The Medium of Social Currency

This is one of the chapters from my book, Truth, Will & Relevance. Read the rest via the Table of Contents in the sidebar or buy your copy from Amazon.ca or Amazon.com.

In the late 90s there was considerable hype about a new economy with new rules until the tech bubble collapsed in 2000/2001. A lot of people from the old-school thought that disaster would discredit the entire movement, but it didn’t — at least not any more than the housing/finance collapse discredited the notion of home ownership.

Through the bust we were able to learn what was actually viable online. A few companies like Google, eBay and Amazon kept growing; a new generation of startups was emerging, bringing back a sense of enthusiasm, focusing on a new paradigm.

The biggest mistake concerning the web has been to conceive it as merely a more efficient way to do things that were already done offline. We limit ourselves by thinking of websites as paperless catalogues, paperless newspapers and paperless books; computers are not just paperless typewriters, paperless filing cabinets and paperless mailboxes. The most effective ways to use computers and cell phones are in an ongoing process of being discovered. It’s an ongoing experiment; it’s an adventure.

Consider Facebook, which was conceived (or at least named) after old-fashioned student directories, but quickly went far beyond that static model. The value of Facebook isn’t that it stores contacts and photos; its genuine value is in the streams of fresh experience it provides for users.

It requires a conceptual leap from a static mindset towards a more dynamic one. You can’t just begin with inert models and then add motion to them, you need to overcome those blockish notions altogether and get immersed in the living, breathing, undulating system.

Much of the “news” in a newspaper needs to be updated and revised before it even reaches your door (for example, sports and election results that occur late in the night). Printed news doesn’t flow very well with actual events.

The new ways of delivering news online are able to flow and stay current with ongoing events while dynamically addressing the customized needs of different people. Rather than simply posing a threat to newspapers and TV, blogs and other new media online might actually save professional journalism by making it more effective and relevant to our lives than ever.

We’re not there yet, and effective progress isn’t guaranteed; new technology might defeat its own purpose if we don’t take responsibility for making it function effectively. We need to be open to the unexpected value created by new media while building on the value that has already been established by the old media.

But it’s hard. Modifying Homer Simpson’s famous quip about alcohol, technology is “the cause of — and solution to — all of life’s problems.”

The same force that’s generating the flood of information is also producing tools to direct it into more manageable channels. And then we find ourselves on a treadmill, still facing the same problem, still making an effort to address it but not getting any closer to solving it. These applications and services don’t necessarily reduce the volume of information; they also increase it.

Perhaps the best demonstrations of this paradox are services like FriendFeed and Google Buzz, which aggregate all of a person’s online content (pictures, videos, events, blog posts, bookmarks, tweets, shared items, comments, etc.) from the various social applications into one feed, which in turn is aggregated with the feeds of other people to be followed by friends, fans, voyeurs, etc.

Even some of the most prolific users of social media originally complained that FriendFeed is very noisy and just adds to the burden of being online. As with anything, it all depends on what you do with it. Services like FriendFeed, Buzz, and Google Wave represent an issue that encompasses the entire Web: we’re just beginning to appreciate its capabilities and master the new kinds of skills needed to use it effectively.

The people who thrive in Web-related enterprises are successful largely because they know they don’t know how their projects will turn out. Great hackers and entrepreneurs know they’ll be learning on the fly. They expect to encounter unexpected setbacks that will require nimble adaptations. And sometimes they persist because of those challenges, not just despite them.

This lesson about innovation and education is the soil in which all subsequent lessons about making something on the Web must be sown. Without it there can be very little growth. Without it, to paraphrase a remark from Marshall McLuhan, we see things “through the spectacles of the preceding age,” like military strategists who are “magnificently prepared to fight the previous war.”¹ By the time these designs and plans are executed they’re already becoming obsolete.

Consider how Associated Press interpreted findings in “A New Model for News: Studying the Deep Structure of Young-Adult News Consumption,” a report they released in June 2008.²

The report includes some interesting points and valuable insights, but it seems to harbour some deeply embedded, tacit assumptions about news that keep its thinking lodged in the past. Its findings seem to validate my belief that the whole conceptual map for dealing with news needs to be redrawn. While they pick up on some landmark features of the present, they fail to orient them in a way that leads to the future.

Among the present findings is that “news is connected to e-mail.” This could simply be a technical matter: news and email happen to “come in small snippets of information” and share the same medium of delivery, the report explains. Many of the subjects in the ethnographic research found themselves looking at headlines that happened to be handy when checking Yahoo Mail or their PDA.

But what the report fails to address is that email is essentially a kind of news; it’s tricky to draw a clear distinction between them — which isn’t to say we should not make a distinction; it’s only to point out that the AP report doesn’t, and therefore misses valuable insight.

It could be argued that the degree to which news differs from email is proportionate with the degree to which news fails to capture people’s attention and interest. If you want to know why people don’t care about “the News,” write down your definition of what makes it different from personal messages and conversations. You’ve just written down a list of reasons why people don’t care about news.

The notion that news exists on a plane apart from people’s actual lives is the core assumption of the old media that needs to be discarded. Here we find the “spectacles of the preceding age” worn by folks reared in old media organizations.

One could be forgiven for not noticing that the conventional distinction between the News and our actual lives is itself largely a result of technology (language, the printing press, broadcasting) that developed just as helplessly as it is now being broken down. The News of old was as much of an ongoing experiment as the Web — or rather, the web is simply the latest iteration.

Society in general has been an ongoing experiment, and the evolving means of communication have always set the basic pattern for every age.

An article Jack Shafer wrote for Slate argued that the value of newspapers has been the “social currency” they provide for our actual lives. News items were like tokens to exchange with people encountered in the course of daily business.

At the peak of newspapers’ influence, everyone could assume that almost everyone else would be familiar with some of the content from that day’s paper – “that picture of an egg frying on a city street the paper published; or a comment about a movie review or comic strip; or an opinion about local government based on a piece by a political columnist”³ — and new relationships developed according to what was said about these common points of reference.

Now the way information is proliferating and diverging into various channels, we don’t all share the same social currency, and it’s increasingly difficult to find shared points of reference. Without common references, it’s difficult to generate conversation with new contacts and get a sense of who they are, and then it’s nearly impossible to establish trust and build relationships – not to mention communities.

This function is increasingly being distributed through online social networking platforms like Facebook and Twitter. The information in people’s pages and profiles (including the lists of people who are already friends) is the new social currency… or is it?

Writing at his own site, Economic Principals, David Warsh built on Shafer’s piece to ague that “Newspapers Are [Still] the Central Banks of Social Currency.”⁴ It’s a good argument; it made me take a step back and re-think my ideas.

Adding my own interpretation to Warsh’s metaphor, I wrote that much of the social networking sphere is a fast-paced-yet-going-nowhere derivatives market. Automated tools for aggregating, recommending and rating mostly keep the sub-prime content moving fast enough to save anyone from truly being aware of the the burdens and risks of ownership — the cost of actually having to think — or so we let ourselves assume.

As we have witnessed over the past couple of years in financial markets, this high-volume/high-efficiency set of practices is not sustainable. We need to build social capital that holds real value despite ups-and-downs in the cultural marketplace of ideas and opinions.

Obviously we can’t turn back time and undo the technological advances that put us in the position of having to cope with so much information. The best strategies for dealing with it will emerge from the advancements themselves (while building on the social capital they inherit from the past, and staying open to advancements that will continue to evolve).

Remember in an earlier chapter I argued that the most important development isn’t merely the technology itself but how it affects our mental models: the notion of streams and threads of information — as in blogs, discussion forums, and mini-feeds on Facebook — is a very useful metaphor to help us make sense of personal identity and social relationships in our complex modern world, both on- and off-line.

Begin with the concept of a “lifestream.”⁵ The best example of a lifestream is probably a personal feed on FriendFeed. Increasingly, Facebook is a kind of lifestream too.

A lifestream is a continuous record of the events of one’s life, as they’re represented and aggregated from various social media services people might belong to. These events don’t have to be all that meaningful or important, and most of them are excruciatingly mundane — a fact that critics begrudge and use to argue that lifestreams are stupid — but it seems obvious to me that the first step towards making one’s life more meaningful is to get a sense of all the associated information in an orderly way, which is something that lifestreaming can help do.

When all we can see is what’s happening at a given moment, we tend to follow the crowd: we fail to develop the ability to think, work, learn, and live apart from that crowd. But when we can view our own actions playing out over time in one continuous thread, as in a lifestream, we get a better idea of who we are (or perhaps aren’t). Then we can stop following the crowd from fad to fad and ground ourselves via sustainable personal identities, each with our own respective knowledge, skills, styles and voices that nobody else can duplicate exactly.

The thread metaphor is especially valuable when we try to make sense of the relation between personal and social aspects of living, or the relation between “the individual” and “the group.”

The value of self-reliance is not merely personal or individualistic. When we each cultivate distinctive talents and personal mastery for ourselves, our society becomes richer and more resilient. The greater degree of variety of knowledge and competence is present in a group, the more likely the group is to survive and thrive via changing opportunities and challenges.

Hence a social fabric develops as our many personal threads distribute evenly across the full range of experience — not tangling too close together or leaving too many gaps, but each tending to find an individual niche within reach of others but with room to move and grow. It’s just as important that our threads should all continually stretch towards the future, learning and growing via new challenges, rather than going in circles, or falling slack and getting tied into knots.

My notion of the role of news is that it provides the perpendicular threads that weave our lives into a coherent fabric. Without these common cross-references it’s difficult to maintain an even distribution. Without objective threads being weaved laterally, the fabric may disintegrate into separate bunches, tangles, and braids.

News about the world and streams of personal experience aren’t separate things. I think the best way to describe them is to use William James’s analogy, describing “the conterminousness of different minds” as like a geometric point that is not self-sufficient but is defined by lines intersecting through it.⁶ The point of any given event isn’t merely abstract news, nor is it merely a matter of personal interest; it’s where the two aspects merge.

Media in its essence is simply the means by which we place ourselves in the world by placing events, people, and ideas in relation to each other.

As we communicate through the course of the day, we each have a personal responsibility to continually weave information into this general fabric — interpreting each moment into knowledge that can be extended both spatially and temporally, generating relevance and meaning in the process, leaving some aspect of the thread open to the future.

We can’t choose whether or not to participate. We’re already thrown into it and presented the choice of whether to participate more or less generatively, more or less effectively through the connections we make and the stories those connections represent. There are a couple of very basic factors determining we must always compose narratives.

The first factor is time — not just something we live in, but a quality that affects our minds, our nervous systems, and all of our experience. We have no choice but to think and feel because thinking and feeling naturally happen and there’s no way to turn them off. We can learn to think and feel certain ways with some regularity, we can direct our attention and we can think of ways to dismiss facts as “nothings,” but we can’t think nothing in the literal sense of not thinking at all.

The second factor is evolution — itself made necessary by the universal qualities of time. Our ancestors’ propensity to turn facts and experience into ideas and stories enabled our species to flourish and now we’re stuck with that nature. We can’t help wanting to know and tell it because individuals with the know-and-tell genes probably had more grandchildren (and great-grandchildren, and friends, etc) and were more effective cooperators when it came time to help each other build and protect each other in battle.

In other words, that feeling of “I have to tweet about this!” has the same source as the impulse our ancestors had to share heroic tales and local lore from generation to generation — stories that became focal points for shared social identity and perhaps the biggest reason our species (and certainly our civilization) is here to talk, tweet, and write about it today.

Think back to the earlier chapter on the “will to relevance.” The urge to document and share knowledge is largely innate. We don’t even need to resort to a scientific explanation. Just take a look at what happens in coffee shops and how people spontaneously use the web to socialize. The evidence is all around us.

Like history, journalism involves much more than merely maintaining a record of facts — if only because people often disagree on what happened and how to emphasize particular aspects over others. More important is that we don’t tend to stop at just “keeping a record”: we’re also inclined to interpret. We form predictions, opinions, and arguments in the process. Facts take on different meanings depending on how they’re focused on and framed.

Life comes out looking different when we try to capture and represent it. Every kind of media has specific properties that affect how things appear through it. Just as painters use linear perspective to convey depth, colour theory to convey light, and other tricks to suggest form and action, there’s a lot of artifice in stories and theories that appear true-to-life.

Good journalists, historians, philosophers, and poets don’t always work with straight lines; they bend things a little, so when we look at them they’ll appear simple.

So when we have opportunities to shape our narratives and theories we need to consider what effects they’ll have on our future thoughts and feelings.

It’s as if you’re constantly crafting the lens through which you’ll observe the next moment, the next crisis, the next opportunity, the next period of your life — as well as how you’ll remember the current one. You’re also shaping the lens through which others will observe and remember you.

These duties aren’t reserved for professionals. In a digital world we’re all becoming novelists, composing the stories of our lives — not just metaphorically, but literally. Our online stories are documented and persistent; they also have immediate and often significant effects — think of internet memes and market fluctuations — on the character of our society.

Every click is a vote, every link is a nomination of something you want others to invest their attention in, incorporate into their stories, and carry into the future. Our decisions have always had these kinds of effects; the web just makes the process more explicit and profound. These new realities give us both the opportunity and the need to be more responsible for how our stories turn out.

Maybe we should think of ourselves as critics, rather than only “novelists-of-ourselves.” Novels exist independently, between two covers, whereas our lives are entailed in a complex, dynamic web of relationships. Simply defining our place within the web is a challenge in itself. This is what criticism essentially means. As Richard Rorty, one of the heroes of this book suggested, criticism isn’t about explaining or evaluating; criticism foremost means “placing books in the context of other books, figures in the context of other figures.”⁷

In a sense, science is just this kind of criticism as performed on life’s temporal aspect: placing events in the context of other events, factors in the context of other factors, conditions in the context of other conditions, effects in the context of causes. History and journalism serve the same function: distinguishing the critical moments. It’s all storytelling — which isn’t to say that anything goes. The more precisely our knowledge accords with observable realities, the more open our ideas are to falsification and refinement by others (again, with reference to observable realities), the more generative and sustainable the process and our relationships will be.

We need to focus on fostering that open objectivity; subjective benefits will follow. We don’t need to worry as much about whether momentum or motivation will persist. Force and drive are over-rated. The world is not going to stop. Things have always happened and things will continue happening as long as time exists.

What we do need to worry about is how we frame things — ensuring our ideas and practices aren’t just efficient and precise but compatible, consistent, and coherent as well. That’s our responsibility: outlining the relations and distinctions among things, people, ideas, and events, in order to find the gaps that need to be filled. Frame those problems and opportunities right and the rest should start to follow naturally.

This is all media is to me: simply the means by which we place ourselves in relation to others — on a personal level, discovering and defining ourselves through the process of selecting and signalling our affinities and associations — and on the social level, ultimately placing the present in relation to the past and the future.⁸

^{This is one of the chapters from my book, Truth, Will & Relevance. Read the rest via the Table of Contents in the sidebar or buy your copy from Amazon.ca or Amazon.com.}

1 Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media (1964/1994, MIT): p. 243.

2 Published June 2008 at http://www.ap.org/newmodel.pdf

3“What’s Really Killing Newspapers?” by Jack Shafer on slate.com (Aug. 1, 2008).

4“Newspapers are the Central Banks of Social Currency,” by David Warsh at economicprincipals.com (Aug. 18, 2008).

5The term was coined by Eric Freeman and David Gelerntner, based on ideas explored in Gelerntner’s Mirror Worlds (1992), and formalized in “The Lifestreams Software Architecture,” Freeman’s doctoral dissertation at Yale University (1997).

6William James, “A World of Pure Experience” (1904), from William James: The Essential Writings, Bruce Wilshire, ed. (1984): p. 196.

7Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (1989): p. 80.

8At this point I should recognize some similarities with the work of Anthony Giddens, specifically my discussion of narrative self-identity is reminiscent of parts of his Modernity and Self-Identity (1991), e.g. on p. 215. However, I haven’t had an opportunity to explore these similarities in depth (just as members of Giddens’s generation have perhaps neglected Ortega and other older thinkers whom I’ve found value in).