter if these cultures fade away.” The answer is simple. When asked the meaning of being human, all the diverse cultures of the world respond with 10,000 different voices. Distinct cultures represent unique visions of life itself, morally inspired and inherently right. And those different voices become part of the overall repertoire of humanity for coping with challenges confronting us in the future. As we drift toward a blandly amorphous, generic world, as cultures disappear and life becomes more uniform, we as a people and a species, and Earth itself, will be deeply impoverished.

He also notes the importance of language, recognizing that it is much more than different ways of saying the same thing; instead, each language is a different way to see the world, more than simple communication.

What this means is that we are living through a period of time in which, within a single generation or two, by definition half of humanity’s cultural legacy is being lost in a single generation. Whereas cultures can lose their language and maintain some semblance of their former selves, in general, it’s the beginning of a slippery slope towards assimilation and acculturation and, in some sense, annihilation.

He recognizes that there are different ways of defining cultural success–and that technology is only one, though currently dominant, example:

We [Westerners] reflexively think of ourselves as the cutting edge of history. And if the measure of success is technological wizardry, we would no doubt come out on top. But if the criteria shifted, for example, to the capacity to thrive in a truly sustainable manner, the Western way of life would come up short.

He explains the difference in individual vs. community emphasis by noting that in most cultures, the fate of the individual “remains inextricably linked to the fate of the collective”. Only in the Western, technologically-advanced, culture is the individual independent enough to think of himself.

But Can You Teach It?

http://www.economist.com/printedition/PrinterFriendly.cfm?Story_ID=2685892

Interestingly, MBA applications are down between 15% and 25% despite a recession, which usually drives people out of the workplace and into schools. Business schools have struggled to define themselves in the new economy, trying to balance the number-crunching and strategy-defining ROI demanded by companies (who often fund the education) with the real-world experience that is the only way to become a better manager of people.

Unfortunately, the focus is shifting to solely financial gain, for the company, student, and school alike: Jeffrey Pfeffer says that business school is for “the enhancement of the careers, measured mostly in terms of salary, of their graduates”; schools have launched short-term programs that bring in more cash while failing to provide a complete educational experience (you can bet they focus on the financial classes); companies have forced emphasis on the money as well:

In 2002 the Aspen Institute surveyed 2,000 MBA students and found that their values altered during the course. By the end, they cared less about customer needs and product quality and more about shareholder value. Management research tells a similar tale. A study last year of management research in economic and social contexts found far more emphasis on economic performance and objectives than on social goals.

It’s disappointing that so much emphasis is placed on things that do not enhance the culture at all, merely its productivity.

Vonnegut and Tom Clancy on Technology

http://www.vonnegutweb.com/vonnegutia/interviews/int_technology.html

Kurt Vonnegut shares his delightfully Luddite-ish working tendencies in a way that makes them more attractive than anything technology has offered. The best part is a story about how he writes, eschewing the computer for an old-fashioned typewriter and pencil, combined with a phone call to a friend, a walk to the post office, and a dance. Compare that to a laptop…

Electronic communities build nothing. You wind up with nothing. We’re dancing animals. How beautiful it is to get up and go do something. [Gets up and dances a jig.]

He also notes that our entire creative process is focused on getting a product to market better, faster, and cheaper, never on how that product could “create a job that is more satisfying”. Arguments about social entrepreneurship often say that if the economic structure is in place, the happiness will follow–but that’s rarely true. Money never guarantees happiness, only insures against very bad unhappiness (disease, slavery, etc).

A final good insight is that technology only puts the information in front of you–the heavy lifting is still done by the brain, converting that information into enjoyment, using your imagination:

The imagination circuit is taught to respond to the most minimal of cues. A book is an arrangement of 26 phonetic symbols, 10 numbers, and about 8 punctuation marks, and people can cast their eyes over these and envision the eruption of Mount Vesuvius or the Battle of Waterloo. But it’s no longer necessary for teachers and parents to build these circuits. Now there are professionally produced shows with great actors, very convincing sets, sound, music.