Direct Reference

Designing the Situation: social display and social control

2011-04-26T21:49:00.022+02:00

If you're one of the two or three people familiar with this blog, you might've noticed my preoccupation with the idea that we're often guided by social display considerations when using social functionality. Now, I'm not saying that we interact with each other only when there's social gain available. Our motivational schedule is incredibly complex and has yet to be adequately deciphered. Rather, the suggestion is that social perception considerations both motivate and constrain our actions to some extent. Basically, the fact that we care what people think when they can see what we do and how we do it impacts our behavior. That's obvious. The interesting question is what this means for design: what do the factors impacting social display – visibility of behavior; presumed "quality" of audience; knowledge of principles of evaluation; and knowledge of appropriate behaviors – mean for social functionality design?

Goffman and social display

Erving Goffman's classic takes on "defining the situation" and "face" more or less provide the popular understanding of social display. When interacting with others, we often negotiate the framing of the situation and the appropriate roles within that frame, hoping to settle on one that's somehow beneficial or preferred. We also strive to maintain beneficial and consistent roles across interactions, presenting a singular, valuable "face". So, from this simplified "Goffmanian" angle, we can say social display is about negotiating and maintaining preferred or valuable definitions and roles in interaction situations.

But a recognized limitation of Goffman's take is that it downplays the "macro" factors impacting interaction, i.e. imposed institutions, norms, etc. That is, it explicitly focuses on individual choice, leaving the factors constraining the choice of definition and role largely implicit or absent. But clearly we don't negotiate from scratch. We negotiate available or appropriate definitions, our choice set limited by imposed institutions, social conventions, and even the larger-scale normative frames embedding this specific negotiation.

Thus, insofar as display is about defining and maintaining a somehow beneficial social image but the means of doing so are bounded by the social/institutional/normative context, "design" of this context of interaction is important. When discussing social functionality, it's essential.

Social Control

Our deep desire for social display – i.e. "defining the situation" and maintaining "face" in Goffman's popular terminology – provides plenty of opportunities for designers. As it relates to social functionality design, display has two parts: expression and feedback. "Expression" names the tools, conventions and mechanisms by which the user acts, while "feedback" identifies the tools others use to express evaluation of the action, impose sanctions, etc. Here we're interested in how feedback constrains or impacts expression, how the expression behavior in social display is impacted by the afforded feedback behavior.

Institutional design is the branch of political science that studies how different sets of constraints and incentives structure and guide behavior in social interactions. These incentives and constraints often result in what we can call social control, the behavioral control arising from social obligations, expectations, norms, and positive/negative social sanctions. Whether we realize it or not, there's an element of "institutional design" in social functionality design: when we design for social interaction, we implicitly or explicitly impose obligations, incentives, sanctions, and many other means of social control. For example, we impose roles (e.g. sender/receiver); prime or engage norms (e.g. reciprocation via "likes"); and often provide sanctioning mechanisms (e.g. voting up / down, liking, commenting, etc.).

You can't design for social display without at least implicitly designing in social control. They're wickedly interdependent; use of expression mechanisms is fundamentally shaped by the behavior afforded by feedback mechanisms. Understanding that they're related and how they interact is key to designing good social functionality. "Operationalizing" these ideas for design, however, requires a good bit of fudging. Adapting (no doubt to their dismay) Geoffrey Brennan and Philip Pettit's work on the "economy of esteem", we can say that there are four major factors impacting social control through display.

Probability of visibility or publicity
The fact that somebody could see what you do, say, post, etc. significantly impacts your behavior. Whether you want to admit it or not, the potential for public scrutiny often changes your behavior, and, up to a limit, the more scrutiny the greater the change in behavior.

"Quality" of observers
Who happens to be the likely observer also impacts behavior. What you're willing to share with your friends on Facebook is often different from what you're willing to share with your colleagues on LinkedIn. Our behavior tends to shift across intended audiences, often depending on more or less informal social categorization schemes, e.g. friends, colleagues, fellow numismatists, etc.

Knowledge of "values" or principles of evaluation
We tend to tailor our behavior to fit presumed standards against which we'll be judged. The criteria of appropriate or estimable behavior varies between your professional blog and your pro-ana support group. Knowledge of the values "held" by the different groups gives you a more or less standard measures of your behavior.

Knowledge of appropriate behaviors
But understanding the principles against which our behavior is judged won't help much if you're new or otherwise clueless. In that case, you just need to know the appropriate behaviors, the actual behavioral norms in line with which you should act. Presumably, these will be reinforced by and consistent with the values. Most value systems, however, are "behaviorally degenerate", that is any number of actual behavioral patterns could "instantiate" the principles. So, knowing the actual behavioral ground rules is important to garnering the esteem (or avoiding the disesteem) promised by the principles, at least until the values undergirding the behavioral norms are somehow understood.

Clearly, designers have an impact on these factors. Design affects the potential visibility of every action, both through feature-level decisions (are user contributions by default publicly viewable or restricted to confirmed contacts?) and through strategic product decisions (is it about broadcast or narrowcast?). Similarly, design impacts audience "quality" insofar as the product may afford topic-based group formation; be focused on a narrow pursuit or interest; or provide light means of contact categorization. Similarly, the product can be "framed" more or less suggestively, automatically bringing to bear salient norms, roles, and corresponding values. Finally, we can design to make appropriate and inappropriate behavior more or less obvious, salient, valuable, and visible via various moderation and promotion mechanisms.

Social control = structural and normative control

So we have four big factors impacting design for social control. But they don't all seem to be the same sort of thing. That is, it seems like we have two different types of factors in our list. The first two – visibility of behavior and "quality" of observers – are pretty straightforwardly about the structure of the interaction space. They're primarily about how widely behavior is seen and by whom. The other two – principles of evaluation and behavioral norms – are fuzzier, properly "normative" factors. They're about what ought to get done or what's appropriate. Thus, I'll call the first two structural control factors and the last two normative control factors.

The relation between them is up for debate, but I prefer to see it as below.

Visibility and quality aren't opposites or poles on a continuum. You can have high membership and absolute visibility of behavior – meaning enormous publicity, which assumes all actions can be seen – yet still allow some sort of audience-quality control – users can expressly target a subgroup as intended audience. So I'll take visibility and quality to define a structural control design space within which you can plot the product. The focus may be on exclusivity – small audience / limited visibility but very high audience quality – or wide-open, general socialization – large audience / high visibility and little audience-quality control – or any combination of the two (although a low-quality, low-visibility product seems really hard to imagine).

But where your product falls in the structural control space suggests different available approaches to normative control. That is, the sort of structural control you want to design for suggests the sort of normative control focus you should pursue. High visibility / large audience but low audience-quality focus (northwest of the center diagonal in the image) suggests you should skew your normative control focus toward the behavioral: e.g. incentives, sanctions, and various invasive moderation techniques. At the other extreme, low visibility / small audience but high audience-quality focus (southeast of the center diagonal) suggests your normative control design should focus on shared principles or already existing "value systems": e.g. domain exclusivity, framing effects, and structural "assortativity" (for example, allowing users to select subgroups as intended audiences). Between these poles lies a tunable design space, the focus in the middle being equal between behavioral and principle-based control.

So… what now?

Too often in my business (UX design) we focus on whatever happens to work without trying to make sense of why it works or how it all might fit together. This model tries to address the important but often neglected fact that behavior is strongly motivated by social display and that the context of interaction impacts the means and quality of social display. If harnessed, the drive for social display can be great for your product, but it can also tear a social space apart if it isn't understood, channeled, ordered, or allowed to mature organically in a space providing the means for bottom-up norm negotiation. This model tries to articulate a way of thinking about design for social display: from where your product plots in the structural control design space, you can figure out the best means of normative control, mapped to more or less well understood patterns and mechanisms. In future posts I may return to this model, provide some case studies and provide more concrete suggestions.

Quora, Norms, and Motivation

2011-02-04T20:10:00.015+01:00

"I have managed to find a few interesting discussions on Quora lately, but WOW some people sure know how to spew business bullshit and buzzwords. The ego stroking, ‘look how smart I can write’ is one of the things that ends up turning me off to the network."
Jonathan More's 1/10/11 comment on the post "The Answer to this Quora? No." by Saneel Radia.

For a while now, from afar, I've been watching Quora, the much-discussed, newish Q&A platform. In addition to a mountain of press and glowing endorsements from some fancy people, it has also garnered some strikingly negative reviews. That's to be expected. The hype and bile cycle cranks up every time the next "next big thing" rounds the corner. Many gripes are of the "Google does it better" or "What am I supposed to do with this?" stripe. But seemingly petty reactions like the comment above point to a trickier issue, one about product framing, user motivations, and norms. In a nutshell, Quora is shackled to a norm-embedding "frame", i.e. it's a "Q&A platform". But it's also a social product, so it must provide an implicit dual value proposition – one creator facing and one consumer facing – to generate content consumers may want. Yet, because of the norms embedded in the Q&A frame proscribing self-promotion or overt display, the only legitimate, communicable value proposition is the consumer facing one. Confusing? Let me elaborate. Throughout, I'll use reader comments associated with Saneel Radia's critical post as discussion fodder.

Frames as Norm-embedding Structures

"I keep trying to find some utility but it seems like a place where people either just post questions that are utterly ridiculous or they post questions to demonstrate their “expertise” (i.e. they answer them)… It doesn’t seem to be supporting collaboration or interaction…"
Sara' 1/11/11 comment on Saneel's post

"You hit the nail on the head, Sara. Quora is for the creator, not the consumer."
Saneel's response to Sara's comment

Quora self-describes as "A continually improving collection of questions and answers created, edited, and organized by everyone who uses it." Basically, it's billed as an evolving, ever improving Q&A platform in which the best and brightest – initially, but now including the worst and dullest, like me – can ask questions, follow questions, answer questions, and then endorse or promote the answers. Of course, there are also a bunch o' "community" features integrated (and integral) throughout, but that's it in a nutshell.

Sounds simple and it's actually pretty nicely designed, quickly getting you up to speed as regards "official" interactions, functions, and entities. Of course, part of what makes the site's structures, functions and interactions so easy to grasp is the familiarity of the product's framing concept, Questions and Answers. You say "it's a Q&A site, created edited and organized by users" and, as the primary frame is a very conventional interaction structure, we know more or less what to expect.

Framing, in this dumbed down sense of the big, abstract interaction type that structures the product, is an incredibly useful tool that can do a lot of work for you. If properly deployed frames can guide expectations and define roles entering into interactions; constrain or lead actions through processes and flows; and often determine the bounds of appropriate and inappropriate behavior. Relying on familiar, conventional, relatively unambiguous frames offloads a lot of the high level, strategic discovery and design work to the frame itself.

But relying on a frame can lead to problems if you don't understand how they do what they do. Often, frames embed norms, the informal, behavior-guiding rules and simple conventions that we rely on to coordinate and smooth our daily activities and interactions. Norms – mostly social norms but sometimes conventions as well – can be not only descriptive, indicate what most people happen to do, but also prescriptive, indicate what people should do. We humans slip easily, almost inevitably, from the descriptive to the prescriptive – from the fact-based to the evaluative – often feeling that how something happens to be done is how it should be done. Furthermore, norms aren't prescriptive at just the behavioral level, indicating what you should do. They're also often prescriptive at the procedural or motivational level. It's not just what you do that's prescribed and judged, it's also how or why you do it.

Display and the Problem of Motivation

Motivation is a hot topic in our circles, particularly now that everyone is high on that most pernicious and faddish of sub-fields "persuasive design". How do you get folks, for example, to invest time and effort asking and answering questions on your site? How do you softly enforce quality/behavior standards yet open the gates to the largest number of users? How do you trick somebody into signing up for your damn newsletter? Etc….

There are two much discussed types of motivation.

Internal Motivation
Motivation arising out of inherent or intrinsic desires, values, drives, etc.

External Motivation
Motivation arising out of extrinsic considerations or inducements.

Research on these issues is pretty muddled, but seems to indicate that the internal sort is best for, say, learning and maintaining desired behaviors and habits, while the external becomes self-defeating and can crowd out internal motivation in the long run. Other research, however, seems to suggest that, in the real world, the truth is actually a lot more complicated and a motivational cocktail of both types is actually the most effective.

Whatever the case regarding actual motivational efficacy, moralizing the distinction is almost inescapable. We're all pretty biased in our evaluations of perceived motivation, just assuming internal motivation to be somehow better or nobler than external motivation. Consider the case of social interaction. Folks apparently acting from internal dispositions are lauded as "genuine" or "authentic", while those clearly interested in appearances and the esteem of others are branded "fake" or "inauthentic". Maybe this is a normative corollary of social psychology's well documented Fundamental Attribution Bias, the finding that our perceptions of the causes of peoples behavior are significantly biased toward assuming internal as opposed to external (structural or situational) causes.

Anyway, we designers realize (or at least we should if we want to be successful) that a significant real world motivator and quality-driver is Display. We can acquire and accrue social goods – esteem, reputation, and status – from estimable acts (judged by some norm-determined standard) performed in a public context. Display considerations fundamentally impact the quantity and quality of our contributions to social products. And Display is far less about internal than external motivational factors, like how the content, quantity, and quality of your input changes depending on who's likely consuming it and the possible esteem or reputational benefit their consumption might provide. If you were purely internally motivated, it wouldn't matter who was watching, how you'd like them to react/judge you, or what standard they were applying. Your input would always be the same.

Because of our normative bias for the internal, on those rare occasions we do talk about Display it's in passing and with embarrassment. In my opinion, we should drop our proudly naive, exclusive public preference for internal, "authentic" motivations (which is probably an artifact of biases, heuristics, and norms rather than a reflection of true motivational schedules) and embrace the external as a vital tool in our designer's toolbox. But, I certainly don't think that Display is the only motivator here. Rather, as I've written before, there are at least three big, abstract reasons people use social functionality: Connection, Knowledge, and Display.

Explicit Position vs. Afforded Position vs. Enforced Position

"…as much as i dislike it, i can’t fault the strategy: let SV folks self-adulate through display of knowledge, whether real or fake…"
adam on 1/11/11

"The thing that turns me off about Quora is that there seems to be no personality allowed. I answered with a few tongue-in-cheek responses, and found a few of that ilk that I liked, and they were all voted down."
Tinu on 1/11/11

You can think of our three big reasons for engaging with social functionality – Connection, Knowledge, and Display – as the poles of a three-dimensional continuum. Then, if you're really geeky, you can plot (very unscientifically) where items of social functionality fall on the continuum – both functional elements and whole products. Considering the norms embedded in Quora's Q&A frame along with their more or less explicit positioning and teaser line, I'd plot them as below.

Basically, this is the mix of motivators and reasons for engaging with the platform that Quora "explicitly" or officially appeals to. The big circle around the plot indicates that the official message and frame-embedded norms determine more of a range than a coordinate; there's leeway, particularly since product-specific norms are just now arising. They're very skewed toward the Knowledge pole, but with a significant Connection (in this case the explicitly "community" elements) leaning. Their official position is very light on the Display component, although it's implicit in the social aspect. Still, a little bit of Display is allowable so long as the clear point of the activity is Knowledge.

But as some of the quoted comments suggest, perusing Quora you definitely get the sense that a lot of activity is driven either solely or largely by Display. Many people are using Quora as a means of advertising their expertise, interests, sense of humor, and abilities. That's no surprise. The platform clearly "affords" that, and a lot of activity probably depends on it. But, this afforded use case is proscribed by the "official" position and norms. It's clearly the case that a lot of people wouldn't answer at all, except that they can flash their smarts. However, when we think of a Q&A platform, we feel that it should be about Knowledge first and foremost. Display should fall naturally out of quality performance or at least not appear to drive the performance. In this strongly Knowledge-first context, performances perceived to be selfishly Display-focused can make us really uncomfortable or mad (a typical reaction to broken prescriptive norms), even if the content is high quality.

To counter this natural and predictable issue, Quora provides voting up and voting down functionality as well as monitors to actually remove "self-serving" content. This is a good way to guide content quality and pro-sociality, particularly if you're designing within a strong frame. But, it looks like the discomfort of the transgressed no-Display norm associated with the frame is generating a powerful backlash against those perceived to be too Display motivated. Several comments mentioned the strictness and harshness with which some humorous or snarky answers were squashed. The enforcement norms that seem to be emerging appear to be even more anti-Display than the official Quora positioning warrants. Plotting the "afforded" position and the "enforced" position on our continuum gives us something like this.

Clearly, there's a problem here. The product affords activities that the framing and position explicitly proscribe. This happens with every social product, but in this case, the frame is so normatively well defined and understood that transgressions against its accepted norms are glaring and galling. Also, the platform is relatively new and, though there are robust means of sanctioning (vote up and down) and clear identification of high performance, the content is just now reaching the volume where product-specific norms of appropriate presentation form and solidify. The users have yet to coordinate on acceptable means and practices of Display within the normative bounds of the platform. Until these norms become widespread and a "generation" of users have accumulated the norms as product-specific "Cultural Capital" there will still be a largish proportion of brazen self-promoters ticking everyone else off. But, as the norms solidify and spread, they will most likely learn them and cooperate.

Why Redesigns are So Damn Hard

2011-01-06T18:33:00.030+01:00

Redesigning social functionality – that is, re-doing a social product already in use by some sort of entrenched audience – is sometimes tougher than designing from scratch. Very often you're fighting against organizational and institutional inertia; legacy issues that determine what's actually possible; entrenched user expectations; nervous stakeholders demanding guarantees; and a little understood, fickle market always on the verge of catastrophic "creative destruction".

But what interests me here, is that in my experience the difficulty of redesigning a product – both the subjective experience of effort and the objective expenditure of time and attention in completing a redesign, start to finish – seems to vary with the product's success, but not in a particularly straightforward manner. That is, how successful the product to be redesigned currently is affects the difficulty of the process in a complex, non-intuitive way. Why?

Well, first of all there are at least three big classes of factors impacting the difficulty of redesigning a site. Some of these are important in designing the site from scratch, too, but the way they interact with the current success of the product when embarking on a redesign is what interests me. The three factors are Market Information, User Entrenchment, and The Organization.

Market Information
When redesigning, we look to the market for clues, approach our users for tests, and effectively try to tease out guidance from the field. Ultimately, we're looking for the formula for design success. But this stuff is incredibly complicated, including such things as the design conventions determining current user expectations; the competitive landscape identifying areas of relevant differentiation; trend dynamics suggesting potential "innovations"; etc. But the most subtly difficult factors are the complex social dynamics of product acceptance. I've written about these before: the hard to discern workings of network effects, informational cascades, and the resultant path dependencies cause enormous confusion among stakeholders, greatly increasing the difficulty of redesigning social functionality. In our misguided search for a simple formula for redesign success, these factors, which decrease the role of product qualities (the stuff of design) in predicting product success, can really lead you astray.

In a nutshell, the externalities inherent in the social web (i.e. we initially evaluate a product based on others' actions and then get the most value from the products that everyone else uses) make predicting success from product qualities almost impossible. Success is usually a matter of context, timing and accidents of the product's acceptance history rather than objective design quality. So, beyond a set of user expectation-defining standards – the competitive baseline, which you should have already identified in the initial design round – market analysis and user research won't help you identify a redesign guaranteed to succeed.

Even worse, up to a certain point, the more relative success you have, the murkier the information derivable from testing users and combing the market becomes. Your variance from the competitive baseline tends to be smaller the more successful you are, and the true drivers of success are rarely clear cut product design issues beyond this competitive baseline. Very few stakeholders understand these subtle dynamics and insist that more market research, testing and "innovation" will crack the "guaranteed success" design code. As a result, redesigns of moderately successful products tend to bog down in obsessive, inconclusive research, the results of which are infinitely and inconsistently interpretable (especially if testing is public). Research is necessary, but will never provide a guarantee.

User Entrenchment
Perceived usability – as opposed to laboratory usability – is more about familiarity than objective human factors metrics. Users invest their time and attention in your product, amassing a sort of practical capital of product-specific know-how. When you start changing things, they view this as effectively theft of a precious resource: their investment in practical capital has been thrown out the window without their explicit blessing.

As anyone who has ever redesigned anything knows, users get angry when they feel they've wasted time and attention; they must reinvest to get back to the same level of practical capital. So, up to the point where nearly everybody's using your product and there's no real alternative (i.e. where the network effect is so strong and the average user's "sunk cost" so great they overcome practically all anger over perceived losses associated with change), redesigns get dicier the greater the success of the product. One consequence of this is that testing redesigns with current users will significantly skew your results toward the negative, regardless of "actual" quality. If these tests are public, you've just created a significant political battle and, thus, headaches.

The Organization
There are two related but distinct sources of organizational inertia. First, people within the organization simply get used to doing things one way and – being human – are reluctant to change. If the product's relatively successful, that felt reluctance can be rationalized by arguing that any redesign is a dangerous and unneeded rocking of the boat that endangers continuing success. Slowdowns, endless discussion, and frequent miscommunications are usually the result.

Next, as much as I hate calling simple regularities or covariances "laws" for comic effect (Moore's Law, Metcalfe's Law, etc.), Conway's Law, or something like it, seems to be pretty prevalent. In 1968, Melvin Conway observed that organizations produce products that mirror their structure or at least their internal communication patterns. He was referring specifically to the development of intercommunicating software systems produced by different design teams existing in some sort of institutional, social or communication structure. His claim is that this structure will manifest itself in the design of the interfaces between the systems.

Conway thought this was inevitable, which is way too strong by my lights. But stretching the idea a bit, some products, particularly websites, often mirror the structures of the organizations that created them. Furthermore, it seems to go the other way as well. Sometimes the organization and product have co-evolved in such a way that they're truly intermingled or even identified in many stakeholder's minds. Stakeholders view the product as a direct manifestation of the organization, and any change to the former necessarily impacts the latter.

Whatever the underlying mechanisms that generate this feeling, the upshot is that redesigning a product often has organizational implications, at least in terms of many stakeholders' perceptions of the project. Tampering with the product is often perceived as tampering with roles, responsibilities, and the delicately negotiated distribution of power within the organization. Understandably, this can lead to a significant amount of internal resistance, particularly when the product has been relatively successful and actual power and prestige have accumulated. The resulting inertia and sometimes downright sabotage can lead to massive struggles and delays.

These factors interact with the current success of the product (and with each other) to impact the difficulty of redesigning the product. Drawing from my highly subjective experience designing, redesigning, and "researching" social functionality, the situation seems to look something like this:

On the x axis is increasing success and on the y axis, increasing difficulty of redesigning the product. Some of the more interesting areas have been called out with letters. I'll discuss them briefly.

Why is a more difficult than b? After all, nobody's using the product, so redesign should be really easy. At this level of market failure, if you're asked to do a redesign, you should consider it carefully: this product should be completely abandoned and a different product built. But if you have to do a redesign, the whole organization probably understands and embraces the need to change and analyzing the market may help you identify appropriate conventions, standards and design directions. However, you are re-starting from a hole with little prospect of success (remember the importance of network externalities). Your potential users have already invested somewhere else (this a redesign… you had an initial chance and blew it. At this point your users have invested elsewhere and people burned earlier won't come back.). Finally, you have absolutely no user data on which to base your redesign recommendations and no prospect of launching then optimizing, bootstrapping your way to a successful design. After all, there's not enough activity to get a picture of where it's failing or succeeding; analyzing the market will suggest directions, but you can't really put it out there and optimize on the fly as no one's using your product.

As success modestly improves to b, the ease of redesign increases dramatically. At this point, your stakeholders are still ready for change. Analyzing the market could probably still help with design standards, conventions and trends. But now you have some data on what might work and what definitely won't. You have real users that you can gently test against, but not so many that changes will be met with a loud protest. You also have at least a foothold, which, with luck could be turned into something more by doing everything you can to generate an informational cascade through targeted design differentiation and smart positioning/marketing.

But things get progressively tougher from b to c. You're probably nearing the conventional designs as you're at least competitive at this level of success, so analyzing the market too much could lead to frustration and confusion among your stakeholders. Selling designs internally becomes more difficult as the product's modest success has been enough to spread a bit of influence and power throughout the organization. But, there are enough users to make switching costs to another product at least non-negligible to many users. However, the User Entrenchment process begins to become an issue at this point, as you've enough success for your users to have begun internalizing the system.

From c the difficulty quickly rises with success, slowing to a peak at d. This is the zone of incredible difficulty for a redesign; throughout this region all of the factors are potentially against you. Unless you're just adding hot new functionality pioneered by a competitor, culling the market for tips will be largely fruitless. You're most likely conventional – if not the leader – at this level of success, so most of the factors determining further success are those frustrating, inconsistently interpretable, and highly contingent social dynamics. Thus prolonged research and analysis in this situation actually pays little – and often costs much in terms of focus, morale and transactions. But most organizations in this range still get hung up searching the field and bugging their users in an obsessive search for a magic design formula when they should just be looking for suggestive trends to fuel experimentation. But you have to remember, users in this range become ever more entrenched, so the "right" changes are both difficult to identify and nearly impossible to justify through testing or interviews. Users want what they know now, not what they will want later, so at high levels of entrenchment asking them to evaluate a change (as opposed to just testing lab usability) often confuses the issue or leads to the agonizing death of bold new designs. Finally, organizationally, great success can make people scared to change for fear of losing it (people are, after all, far more risk averse than gain hungry). The organization has "rigidified." Success has pumped prestige and power into it's structure, creating significant vested interests in maintaining status quo. Projects in this range can quickly become nightmares.

At d, however, things turn around a little. Though it's never as easy as it is when you've poor to moderate success, the network effect is so strong, that the specter of losing position is largely mooted. That effectively removes the rationalization for status quo from within the organization and greatly mitigates the sting of negative test results from entrenched users. Also, at this point, you lead the market and most of the tips you're looking for are in terms of competitive and trend analysis, not the elusive success guaranteeing design formula. You largely co-determine the conventions defining the completive baseline along with other highly successful players. Thus, redesign at this point becomes slightly easier, but there's still there's a lot of reluctance from those who might fear loss of position and entrenched users will definitely make a lot of noise, which is never pleasant.

Redesigns are necessary to stay competitive. But along with the excitement and product / organizational rejuvenation they generate, they can also be headaches for the designers involved. Hopefully I've managed to shed some light on why and how. As I said, all of this stems form my subjective observation that redesign difficulty seems somehow oddly related to product success. Whether or not your experience of the relation between the two mirrors mine, I hope you'll at least agree that there's some relationship and that it's impacted by the factors I've suggested.

The Hippies vs. The Straights: Information/Knowledge, Internalism/Externalism

2009-12-04T12:07:00.016+01:00

Knowledge is of two kinds: we know a subject ourselves, or we know where we can find information upon it.

Samuel Johnson

A few years ago there was a heated folksonomy vs. taxonomy debate between the vague, jargon-spewing web 2.0-ers and the scared, curmudgeonly old-guard Information Architects. Then there was a mess of talk and some patrician lamentation about the death of the expert (e.g. encyclopedias) at the hands of wise crowds (e.g. Wikipedia). And we’re still chattering about the imminent shuttering of hoary old knowledge-disseminating institutions like newspapers and magazines driven to the brink by upstart “open knowledge” aggregators like Twitter and the blogosphere.

Let’s call the two camps in these debates the Hippies – the folksonomizing Tweeters – and the Straights – the taxonomizing encyclopedists. Sort of by definition of “debate” they take opposing sides. But the problem is, they’re usually talking past each other for ideological reasons, which means we’ll never really get any satisfactory answers about the issues. So, though there are legitimate points of difference between these two groups, I’d rather look at a distinction and a faux dichotomy at the heart of the debates they keep having in hopes of getting clear on foundational issues as opposed to the positions taken. The first is the distinction between information and knowledge, the second is the apparent dichotomy between an internalist viewpoint and an externalist one.

Information vs. Knowledge: Let’s say that information is data potentially pertinent to your projects or interests (as opposed to noise, which is wholly superfluous). Knowledge is something more than information. It’s information that you believe in some sense; it actually is true or genuinely appropriate or morally/ethically reasonable, etc.; and it arrives via reliable channels. So, knowledge necessarily incorporates our beliefs, desires and projects. But it necessarily includes something else as well. We evaluate items items we've solid reason to believe as knowledge – as opposed to just information – against some appropriate "disinterested" measure or guarantor. Information’s being knowledge isn’t just up to you, your beliefs and your interests; it’s up to something about the way the world is, whether physically, socially or culturally.
Internalism vs. Externalism: Internalists (or individualists) hold the traditional view that cognition, knowledge, meaning, perception, etc. are necessarily the result of internal, valid, inferences and calculations on some representations wholly inside the head of the thinker, knower, speaker/hearer, perceiver, etc. Externalists generally believe that cognition, knowledge, meaning, perception, etc. extend outside of the head and into the environment (physical, social, cultural, etc.) of the thinker, knower, speaker/hearer, perceiver, etc. Basically the dichotomy comes down to the following question: are the cognitive and epistemic abilities that make us the creatures we are “all in the head” or are they somehow extended “out there” into the social and cultural world?

A lot of the sturm und drang surrounding debates on the effects of the web on intelligence, democracy, culture, etc. comes down to differing intuitions and flat out misunderstandings about these foundational issues. Furthermore, entertaining rhetoric aside, we won’t get satisfying answers to the issues being debated until the Hippies and the Straights stop allowing ideological commitments to drag them to opposite poles of the distinction or rigidify the actually soft "dichotomy."

Informational Markets

Let’s start by stating the obvious: Many of our actions are based on what we take to be knowledge. And when asked to justify our actions, if we have a choice between justificatory facts – being pieces of true information that we’re in a position to know – or unsubstantiated justificatory hearsay, we use the former because the latter lacks any real foundation. The former is knowledge: information that we’re justified in believing, meaning that it’s come to us via a reliable channel, and is true or appropriate or reasonable, etc. Knowledge, as distinct from plain old information, is obviously incredibly important.

But unfortunately, it’s also an ideal that doesn’t weather the constraints of reality all that well. As Russell Hardin notes in his new book (which, though not too informative and wrong in equating belief and knowledge, presents an interesting thesis), there’s an economy of constraints on knowledge search: we’ve limited resources of time and attention and our incentives to attain knowledge are determined almost exclusively by our current instrumental needs or desires and our many non-knowledge based prior beliefs. That is, we tend to stop looking for knowledge when we find information that’s just good enough. And we usually find this information through inexpert, simply familiar or comfortable, i.e. not necessarily reliable, channels. What’s more, we really don’t make much of an effort to determine truth or falsity or optimality provided the new information fits with our past presumed knowledge. Why should we, after all? We’re busy, limited beings and if our non-knowledge works well enough or helps us get by, the only incentive to push further seems purely academic.

But this means that in real life we practice little or no epistemic hygiene; most of what we call knowledge is most often just information even though it’s the basis of our actions (including search and recognition criteria for future knowledge) and often serves as public and private “justification”.

Now, the key to the Hippies’ position – for example that the blogosphere could be a viable news source – is that “epistemic hygiene” is best left to market forces. Knowledge will automatically win in an open informational marketplace. Knowledge – the best, the truth – necessarily survives the winnowing effects of the market for information; if there’s a market for knowledge and it’s out there, the best way to ensure that it gets where it’s needed is to let the demand draw it from competing providers. When there’s a robustly discriminatory market for knowledge as distinct from just information, providers are thereby incentivized to provide it.

But the problem is, considering the economics of informational consumption, there’s not much of a market for knowledge as opposed to just information. That is, due to the economically constrained drives of real world infovores, people’s discernment isn’t such that they’ll seek out only knowledge. Thus they probably won’t provide enough pressure to drive the virtuous, knowledge-elevating market forces in the short term. But over the long term, the faintest of discriminating behavior will probably lead to knowledge boosting institutions. That is, it’s unclear if we have strong enough demand for knowledge, as opposed to just information, to ensure epistemic virtuousness right now.

At this point, the Straights swoop in claiming that epistemic virtuousness must be ensured from on high through the time honored institutions we’ve already got. But, of course, it’s clearly the case that placing all control in the hands of a small group of “deciders”, anointed moral shepherds to the riffraff, is simply ridiculous. Similarly, the institutions we have weren’t hatched fully formed with all of their knowledge preserving norms in place and operational. Indeed, all societies and cultures are, ultimately, bottom-up phenomena. Their seeming self-evidence notwithstanding, knowledge institutions (e.g. journalism and it’s vaunted social norm of objectivity) are the highly historically contingent result of blind, non-intentional coordination over the long term. Dissolution of the old institutions doesn’t mean that new, possibly better ones can’t be coordinated upon. The risk, if the search for new ones veers off an “equilibrium path,” is a period of turmoil as new institutions are coordinated upon. The real issue thus seems to be the cost, depth and length of the possible period of turmoil.

So, the Hippies don’t pay enough attention to the distinction between knowledge and information, particularly as it relates to the attentional economy of knowledge seekers. That is, they think that an open information market will necessarily result in an increase in knowledge. The Straights, on the other hand, misunderstand knowledge as something sacrosanct, existing only because of the (actually contingent) structures through which it currently flows. Thus those structures need to be shielded at all costs. In one direction lies possibly indefinite knowledge-mitigating turmoil but the potential for improved institutions, while in the other lies comfortable stability at the price of repressive stagnation.

Inside Out or Outside In?

The internalism/externalism distinction is at the heart of debates over whether, for example, Google makes us smarter or Facebook actually expands our social abilities. For the internalist, this is just a dumb question. Cognition is in the head and thus Google is simply a tool or resource the use of which must be weighed like any other. It possibly allows us to do things we couldn’t have before, but it doesn’t make us any smarter or dumber than a hammer does.

Externalists, on the other hand, view technologies like Google as more cognitive prostheses than simply tools. They extend our cognitive powers. In this sense, the same sense in which an amputee's artificial arm becomes his or her arm, Google is part of our cognitive apparatus. Just as the ability to do long division doesn’t mean the ability to do it exclusively in the head, without the aid of such external technologies as pencil, paper and the arabic numeral system, so our knowledge of, say, philosophy may actually be increased if we acquire the skill to find it at will. So Google, in a real sense, makes us smarter insofar as it’s a prosthetic memory bank.

People often balk at the metaphysical implications of saying our minds are somehow extended into the world. So to avoid that quagmire, let’s just say that culture actually augments cognition, that culture impacts, maybe even defines, our characteristically human minds. We, unlike most other critters, can actually use and build on what others have done and then in turn pass it along in detail for others to use and build on. This is similar to psychologist Michael Tomasello’s “Ratcheting,” the idea that humanity’s great cognitive distinctiveness is as much the result of cultural as physical evolution. Fudging a lot, we actually become smarter through the lateral (i.e. within a generation) transmission of skills, abilities and ultimately material artifacts. The stuff of culture, material and conceptual, expands our cognitive abilities.

If we grant just this cultural ratcheting instead of the full blown extended mind thesis, then we can see how one could say that Google, for example, could make us smarter. Ratcheting works on exposure and imitation. Google lays bare the world’s information to a certain extent. The internalist on the other hand, says it makes us lazy – we should learn and store all of this info in our heads if we want to call it knowledge – and thus, as we know where to find it but never really try to, dumber or at least somehow culpable. Plus, there’s no guaranteeing that Google is “epistemically virtuous.”

Frankly, the first internalist argument doesn’t hold water. Whatever intelligence is, it’s clearly not a matter of facts stored in the head. If their gripe is that Google doesn’t force us to develop the strategies of inquiry and action that may actually impact intelligence, then they may have a point. But, at this historical moment, Google is a viable strategy.

Anyway, though externalism seems to make sense, the issue of epistemic virtuousness still remains. That is, cultural artifacts like Google seem to impact our cognitive abilities, but that doesn’t mean that the impact is automatically for the best. The mechanism or artifact we’re “extending our minds” with may be defective in that it doesn’t necessarily deliver an appreciable amount of knowledge per unit of information. So we’re back to knowledge, but with a significant twist. If technologies like Google actually are cognitive prostheses and it’s possible for us to impact the ratio of knowledge to non-knowledge, then we’ve a significant moral obligation to guarantee that it’s epistemically virtuous. So, the Hippies’ hope for a brighter tomorrow through a cognitively expanded humanity rests on the epistemic virtuousness of the technologies through which we’re expanding our minds and abilities. The Straights, on the other hand, are doubtful about the whole expanded mind thing (it encroaches on their cherished romantic individualism) and are certain we’re not up for the ethical obligations incurred if it is true.

The Empty Middle Ground

The Hippies and the Straights both present arguments that turn on the issues central to these distinctions. But the problem is, their commitments seem to drive them to take one side to the exclusion of the other. The Hippies trip out on the Information and Externalism side while the Straights hole up in the library of Knowledge and Internalism, pouting. And just clarifying the nature of the distinctions doesn’t give us the answer either.

There is, however, a methodological lesson to be learned in picking apart the issues. As we’ve seen, both groups use arguments drawn from these divisions, but both seem to only get half of the story. The criticisms they throw at each other often have value. But the object of critique usually does as well. What this suggests is that just because there’s a distinction or apparent dichotomy, you don’t have to choose one pole and fight against the other. You need to consider the issue as a whole and let that inform you, rather than working from an ideological place that forces your hand and thus opens you to attacks you could have foreseen otherwise.

For example, the Hippies – at least the ones who even countenance the distinction – have too rosy a view of our individual desire for knowledge. They assume we actively seek knowledge and actively discriminate against “non-knowledge” instead of just muddling through with good enough information. The Straights, on the other hand, are sticklers for knowledge and really pessimistic about our ability to find it unguided. The problem is, they’re too pessimistic and take too narrow a view of institutional history. They arbitrarily limit the prospects and vehicles for knowledge to institutions and structures that already exist, closing off potentially valuable new ones.

Similarly, the Straights are often, but not always, internalist. They think that the question of, say, Facebook expanding our real social ability is just silly hyperbole or metaphor madness. Facebook is just a tool that we engage with under the direction of our hermetically sealed, inviolable cognitive apparati. It doesn’t extend or expand that apparati. True, Hippies and Straights aren’t necessarily divided on the internalism/extenalism issue. For example when it comes to the “Google makes us smarter” debate, many Hippies say “yes” and Straights usually says “no”, but they can both be somewhat externalist. It’s just that the Hippies think that Google is epistemically virtuous, while the Straights don’t. Anyway, Straights tends to be traditional internalists or individualists. This means they’re a little reluctant to buy the pie in the sky visions of the Hippies, who seem to want externalism to be true out of a progressivist cyborg fantasy of human perfectibility, without considering or shouldering the ethical obligations that would come with its truth.

So what’s the answer? Chances are, the truth is being triangulated by the critiques hurled from either side. Blind faith in market forces isn’t too wise, but neither is stodgy old paternalism. If externalism is true, then we really should be concerned about the epistemic virtuousness of our cognitive prostheses right now. The lesson is that we shouldn’t be forced into taking sides out of ideological considerations, either utopianist or conservative. Instead we need to stop dreaming of panacea or suspecting decline and start looking at the mechanisms and policies by which we can both allow freedom and ensure knowledge in the short and long run.

Being-on-the-web: Weinberger's "infrastructure of meaning"

2009-05-29T12:28:00.013+02:00

Writing about the web is increasingly “post-utopianist” meaning that it doesn’t expressly argue for the essential goodness of the web; doesn’t assume we’ve no real responsibilities as designers and consumers; and doesn’t assume that people are always nice or positively prosocial in their behavior online. Writers like Cass Sunnstein and Clay Shirky are at least trying to get past the breathlessness of the early days of communitarian-turned-capitalist web boosterism to a more realistic – but still hopeful – place. This is great and it’s exactly what was needed.

Dystopianism – the view that the web is essentially for the worse – is clearly the wrong reaction to utopianism. But if you can get past the panicky, paternalist fist-shaking and general curmudgeonliness of a lot of the dystopianist writing, their arguments tend to be of two types: appeals to popular, romantically conservative conceptions of individuality, creativity and culture or arguments showing that the boosters’ optimism is actually misplaced and the web doesn’t work the way they claim. The latter arguments are actually helpful, just showing that, if you’re attempting to draw evaluative conclusions from theoretical arguments, you can’t simply rely on your assumptions about what we all consider positive. For example, you can’t just assume that removing barriers to “publication” is good in and of itself, regardless of whether or not this is an increase in overall “freedom.” Some might not like the idea that there’s no longer a practically imposed institutional filter on publication because it results in enormous choice and verity problems. In addition, we’ve no real proof – plus a lot of theoretical objections and some disconfirming experimental data – that the web’s structural “solutions” to the problems of choice and truth actually work.

The other dystopian “arguments,” however, tend to be limited to dismayed hand wringing and unkind caricature about the state of culture, creativity and taste. So ultimately, the dystopianist/utopianist battle boils down to competing intuitions about what we should value and what we’re giving up or gaining by embracing this new and powerful medium. David Wienberger, a brilliant and proud utopianist, casts this battle in political terms as conservative dystopianists versus liberal utopianists. Of course, analogizing to a dichotomy in another domain doesn’t really clear things up. It’s a rhetorical move trying to get you to cast your lot either with the progressive forces of liberalism (yay!) or with the regressive deadweight of conservativism (boo!). But along the way he throws a third type into the mix, realists. He defines realists as the pragmatists in the middle, rational, level-headed and myopically obsessed with facts, data and history, i.e. boring. Supposedly, the realists feel that the web isn’t that different from other media, that the rhetoric on either side is hysterical and needlessly sensational. We just need to step back and think rationally about this new medium.

Weinberger thinks that the realists are valuable but essentially wrong about the web. That is, they’re wrong about the essence of the web, which is totally different and wholly revolutionary. Realists’ calmly rational judgment of its potential and possibilities will only blind us to its true innovative potential in the long run. For example, thinking of, judging or predicting the web’s impact and future in terms of past media may keep us locked in old patterns and thus foreclose potentially valuable new paths. So realists are valuable advisors and functionaries, but they shouldn’t be allowed to steer the ship or even navigate. After all, you’ll never discover new worlds by reading old maps... or something like that.

Anyway, if we define the realist as somebody who feels that the rhetoric on either side is overheated, that the whole debate needs a dose of reality and that the web isn’t really all that different or revolutionary, then I’m clearly not a realist. The web is indeed different in many respects, mainly in its decentralized structure, wickedly low entry cost and sudden ubiquity. I do think we need a dose of reality, but not in the way Weinberger’s realist thinks. Sure, reality is about facts, a claim most utopianists belittle via scare quotes, but these are facts about mechanisms – what structures foster and propagate knowledge, truth and quality and what we can expect from interacting agents, etc. – and not necessarily facts about history, which really are subject to biased “framing narratives.”

Finally, both utopianists and dystopianists agree that the web is revolutionary, but the former consider it a positive revolution, while the latter consider it negative. The realists, in contrast, don’t think it’s revolutionary at all, but rather more of the same only louder. Unlike Weinberger’s realists, I think the the web is revolutionary, but I use this word advisedly and without the attached evaluation, good or bad. Normatively evaluating a fact is clearly a case of interpretation, it’s identifying a fact as good or bad according to some evaluative scheme. It’s the interpretation that makes the difference. So what’s Weinberger’s interpretation?

Like Shirky, Weinberger analogizes the web revolution to the socio-cultural impact of the printing press or rather moveable type. Just as the printing press led not only to affordable books but also the dissolution of old social/labor orders and the growth of a literate, educated public, so too the web is leading to a boom in bottom-up social organization, individual creation and the general overthrow of old-guard cultural gatekeepers and entrenched hierarchies.

Now, Weinberger and Shirky, never tell us how to define institutions (or norms, conventions, etc.) – the socio-cultural structures overthrown by these revolutions – but to me they’re just self-reinforcing patterns of conditioned preferences and expectations structuring our repeated interactions. They aren’t etched in stone or handed down from on high. Rather they are slowly coordinated upon by generations of locally interacting humans. Thus, they’re contingently coordinated upon interaction and preference structures suited to the circumstances in which they developed. Change the situation or circumstances, and there will be pressure to change the institutions, norms, etc. If the situation changes radically, they will crumble and chaos will ensue, lasting just until new institutions and norms are either coordinated upon or imposed. This is a revolution.

But Weinberger in particular – echoing Marshall McLuhan, Walter J. Ong and my old teacher Greg Ulmer among others – likes to point out that media transform our ways of thinking, thus a revolutionary medium will radically change us. I agree, but only insofar as new media destroy old and foster new norms, conventions and institutions of creation and consumption. It’s the old and new norms and institutions that structure our interactions, inform our preferences and cement our expectations. So we agree on a lot, but notice, we’ve yet to see anything in this revolution that would lead us to evaluate it positively, i.e. as a utopian revolution (conservative old dystopianists, on the other hand, started frowning the second institutions felt pressure). Disruption, difference and impact don’t necessarily equal good. So how does Weinberger get from revolution to positive evolution?

Well, I can’t definitively say, but there are hints throughout his writing. Take this passage:

...Access to printed books gave many more people access to knowledge, changed the economics of knowledge, undermined institutions that were premised on knowledge being scarce and difficult to find, altered the nature and role of expertise, and established the idea that knowledge is capable of being chunked into stable topics. These in turn affected our ideas about what it means to be a human and to be human together. But these are exactly the domains within which the Web is bringing change. Indeed, it is altering not just the content of knowledge but our sense of how ideas go together, for the Web is first and foremost about connections.

And in what way is it altering “our sense of how ideas go together?” In his wickedly clever Everything is Miscellaneous Weinberger claims that the web is an “infrastructure of meaning” as opposed to just stodgy old knowledge. He trots out the philosopher, Nazi and all around dour grump Martin Heidegger to explain his notion of meaning. Basically, it comes down to the humanly grounded, intricately woven, real-world web of warm significance that we actually live in daily as opposed to the cold, objectified, brutally subdivided grid of "official" knowledge. Just as printing initiated a revolution that separated knowledge from the lived world and brought us the evils of categorization, specialization and scientism, so the web – with its personalizing “tags” and ability to instantly pair even the most unlikely contents regardless of official taxonomies – is initiating a sort of counter-revolution in which content and knowledge are re-imbued with subtle, non-taxonomic human significance. Thus, the web – particularly the user-enhanced, user-responsive (if jargony) “Web 2.0” – is an “infrastructure of meaning” insofar as the thickening accretion of human metadata on boundlessly linkable content makes it implicitly available for officially unintended but humanly significant purposes.

So, the foundation of his normative claim that the web is essentially for the best seems to be the idea that it’s instituting a new, souped-up version of the old pre-printing press, pre-Enlightenment notion of situated and subtle human – as opposed to "rational" or scientific – knowledge. The web reclaims knowledge from the alienating pretensions of science, reason and “rationality.”

Versions of this idea have been around for a while. As Weinberger mentions, McLuhan argued for the human impact of media, as did the Jesuit scholar Walter J. Ong. Ong’s book Orality and Literacy was expressly devoted to the cognitive, epistemic and human impact of media types. You could interpret Michel Foucault’s claim that knowledge structures are imposed power structures as a version as well. I even agree with part of Weinberger’s application of it to the web: the web really is revolutionary in the extent to which it puts knowledge at people’s fingertips and allows them to find, add to, connect and forward it at will. And this is a far more human – essentially human – way of interacting with and handling knowledge.

I just don’t agree that the “human” way is necessarily good. It could be great, leading to broader minds and deeper understanding of the world and ourselves. Or it could lead to increasing factionalization, self-absorption and distrust. After all, research suggests that, left to our own devices, people – humans – only seek out and retain confirmation of previously held opinions. So much so that we often ignore the true in favor of the convenient or comfortable. We’re also significantly biased toward things we’re already familiar with. It’s also unfortunately true that our moderate views tend to become more extreme in the sorts of echo-chambers the previous phenomena set up: seeking out confirmation from like-minded people and sources and the discomfort at differing opinions (justified and reinforced by the ready agreement of our like-minded contacts) tends to make our views ever more entrenched, absolute and resilient against contradictory fact.

Just because people can connect content in wickedly exciting but subtle new ways and access highly specialized information in seconds, that doesn’t mean they will be exposed to a breadth of opinion or even – sadly – the truth. The web, because of its native responsiveness to our individual desires, allows each of us to create a cozy cocoon of confirmation and reinforcement.

But maybe this isn’t all bad by Weinberger’s lights. Weinbereger adores Heidegger’s philosophy. Central to Heidegger’s understanding of meaning is the concept of Being-in-the-world: basically, the idea that all encounters with the world are already infected with our intentions, moods, cultural connotations, etc. and that there is no sense to the traditional notion of a pure object or subject. So meaning is pretty much an inescapable consequence of any encounter with the world. But this also suggests that context – physical, social, cultural and historical – is not only inescapable, but necessary for meaning. Objectivity becomes, literally, the view from nowhere, not just impossible, but unintelligible.

Maybe these cocoons of confirmation – these little webs of shared connotations and self-reinforced absolutist understandings, which I claim are negative aspects of a naturally biased humanity – are really what Heidegger’s beleaguered teacher Edmund Husserl called “lifeworlds:” the necessary and inescapable social, cultural and historical contexts within and through which we experience the world. Maybe so, but the problem is, these life worlds are hermetically sealed wholes of historical and cultural prejudice, incommensurable and unassailable. As Heidegger’s most influential student Hans-Georg Gadamer formulated it, prejudice – the historical, social and cultural “situatedness” we’re born into – is essential to Being-in-the-world. Outside of your lifeworld, your cocoon of prejudice, you simply aren’t... in the big metaphysical sense. Thus primordial prejudice – our cocoon of reinforcing ideas ever ready to disregard inconvenient or inconsistent “facts” – is the foundation of meaning in this Heideggerian sense.

Obviously Heidegger had nothing but disdain for the Enlightenment notions of reason, rationality and truth. It’s easy to see why. By his lights, there’s nothing over top of “Being-in-the-world” or “the lifeworld,” no outside facts to adjudicate between the “meanings” grounded in the various prejudice-composed contexts. The “lifeworld” or “Being-in-the-world” is the only ground of significance. Rationality, reason and science, on the other hand, are about seeking a global foundation (possibly in the real world) for the “intersubjectivity” that Heidegger seems to have thought only inheres in shared cultural, social and historical prejudices or contexts.

So maybe we who are stuck on the old-fashioned liberal hope of finding some common, testable ground of meaning, knowledge and intergroup understanding have it terribly, inhumanly wrong. We shouldn’t think of people’s natural drive to willful ignorance and reinforced, non-verifiable absolutism as an unfortunate legacy of our evolutionary past. They aren’t something that we as designers working in a world that desperately needs people to stop embracing local superstition, prejudice and dangerously out of sync norms have a responsibility to mitigate for the good of humanity. Rather we should just realize that these prejudices are the only foundation of truly human meaning and not pretend that there’s anything outside of them. Maybe this is the way Weinberger intends his “infrastructure of meaning” to be interpreted.

So, back to Weinberger’s utopianism. Remember that utopianism is the idea that the web is essentially good or for the best. Specifically that it’s native capacity to allow users to add metadata to content and make subtle, personal connections and relations is fundamentally and wholly positive. I’ve suggested that certain biases in humans – we only like what we know, we only want to be agreed with, agreement makes our prejudices even stronger and we’ll ignore the truth if it violates either of the first two – mitigate the positive prospects. In other words, because of the way we are, the web alone isn’t going to lead us to the promise land. That said, Weinberger’s rosy optimism seems to make sense only if you choose one of the following two options:

Ignore the unfortunate facts about humans’ tendency to avoid disconfirmation and neglect what some would call the truth for cognitive comfort and personal consistency.
Or, as his preferred philosophical tradition might recommend, embrace these tendencies as a prerequisite of authentic, human meaning. It’s not a bug. It’s a feature.

You do either one of those and I could see how Weinberger’s web utopianism might work. Personally, I find neither particularly appealing.

Of course, I’ve fudged along the way. Heidegger wrote extensively about “authenticity” as a refusal to unreflectively live the conventional life your peers demand etc. Also, “Being-in-the-world,” “lifeworlds” and even Gadamer’s prejudice soaked “horizons” aren’t exactly like the little cocoons of auto-agreement people tend to create around themselves and which the web makes ever easier and more complete. But fudging aside, this doesn’t alter the basic thrust of this popular philosophical tradition’s radical perspectivism. I just wanted to investigate whether this could be what Weinberger has in mind given that he probably knows people aren’t as reasonable as we could hope. Finally, it could be that Weinberger is just trying to say that the web provides wicked cool new ways of getting people to content. Which it does. But I think he’s going for something more.

Ha-ha, Ah-ha and Oh-yeah: cultural irony and rediscovery

2009-05-27T14:11:00.026+02:00

A lot of the cultural items we consume or partake of – hairstyles, shoes, tv shows, slang, professed values, bands, etc. – can be thought of as socially instrumental. That is, they can have a “symbolic value” over and above their use value, entertainment value or whatever. We often consume them not only because of what they do, but because of what we hope they add to our social identity in the eyes of those we esteem and those we despise, to our in-group and our out-group.

A while ago, I wrote a post illustrating part of this (intuitive? clichéd?) idea. I tried to show how the mutual interactions and reactions of three distinct cultural subgroups – trendsetters, hipsters and regular joes – can drive cultural items through their life cycle. This idea has occurred to a lot of us: many social groups’ preferences (for shoes, bands, styles, slang, etc.) respond – positively or negatively – to other groups’ preferences. Slang and cadence, for example, are often valuable signals and affirmations of group affiliation, so preferences for specific slang terms change rapidly with diffusion outside the group. We illustrated this as interwoven curves along the path from few partaking (o) to most everybody doing it (n).

But so far we haven’t really discussed the later part of a cultural item’s life cycle, the point after c in the graph. Frequently, cultural items just go away and are never heard from again. But sometimes they come back around. In this post I want to look at some late stage possibilities for trends, particularly cultural irony – imbuing cultural items with a different, more "self-aware" symbolic value than they originally had – and rediscovery – rehabilitating older cultural items for current use.

Irony and Rediscovery

First of all, some items never really go through the creep from fringe to mainstream. Agreed. The idea here isn’t to model the essential, inviolable profile of a trend. Rather, it’s just that in most collections of people presented with a cultural choice you can roughly define different subgroups by how their preferences change relative to others’ preferences. For example, within the regular joes there are likely to be different constituencies analogous to trendsetters and hipsters. That is, some regular joes will be a lot like hipsters in their preferences – ready to partake of items not quite fully mainstream. If we restrict n to regular joes, the preference profiles of the different types within this group might look something like our graph.

Anyway, cultural items that never go through the full cycle at the highest, all sub-groups cultural level – that take off in or are specific to one sub-group only – become particularly interesting when we consider irony.

Ironic embrace is cultural consumption that’s generally very aware of the consumed item’s cultural history. This awareness often becomes an explicit part of its new symbolic value. Consider the recent ironic rehabilitation of Jean-Claude Van Damme, Rick Astley and ‘90s pop (Bell, Biv, DeVoe is suddenly on every hipster playlist). Faint nostalgia notwithstanding, most of the consumption of this stuff (like 70s and 80s ironic embrace before it) seems to be ironic.

Grossly simplifying, there are two big possibilities for ironic embrace. The first is when one sub-group appropriates a cultural item from another group after the latter has already abandoned it.

When this happens, we often get what I call ha-ha irony. An example – also illustrating my advanced age – might help. At a “noise” show back in the very early ‘90s (noise became fleetingly cool when “alternative” was mainstreamed by bands like Nirvana and Jane’s Addiction) the headliner’s lead screamer wore a New Kids On The Block t-shirt. At this point, NKOTB’s popularity had dried up even among their teen target. The contrast between a defunct teeny-bop group and the aggressive, self-consciously oppositional posturing of noise music was obviously the ironic point. This is a case of ha-ha irony. It’s just a broad joke or gag and in no way even remotely critical. In fact it even has the prototypical joke structure: an unexpected shift in reference or clash of expectations results in humor.

Obviously, this isn’t a full-blown new trend arising out of an old one. Rather it’s a cultural item that typifies the prefab pop trend previously popular among the mainstream appropriated for new symbolic purposes by a self-consciously opposed sub-group. Bearing this in mind, it could be graphed something like this:

This time we start at c, the point on the original graph where the item peaks for the regular joes, and proceed to n. After n the item starts to become a cultural liability for regular joes and the total population partaking plummets to m, which is much less than n. Now the trendsetters can claim the cultural item for ha-ha ironic purposes. The trendsetters, of course, will start to abandon if the hipsters pick it up at a’, that is, when the hipsters come to see it as a codified ironic strategy (see). But this case probably wouldn’t get past a’. (Although, an ironic mini-trend did occur in the early ‘90s when noise acts started appropriating the insipid graphics of those new-agey “Smooth Sounds” whale-song albums.)

The NKOTB case involves an item that never went through the full cycle from trendsetters to regular joes. Or rather, it’s an item that the hipsters at the noise show most likely never invested in. NKOTB more or less started out with the regular joes. My guess is that this is often the case with ha-ha irony: the items that get ironically rehabilitated by one sub-group tend to be yanked off the junk heap of another subgroup. In this case, it was the hipsters using teeny-bop detritus to highlight their aggressively oppositional stance to pop music. It was a joke that everybody – even the regular joes once into NKOTB– would get. As a sort of rule, we could say the greater the item’s one time value to a subgroup, the greater its potential to be used in a ha-ha ironic way by members of a self-consciously oppositional group.

The second possibility for ironic embrace is when one group ironically appropriates a cultural item from another while the latter group is still into it.

Not surprisingly, we usually get ha-ha irony here, too. Consider some clever hip-kids’ “love” of geeky sci-fi/fantasy conventions, like Dragoncon in Atlanta, Georgia where middle-aged IT professionals (that’s actually unfair... young IT pros dig it too) party all night in DIY Klingon armor. These fringe affairs are really, really popular among die-hard fans and represent for them a market for a very specific sort of symbolic capital. For the hip-kids, on the other hand, it’s a lark, a gag, a chance to ogle the arcane rituals of nerd-communion in their proper environs. The hip-kids’ intended audience – the group from whom they seek recognition of the value of attendance – is their buddies, not the group actually attending the convention. Also, the hip-kids' symbolic value comes from a completely different cultural and symbolic arena than it does for the earnest fan-boys.

It’s sort of like cultural poaching for laughs. Once a few ironic trendsetters start doing it, the very next year will see hipsters joining in. We can graph this second ironic configuration like this:

Under certain circumstances, this sort of value relationship can result in what I call ah-ha irony (as opposed to jokey ha-ha irony). We can illustrate ah-ha irony with a slight alteration of the noise band example. Suppose it had been a Nirvana shirt instead of NKOTB. At the time, Nirvana was wickedly popular and symbolized the mainstreaming tendency that allowed noise bands to arise as an oppositional alternative in the cultural marketplace. Nirvana had gone through the full cycle from trendsetter popularity on the periphery to mainstream pop adoration among the regular joes. Wearing a Nirvana shirt – the incarnation of the new ‘90s pop which many hipster fans viewed as a sort of personal cultural theft – would have been a really critical, really exclusionary (in the sense of in-group/out-group defining) statement that few would have gotten. After all, most of the kids at the show had been – or still were – into Nirvana. That ambiguity of intention is sort of the calling card of “good” or at least powerful irony: it should be sneaky or at least not intelligible to all and have some sort of critical quality.

What seems to distinguish these cases of ha-ha and ah-ha irony is closeness to the cultural item. In the ha-ha irony cases, the kids who were being ironic probably hadn’t been part of any of the groups involved in the item’s trend cycle. They were outsiders who could objectify the cultural item. However, in the ah-ha case, it’s trendsetters using something that most hipsters (and they themselves) had recently invested in as an ironic prop.

It’s probably not anything like a rule, but this specific example of ah-ha irony looks something like this:

The item went through the whole curve; the trendsetters and hipsters had been committed to it at one time. Needless to say, ah-ha irony is really rare (or maybe not and I just don’t get it). It’s usually used solely by fine artists, motivated by chronic self-awareness and cultural inferiority complexes, which drive them to theoretical, unaesthetic excesses. I know because I was one... probably still am.

Let’s look finally at “rediscovery,” earnest and ironic. Sometimes cultural items come back from the dead. Sometimes the folks doing the reviving are earnest (the Nick Drake revival about 12 years ago and the garage rock revival about 4-5 years ago). Sometimes they’re ironic (disco’s many revivals and Enoch Light). But most of the time, it’s a mix of both (the ‘80s synth-pop sound, particularly in contemporary French and West Coast alterna-pop) and it’s always with different intentions than when the item was actually culturally current.

This graph, like the irony graphs, starts at c and goes through the crash at n. After n there’s a period of cultural hibernation while all of the groups assume their original relative positions. At some point, the item gets picked up by the self-conscious cultural adventurers (earnest indie rockers for Nick Drake, the gay community for at least a couple of the disco revivals) and the cycle starts again.

So why is rediscovery sometimes earnest and sometimes ironic? Well, I think part of it might have to do with uptake among past cultural groups and the perceived genealogy of contemporary cultural groups. Contemporary groups that understand themselves as having “descended” somehow from traditionally oppositional subcultures often approach items from these “related” subcultures earnestly and items from “unrelated” or mainstream culture ironically. Regular joes, since they’re not quite as culturally sensitized or obsessively self-aware as trendsetters and hipsters, generally shoot for ha-ha irony unless the item has already gotten past b’. In that case, it’s no longer really “rediscovery”: the item has been “contemporized” or brought back into currency. (Regular joes that still dig the music they loved in high school – “it’s not about new or old...Aerosmith just made quality rock, man!” – aren’t rediscovering anything... they’re just frozen in a particular cultural period.)

A Last Note

But this whole graph-y, representational thing I have going skirts one obvious and over-talked point about contemporary culture: it seems to be moving faster. The trend circuit from hip to passé to rediscovery is getting quicker and quicker. So much quicker that the whole concept of rediscovery makes less and less sense every day. Something similar is happening to the idea of mainstream; it doesn’t really seem to have the old, easy to poke at stodginess it used to. Actually, it’s pretty hard to even locate in the first place. Why is this happening?

Just speculating here, but pervasive media probably helps. Modern user-tailored, user-driven media like the web is really good at getting stuff from the fringe to the center, from “hip” to “mainstream,” overnight. Stuff that used to take years to bubble to the surface through old media channels now zips up almost instantly in a process of accelerated mainstreaming that calls into question the whole idea of fringe and center, counterculture and mainstream.

But in the west at least we still seem to highly value the idea of oppositional individualism and the autonomy of our choices, of trendsetters, “mavericks” and nonconformists, out there marching to the beat of a different, etc. A significant number of folks in the west – most I’d say – have internalized this cultural value or ideal. Trendsetters and hipsters probably wouldn’t be our culture’s marketing holy grail otherwise.

You put these together – media that rapidly drains oppositional cultural positions of their “outsider,” “in the know” status and an internalized cultural admiration of the “individualist” or the “nonconformist” – and you get accelerating trend cycles. After all, if cultural items come larded with a symbolic value that is partially determined by the item’s prevalence, and modern media provide a fat but highly user-responsive channel to spread the word, then you’ll have to act quickly to stay relevant. In this environment, uptake and abandonment of trends is going to speed up.

Adding to the mix cultural industries like film and fashion, that, to a certain extent, have institutionalized in their marketing and business models ideas of constant opposition, innovation or nonconformity, and things really get moving. Taking just one example, the fashion industry is built on the idea of annual overthrow, of mainstreaming (i.e. making passé) last year’s line so this year’s can supplant it. It’s a business model founded on the idea of the incessantly new. Fashion marketing hinges on – and thus amplifies – the desire to be slightly ahead of the curve, to break with the currently mainstream fashion, to be more distinct and “original” (in acceptably fashionable ways) than your peers. In the present media context of almost instant diffusion and accelerated mainstreaming, their business model of providing “the new” and their marketing model of codifying, amplifying and creating a “need” for “the latest,” results in accelerating demand that outstrips their creative capacity. The result: unrepentant cultural recycling at a faster and faster pace.

Of Market Analogies and Ultimatum Games: the myth of web utopianism

2009-04-07T14:45:00.030+02:00

Web utopianism is the idea that the web is somehow fundamentally or essentially a positive force. It’s not just that the web is more important, socially “impactful” or different than other media. Rather, it’s the claim that the web is, by its nature, for the greater good. Many futurists and web pundits seem to push utopianism as the web’s “brand,” effectively the set of concepts, assumptions, implications and preferences making up its popular conception. But if we buy into this brand, this idea that the web is in some way essentially good, we greatly reduce our responsibilities as designers and users. Once we take the web to be simply good in itself, we no longer really have to consider the potentially bad consequences of our creations or actions, by whatever standard.

Often utopianists frame the web as the ultimate market, where great ideas, unique voices, vital information and compelling products rise to meet the true and internally generated needs and desires of fully autonomous, choice-empowered, creative consumers. From this freedom of access and choice and the ease with which we can create, share and elevate content, they draw positive democratic and communitarian conclusions. As the story goes, the web is about cultural disintermediation on a grand scale: anybody can create the next video craze through YouYube or help build a surprisingly accurate reference work like Wikipedia. Powerful cultural gatekeepers, who for years perpetuated pernicious and self-serving social and informational hierarchies, are suddenly irrelevant. What’s more, nobody will miss them. As it turns out, claim the utopianists, markets are essentially better at arriving at truth, quality and beauty than experts ever could be. And markets coordinate on these desirable ends through the individual, undirected, autonomous choices of consumer-creators. Thus, the utopianists conclude, the web is a technically aided manifestation of Democratic ideals. And this is obviously good.

Perfect Markets Meet Imperfect Web

Unfortunately, this view is wrong in the same way superstitions are wrong: its evaluations and claims are based on shaky assumptions about mechanisms. I want to avoid the cultural politics of the issue and look at some of the utopianists assumptions. First of all, the positive evaluation of the web as a market seems to follow only by analogy to a specific sort of competitive market, what’s called a perfectly competitive market. This is an idealization of the conditions under which the price arrived at by interacting consumers and suppliers will match the “true value” of a commodity. The idealized conditions are pretty stringent and numerous. For example, you must have a large number of suppliers; no barriers to entry; everyone gets the same complete information; no one turns a profit; no one advertises or markets; each supplier’s output is pretty much individually negligible to the ultimate price; and each supplier’s output is intersubstitutable for any other’s. If these conditions are met, then prices will reflect the “true” value of the product.

The utopianists’ idea seems to be that the web is like a perfectly competitive market because it appears to meet somewhat analogous conditions.

Anyone can contribute and huge numbers actually do.
Consumers can access any information at will.
They can find exactly what they want regardless of how niche it might be and can costlessly choose between options.
They can state their opinions, create whatever they want or share their knowledge truthfully or “authentically” without the biasing influence of social pressure.
There are few recognizable extrinsic incentives to contribute, which avoids the skewing of contributions associated with profits.
Finally, any one contribution is as good as any other and doesn’t really affect the final information. In other words, no one opinion can skew the final collective result because there are so many and there’s always someone willing to refute anyone.

Obviously, it’s a strained analogy. Prices and evaluations are "true" in very different and hard to express ways. Settling true evaluations from masses of tastes and opinions isn’t much like setting prices from masses of tastes and desires. Still, something very close to this analogy is a pretty implicit assumption among many web utopianists (and almost explicit in Wikipedia’s “Jimbo” Wales’s public veneration of F.A. Hayek, father of modern equilibrium theory). To many utopianists, the web is simply structurally conducive to settling on true information or elevating true quality in much the same way perfectly competitive markets are conducive to settling on “true” prices.

But the web just doesn’t work this way. Perfectly competitive conditions don’t hold together on the web. There are many reasons the web's not a perfect market, but I’ll just look at one big one: the false assumption that people online aren’t subject to social pressure or influence that might skew the collective result. It’s based on the idea that people’s visible actions aren’t informational signals themselves; that people’s choices follow an ideal of narrowly rational, autonomous reflection. Duncan Watts’s much discussed recent research shows that social influence in cultural markets, e.g. an opinion market like a movie review site, actually leads to radically unpredictable (i.e. quality doesn’t predict success), highly unequal (i.e. huge difference between very famous and slightly famous) distributions for cultural items. In a nutshell, famous things get more famous and this is a contingent, path-dependent process which has very limited correlation with actual quality. In other words, the same items might show very different success or evaluation patterns depending on chance uptake events at earlier stages of the process.

Clearly, this suggests that the conditions for perfect competition aren’t met in markets with significant signaling, like the web. Markets like this won’t necessarily result in the “best” or "truest" rising to the top automatically because the assumption of autonomous decisions just doesn’t hold. As Clay Shirky has noted, the web makes socialization, communication and coordinated activity "ridiculously easy." I'd say it's more than easy, it's pervasive and inescapable. Stretching the economic metaphor a bit, whenever coordination and communication are cheap, information "cartels" form reflexively and not just when people are positively motivated to alter the competitive landscape to their advantage. People pool and align their opinions (and thus productions) whenever communication is possible, skewing the market. They look to others' actions – not just to their own fact based judgments of quality – to help them make decisions. If something starts to take off, this is “social proof” of value, an assumed signal of quality, and others follow suit. Seeing what does well, more of the same is produced. The social web is all about such signaling – sharing your actions and choices – and thus it's rife with social influence. It really can’t be a perfectly competitive market. (This effect is similar to, but distinct from, so called herd behavior and informational cascades, which also make perfect competition difficult.)

Also, the “Democratic ideal” utopianists claim the web promises is the political analog of the perfectly competitive market: the “best” or “truest” result arises when no special interests have undue influence, when tastes, knowledge and needs can aggregate, free from the distorting interests of profit, influence and pooled power. Utopianists point to knowledge aggregators like Wikipedia as prime practical examples of this idea. But Wikipedia is clearly not a perfectly competitive knowledge market or democracy. Rather it’s an oligopoly, or its political analog an oligarchy. A core group of contributors, the editors, has considerably more power and wields considerably more social influence (i.e. their actions are neither negligible nor intersubstitutable) than all other contributors. “Jimbo” Wales’s admiration of Hayek notwithstanding, Wikipedia is not a pure democracy. It’s an oligarchy. And oligarchies do not structurally result in the “truth” the way democracies or perfect markets supposedly do. Wikipedia is successful (to the degree that it is) not because of the nature of wikis or the web, but rather because of the oligarchy’s ability to manage the negative effects of social influence, informational cascades and bad behavior. And this is arguably the result of social influence used for positive ends, not just the structurally positive force of a perfect "knowledge market" or informational democracy (added April 8: the importance of "community" to the success of wikis is made very clearly by Clay Shirky in Here Comes Everybody and by Cass Sunnstein in Infotopia).

Ultimatum Games and Two Types of Prosociality

Well, the utopianists respond, the relative success of Wikipedia’s oligopoly/-garchy suggests that maybe the web isn’t structurally good in the sense that truth, originality or the “best” stuff succeeds solely in virtue of the implementation. Maybe the web just helps people’s native goodness, prosociality and urge for reciprocal interaction to flourish. The web makes it easier for folks to coordinate, create and realize their intrinsic desire to be, not just social, but prosocial. So the necessary goodness of the web is its ability to amplify and enable user's intrinsic prosocial motivations.

However, this weakened, indirect argument – if used for utopianist ends – founders on something like social influence just as the stronger perfect competition argument does. When people are susceptible to social influence – informational cascades, herd behavior, Watts’s social signaling and conformity or esteem effects – bad behavior or lock-in of less than optimal norms often results. After all, there are two distinct ways to understand “prosociality”: as a desire to share, strive and be nice or as a desire to simply do as others expect you to do. Both ways are about deference to your social group. But only the former is automatically positive in the way web utopianists seem to assume. On the latter, if all of your friends are jerks, you think they expect jerkiness of their peers, and you want them to like and esteem you, then you’ll probably be jerky, too. You’re deferring to what you take to be the expectations of those you hang out with.

Against this less than estimable version of “prosociality” the utopianists often claim that research shows we’ve a hard-wired preference for good prosociality, that we're intrinsically motivated to be prosocial in the positive sense. In particular, they often point to results from Ultimatum games, which purport to show we’ve an evolved preference for flat fairness, what the behavioral economist Herbert Gintis calls “strong reciprocity.” Ultimatum games have two players, Proposer and Responder, and a set sum of “money,” say, $4. The Proposer can offer any sum to the Responder. If the Responder accepts, they both get their cuts, but if he rejects, neither get anything. Research indicates that Responders often reject what we would consider unfair offers and Proposers often start with close to a 50-50 split. In other words, Responders are willing to sacrifice potential gain if the Proposer is unfair and many Proposers seem to immediately offer the fair split. Supposedly this shows that people have a simple preference for fairness, which they argue is a hard-wired, positive-prosocial drive.

Obviously, we’re social animals and thus have an evolved knack for some sort of prosociality. But we have to be clear what’s actually exhibited by the Ultimatum game. Relying on a literature review and critique by Cristina Bicchieri and some ideas of Ken Binmore, some Ultimatum game experiments suggest that these results may be more an effect of the perception of the situation or context than a simple preference for fairness. People are conditionally fair depending on their expectation of other’s expectations and often on what they think others will accept given these expectations. It’s not a matter of fairness, per se, as much as it's a matter of what others expect and thus what you can get away with.

For instance, cross-cultural studies [pdf] of Ultimatum games suggest that people’s rejection rate is culturally determined. In some societies, rejection is very rare regardless of the offer. This suggests that people have a preference for meeting situationally relevant expectations rather than a preference for simple fairness. It's the norms in play that matter rather than some absolute or hard-wired standard of fairness, and this influences both what Proposers expect to be acceptable and what Responders expect to be offered. Similarly, Ultimatum games with asymmetric information suggest that Proposers are generally more interested in appearing to meet salient fairness norms – thus decreasing likelihood of rejection – than actually being fair. Consider the case in which the Proposer knows that the chips used in the experiment are worth 3 times more to him than to the Responder and he knows that the Responder doesn’t know this. If we all simply preferred being fair, as opposed to appearing fair to hedge our bets going into interactions, the Proposer should most often offer 75% of the money. That’s the fair value split. As it is, Proposers in this scenario offer slightly less than 50% of the chips on average. Obviously, we don’t necessarily just prefer fairness for its own sake, which is what’s assumed by the positive-prosiciality idea. Rather we prefer to follow whatever norms we take to be expected by others – the less than estimable prosociality.

So if it’s the case that we’re not so much driven by simple, positive prosociality as we are by the desire to do as our peers expect of us – as the situation-relevant norms suggest we should act – then the prospects for this weakened form of web utopianism aren’t all that great either. That is, if the utopianists argument is that the web is essentially good because it allows the intrinsically positive-prosocial motivations of agents to flourish unhindered by the overhead of real world socialization, then it’s founded on a mistake. Our prosociality isn’t as normatively rosy as they assume. It’s a desire to do as we think others expect of us, which is not necessarily good in the way utopianists need it to be for their argument to work.

No ‘Topias

In this post, though we avoided the political versions of web utopianism, we’ve discussed two of the most interesting non-political strains. They clearly don’t hold water. The web isn’t the wholly positive boon to humanity the utopianists want it to be. But neither is it the great destroyer of culture the panicky, proudly paternalist web dystopianists take it to be (aside: avoid Lee Siegel’s Against the Machine. It’s one of the few books I’ve read that actually deserves to be called a rant or a screed. It’s like the web insulted his mother or something). The web is just a massively influential tool – or fact – with impossible to predict social and cultural impact. Some of the impact will be positive, some negative and some both on different time scales. We just don’t know. But utopianism of the sorts considered above assume that the web just is positive. Taken seriously, this assumption mitigates our responsibility as designers, creators, sponsors and consumers of content and experiences on the web. In reality, we don’t know what the real social and cultural results of our actions will be. But we need to act as if they could be negative so that we feel compelled to strive for – not just expect – the positive in the long term. Doing anything else is irresponsible no matter how nice or progressive it would be to believe the web a simply positive force.

Why Does Fad = Bad? Velocity, Autonomy and Constancy

2009-03-18T14:31:00.023+01:00

It’s a fact that trends end, but most accounts of the uptake of cultural artifacts don’t really get into the end too much. They focus on the dynamics in regards to acceptance or consumption, not really touching on how these very same dynamics can lead to the cultural item being very quickly dropped. Trends, after all, are only as stable as people’s beliefs about other people’s preferences and expectations.

Which brings us to fads. Fads can be thought of as cultural trends – tastes, styles, fashions, attitudes, jargon, slang, etc. – that peak rapidly and then quickly die out. We’re all familiar with these: a cultural item – consider those annoying rubber wrist bands from a couple of years ago – suddenly shoots up in prevalence, appearing everywhere at once, and then suddenly pops back out of sight. So, fads by definition are trends that end quickly, but speed of uptake is obviously a key signal. In this post we’ll look at two different accounts of the relation of speed to ends and how our evaluation of fads differs from our evaluation of other trends. Finally, we’ll try to figure out what is “symbolically” at stake in the distinction between a trend and a fad and how this makes the latter automatically less worth joining.

First of all, Luis Bettencourt presents a model of the trend life cycle in which agents use a trend's relative speed of adoption as an indicator of viability and value. The faster the speed of adoption relative to other competing items, the more attractive an item is. When the speed slows, as it inevitably will given a finite population, agents will begin to abandon the trend provided the speed falls below an individually determined critical level. In this model, speed is a positive factor as it indicates the potential value, a form of “social proof,” of a trend. But it also inevitably brings about the trend’s end. Because of the way the dynamics are structured, trends that move fast, will move even faster, quickly bringing about their own crash. These are clearly fads.

Contrary to Bettencourt’s model, Jonah Berger and Gael Le Mens claim [pdf] that a high perceived rate of adoption of an “identity relevant” cultural item decreases our likelihood of adopting or consuming it. Identity relevant cultural items are those that can be thought of or used by potential consumers as a means of communicating some desirable or esteem-generating information about who they are or – more likely – who they’d like others to think they are; identity relevant cultural items are conventionally meaningful signals of group-specific tastes, social affiliation, status, etc. If adoption is too fast, the item might be a fad, which is a bad investment in the social identity stakes because, by definition, they can’t sustain popularity.

An important difference between the two views is obviously the latter’s focus on “identity.” In Bettencourt’s model, the faster the better for all items; it’s the fact that velocity is unsustainable in finite populations that leads to collapse. In Berger and Le Mens’s view, beyond a certain velocity threshold, the faster the worse, at least for publicly visible cultural items with identity implications. They argue that it’s our concern for the “symbolic value” cultural items may have for the development and maintenance of social identity that explains the desire to avoid fads. High velocity may decrease the attractiveness an item might have because it could be just a “flash in the pan” or of fleeting popularity. In other words, faddish cultural items are a bad investment as they don’t maintain symbolic value. So, in both models, speed is information, but in Berger and Le Mens’s, identity concerns decrease the item’s attractiveness (i.e. likelihood we’ll partake) as speed increases.

Their goal is to show that we judge potential faddishness by velocity and that we avoid fads because they're viewed negatively, which might be tied to the fear that they don't return symbolic value. Though they never really get into why we view fads negatively, I feel that we can say something stronger than that fads are unattractive because they’re bad social identity investments. Indeed, it seems that public association with a fad in an identity relevant domain may ultimately deliver disvalue as opposed to just decreased value. It not only won’t add to your social identity, in some situations it might actually damage your social identity. It’s often embarrassing or somehow dis-estimable to have been caught in a fad, to have publicly invested in or consumed some short-lived and now unpopular cultural item (if there are any pictures floating around the internet of you earnestly rocking a white Miami Vice blazer and woven loafers, you know what I mean).

So, I think that with a little reflection most will admit that getting publicly caught in a fad is somehow embarrassing or to be avoided, i.e. a disvalue. Can we articulate what it is about faddishness that actually bugs us? Why should the perception of an identity relevant cultural item’s faddishness make it less valuable or even potentially disvaluable? If it’s just that “flashes in the pan” – items that don’t sustain popularity/potential symbolic value – provide limited or no return to social identity on investment, why do we actually feel embarrassed about fad association as opposed to just annoyed at the wasted time? What is symbolically at stake in the distinction between fads and trends?

Autonomy and Constancy

Our social identity is impacted – often mediated – by the cultural items we consume or otherwise associate ourselves with. Cultural items have symbolic value related to what consumption of the item conventionally means or communicates. For example, the shoes you buy do more than just protect your feet or give you extra purchase on slippery sidewalks. They also communicate something about you, your tastes and often your position in a socio-cultural taxonomy (you’re a hipster in Converse or narrow slip-ons; an urban kid in puffy, tricked out Nikes; etc.). They’re public signals with conventional cultural connotations that you can exploit to manage your social identity. It’s these conventional connotations, the realm of taste and tastes, that confer the symbolic value. We manage our social identities partially by managing the set of cultural items we publicly associate ourselves with.

But clearly it’s not the cultural item alone that confers the symbolic value we exploit in managing perceptions of social identity. Perceptions of our motives and the longer term regularity of our social identity also impact our ability to wring symbolic value from a cultural item. For example, I had a friend who rapidly cycled through “personas,” going from punk to skinhead to b-boy to truck driver. With each new identity came a boatload of highly appropriate, conventionally meaningful gear, slang and comportment. But no matter how cool or dead-on they were for the current identity, he could never really wring any value from them. In fact given the suddenness of each of his transformations, they just seemed like cynical accoutrements, rendering symbolic disvalue and actually damaging his social identity to those he presumably most esteemed. The more he desperately tried to construct a "cool" or valuable social identity, the less likely it became that he actually could. Clearly, the items' perceived appropriateness or continuity with past social identity is important. More generally, perceptions of the motives for associating oneself with cultural items effect the items' symbolic value (and possibly one's larger social identity). If it seems out of character or if the social identity motive is too obvious, we likely won’t be able to garner any actual symbolic value from them no matter what they are.

So, in managing our social identities, we also have to manage perceptions of our management; there are “perceived motive” conditions on the symbolic value we get from some cultural item in an identity relevant domain. More specifically, there are autonomy and constancy conditions, which, if not met, decrease or possibly reverse the symbolic value available from a cultural item. Fads, pretty much by their nature, trash these conditions. Before saying why, let me look a little more closely at the perceived motive conditions, which must be met for an item to confer symbolic value.

Autonomy
Sometimes people try too hard to impress. They obviously speak, dress or comport themselves in what they assume relevant others consider the “cool” way. People like this are often called posers (or poseurs... but when I spell it that way I feel like one). They could be doing the same thing everybody else is doing, but their identity relevant moves are perceived as desperate, “inauthentic,” or even cynical.

As Jon Elster says, “nothing is so unimpressive as behavior designed to impress.” I think this “general axiom” extends to our public association with cultural items as well. Of course, we all recognize that our tastes are shaped by our in-group and larger culture. If not for the conventions and norms against which we evaluate cultural items and social identity, “symbolic value” really wouldn’t exist. But when identity relevant choices appear unduly concerned with others’ perceptions they start to lose value and may even damage social identity. When it appears that you’re dressing or talking a certain way solely out of concern for others’ perceptions of you, you may seem, for example, pretentious, conformist or cynical as opposed to cool. In short, in the West at least, we disvalue identity relevant moves that appear to be completely externally or cynically motivated, while we greatly value those that appear to be internally, “authentically” or autonomously motivated.

Constancy
When it comes to your social identity you don’t want to appear that you’re trying on personas. This is closely related to autonomy, but conceptually distinct. You can switch your style daily, trying to align yourself with various cultural groups, in which case you’re a poser or social butterfly. But you can also switch daily just because you’re an odd loner, a kook. In this case, you’ve high autonomy, but low constancy. They’re distinct, but either way fickleness when it comes to identity is frowned upon. If you give the impression that you’re actively searching for an identity, it’s unsettling: it feels stagey, shifty and possibly cynical.

Though research suggests that our perceptions and expectations of singular self-identity are sort of illusory – more a product of self-narration and fundamental attribution error than some continuous, thing-like Self – we clearly assume and value the idea of constancy, consistency and continuity when it comes to social identity. Pomo identity theories notwithstanding, fickleness, or publicly searching for some sort of social identity, is often interpreted as dishonest, “inauthentic,” self-defeating, cynical and sometimes even pathological. It’s probably a cultural artifact of the West, but we really like to think of ourselves and others as Selves in the ideal sense. Acting otherwise can turn social identity moves on their head, making them seem like a sham and destroying any potential value.

Why We Avoid Fads

We are socially incentivized to manage our social identity management. We seek to construct social identities that are meaningful for and align with existing socio-cultural groups. But in order to create a valuable social identity, we have to construct it in a way that gives the impression that our choices are the autonomous decisions of a constant, stable, already fully constituted social identity. Failing to give the impression of autonomy and constancy in our decisions decreases the “value” of social identity relevant moves.

Fads are culturally salient; their sudden appearance everywhere gives them high visibility and holds our focus. Because of our (probably cultural) bias toward autonomy and constancy – that is, for evaluating identity moves against the ideal of individual, reflective choice by a singular Self – we interpret these waves of uptake and failure in individual terms. After a fad crashes, our bias pushes us to interpret it negatively as a case of social influence over autonomous decision, as a case of herd mentality. The speed of the descent we interpret as social proof of the emptiness or valuelessness of the fad. But the speed of the ascent we interpret as the dis-estimable actions of non-autonomous, inconstant conformists: it’s the result of unreflective "bandwagoneers," people with no strong Selves embarrassingly misled by social influence.

Provided you want to optimize the potential symbolic value from a cultural item, you had better take into consideration whether or not it’s a fad. But, that’s not the only reason you should avoid them. Publicly associating with fads may damage your larger social identity. That is, association with a fad is interpreted as a failure of the autonomy and constancy conditions and specific failures of general conditions reflect on all of your identity relevant decisions. Publicly joining a fad changes the way others interpret your motives for all social identity relevant decisions; your motives become suspect not just in this case, but to some limited degree in all past and future cases. Provided information is publicly available, association with fads incrementally whittles away at the perceived "authenticity," "autonomy" and, effectively, "value" of your social identity. So, it’s a wise strategy to wait and see. Failing that, use the information at hand to judge the probability that some cultural item is a fad. Keep your eye on the speedometer; velocity of uptake is the most salient indicator of a fad pre-crash.

Nice For a Price: esteem as a social incentive

2009-03-05T22:26:00.019+01:00

Daily, enormous numbers of people interact in digitally mediated social groups. They usually behave prosocially, that is, they generally play nice with each other, often cooperate and sometimes even collaborate in the creation of a social good. As a result there's a lot of discussion around the sorts of stable social contracts groups can coordinate on; how new tools and designs for getting together impact and are impacted by these possible social contracts; and what sorts of incentives or motivations individuals have to play nice in the first place given that cooperating isn’t necessarily as easy, cheap or materially profitable as being a jerk.

This (way too long) post is all about motivations to join a group and act collectively. It’s the second post in a series (first one) trying to show that the recent focus on the deeply social or other-regarding nature of social and collective action groups online is too one-sided, simplistic and, frankly, ideological. Certainly we’re social animals with frequently benevolent motivations. But that doesn’t mean that we’ve no self-centered, broadly (as opposed to narrowly or materially) rational motivations. Extrinsic incentives, which we scheme to “maximize” in our limited way, abound in social situations. However, they’re mostly non-material things like esteem – the positive evaluation of your actions by the norm-based standards of your group – and status – deferential position in a social group. These are real motivations. Even Yochai Benkler, a genuine web utopianist, mentions them briefly in his Wealth of Networks. He says in passing that they’re part of our real motivational repertoire. But generally these issues are treated as either a dirty secret or beside the point. They’re neither. We need to really look at how these inescapable self-regarding motivations can help us be more prosocial and not just blame them when we’re antisocial.

Since it’s the most completely worked out account of the effects of social functionality on group creation and maintenance, I’ll focus on Clay Shirky’s excellent Here Comes Everybody. Smart as he is, I’m sure he understands the point about the value of broadly instrumental motivations for prosocial behavior. But the hero of his book is the genuine prosociality of humans freed from the limitations of “real world” organizational overhead by digital social functionality. And though he addresses self-serving, antisocial behavior like disinhibition and free-riding, he avoids talk of self-interested, extrinsic motivations for collective action almost entirely, focusing instead on intrinsic motivations such as vanity, self-esteem, true interest in the public good and simple innate pro-sociality. I agree with most of his conclusions, I just think he left out a huge factor that should inform thinking and design around online sociality.

Two Motivation Problems

There are two big problems of motivation here that are conceptually, but probably not practically, separable. First, there’s the motivation connected to the collective good some group’s trying to bring about, say, a high-quality, UGC encyclopedia like Wikipedia. Second, there’s the motivation to play nice, to make your contribution to the collective good you value in a way that the group approves of, like sticking to citable facts as opposed to stating an opinion when adding to a Wikipedia entry.

Riffing on a very useful distinction made by Clay Shirky in his latest book, we can divide our motivations between the group’s promise, whatever collective good or goal it’s trying to achieve, and the bargain, or the social contract within or through which the goal is to be achieved (he also distinguishes the tools, or the actual functionality the group employs to achieve the promise, but that’s for a different post). For Shirky, if you care about the goal embedded in the promise – e.g. collectively create a quality, UGC encyclopedia – and consider it actually attainable as it’s implicitly “stated,” then you’ll be motivated to contribute. Indeed, Shirky explicitly considers motivation only in regard to the promise: “The promise is the essential piece, the thing that convinces a potential user to become an actual user.”

In practice, it’s not so easy to separate the promise from the bargain. But in theory we can say that the promise is normatively degenerate. That is, you can achieve the promise through a variety of bargains. Although the details of the bargain have a huge impact on the viability of the promise, you could theoretically develop a quality, UGC encyclopedia without the exact same contributor/editor structure or implicit/explicit rule sets operating on Wikipedia. Again, they’re theoretically separable but probably not practically separable; it’s most likely the case that people don’t even know they “have” a goal or value the content of the promise until it’s articulated to them via the specific implicit promise couched in terms of some tentative, operating bargain. That is, the actual “articulation” of the promise in the context of the bargain probably creates people’s desire to reach the collective goal as much as it meets it. Also, bargains tend to be continually re-negotiated during the process of actively pursuing the promise.

Shirky would undoubtedly disagree, but it seems like the bargain impacts overall motivation in addition to the motivation arising from the promise. If you value the promise and think this group’s specific bargain is a decent way to achieve it, then you’ll be motivated to join this specific group or contribute to this particular collective good. But if the social environment in which you can contribute to your genuinely desired social good blows, then you’ll likely have to be a lot more motivated by that good to stick around. Similarly, if you're only moderately motivated by the promise, but the bargain offers something exciting in itself – say, the public adoration of your peers – then that might be enough to get you contribute when you otherwise wouldn't. Clearly, the bargain impacts overall motivation, positively or negatively, though some initial interest in the collective goal is probably necessary in the first place.

Anyway, one of the big arguments of Shirky’s book is that toady’s social functionality lowers the cost of contributing and collaborating to such a degree that people motivated by the same promise or goal – latent groups to use Shirky’s Mancur Olson-inspired term – can actually get together to do something about it. Even relatively weak goal motivation is no longer blocked from actually resulting in action since the overhead associated with coordination has dropped so dramatically; thanks to social functionality like wikis, blogs, tagging, cell phones, etc., it’s really “easy” to get dispersed people together to focus on some collectively defined good.

However, since the promise is “normatively degenerate,” i.e. can be achieved by means of a number of distinct social contracts or bargains, we still need to consider people’s motivation to comply with a specific bargain given the goal. What would make people choose one Bargain over another? Does the nature of the Bargain do anything to the overall motivation to contribute or cooperate? To answer these, we first need to say what a Bargain is. Fudging a little, we can say that Bargains, as little social contracts of sorts, are collections of norms

Why Comply?

Social norms are the implicit (but they can become explicit like some laws or codes) interaction rules that keep social groups from deteriorating into antisocial free-for-alls. They turn potentially state-of-nature, every-man-for-himself interactions into coordination games. Humans are social animals, but that doesn’t mean we always play nice. If it did, we’d rarely see any groups fall apart. Everybody would play nice by their group’s standards. As it is, though, we see a lot of antisocial, anti-normative behavior in contexts in which prosocial norms would be appropriate, particularly online. This suggests that we have a conditional preference for following norms. If the conditions are met, we play by the norms, otherwise it’s a melee. Obviously, the conditions under which we can generally induce a preference for social norm following on the part of most users should impact our designs for social spaces online and elsewhere.

Just to solidify everything, I’ll borrow (with slight fudging/modification) Cristina Bicchieri’s idea that there are three types of conditions which have to be met for someone to prefer following a norm in a given situation.

Empirical Condition: Do you expect the norm to be observed by most people in this sort of situation?
Normative Condition: Do you believe that most people expect or prefer you to follow it in this sort of situation?
Motivational Conditions: There are several of these and they relate to your reasons for complying given the truth of 1 and 2 above.

Fear: Is your compliance solely based on fear of negative sanctions for non-compliance?
Esteem: Is your compliance based on positive sanctions like praise and esteem?
Reasonableness/Internalization: Is your compliance based on your assessment of the reasonableness of the norm or possibly on a non-reflective, conditioned expectation?

The first two are necessary existence conditions for the norm. If neither are met, even if there's ostensibly a norm in place you won’t follow it because either you don’t think everybody else will or you feel it’s not really expected of you. In any given situation the norm may not be salient, and thus people might not know they should be following it. So, designs for spaces in which you want users to coordinate on a cooperation-inducing social contract should include provision for making norms salient (e.g., user-rating of UGC, contribution sorting by quality, etc.). But salience isn’t really what interests me here. Let's look at the Motivational conditions, which are about the reasons for personal compliance provided the Empirical and Normative conditions are met. If you think we just have a basic preference to do as others do regardless of our relationship to them, then consider these supplementary.

Compliance out of fear of negative sanctions, from frowns to finger wagging to expulsion from the group, can be very powerful. Often people play by the rules because of perceived threat of force, even if it’s just social force in the form of conventionalized displays of displeasure (reprimands from admins, poorly rated UGC, banishment, etc.). This is the most widely recognized motivation in the literature. Clearly, it only operates under conditions of at least partial transparency or incomplete anonymity and some sort of publicity or public availability of contributions.

Viewing the norm as reasonable or maybe even internalizing it, renders compliance largely non-reflective. You don’t act out of fear or positive incentive, you just obey the norm. This motivation doesn’t have any observation conditions on the situation; you’d obey the norm in totally anonymous interactions.

Esteem motivated compliance is a little different from the other two. In this cases you obey because obeying results in a personal gain or good in addition to whatever motivations you take to be intrinsic (e.g. general preference for conformity). You get something of value from others – esteem – for acting appropriately or contributing at a high, group-defined standard. The esteem motive is related to the fear motive, particularly if we consider disesteem a negative sanction. And like the fear motive it requires limited anonymity and publicity of contributions.

If esteem is a sought after item in limited supply, then it can add to the overall motivation one has for contributing to the larger social good defined by the group’s Promise. If complying with a social contract and contributing at a high level relative to the group’s norms can generate esteem, then people already motivated by the group’s goal have additional motivation to work. They have been significantly incentivized beyond the presumably prosocial incentive of the collective good.

Even if the collective good is materially negligible or even costly to the individual, the esteem motivation associated with group norm compliance can incentivize behavior to bring about the collective good (provided overall motivation can be the aggregate of promise-based and bargain-based motivations). Basically, implementing the social contract in such a way that esteem can be accumulated (limited anonymity and institutionalized feedback channels, for example) can make selfish jerks work prosocially. However, it also makes people for whom the collective good is genuinely motivating even more motivated.

Obviously, there is considerable space for trouble here. Unethical, mistaken and outmoded norms can easily be perpetuated by esteem motivated compliance. Agreed. Our task as designers and theorists in this space is to figure out how these mechanisms work and whether or not they can be reliably used for prosocial ends. That's why I think the bias for consideration of intrinsic and clearly prosocial motives only is shortsighted. Esteem and other extrinsic non-material motivations operate in all social groups. Unless we face our less social, selfish selves and try to understand how they operate, we can't even begin to make design decisions that will allow us to channel this ignoble element in our character for proscocial – or at least not antisocial – ends.

A Note On Near Anonymity, Limited Publicity and Esteem... skip at will

You might think that the near anonymity and volume of contributions of UGC creations like Wikipedia would destroy the esteem motivation: if next to nobody knows who you are and the volume of contributions mitigates the publicity any specific addition gets, then no esteem accumulates. I don’t think this is the case for several reasons.

For one thing, a study of handwashing habits in public restrooms in New York city showed that the mere presence of an anonymous stranger increased handwashing from 40% to 80%. (Munger, K. and S. J. Harris. 1989. “Effects of an Observer on Handwashing in a Public Restroom. Perceptual and Motor Skills 69(3):733-734.) The anonymity of the esteemer doesn’t seem to matter, but most importantly it doesn’t seem to matter that the esteem-seeker is anonymous as well. The mere fact that someone – anyone – could judge, the normatively charged public situation influences behavior regardless of anonymity.

Also, in many esteem situations, relative anonymity and obscurity actually heighten the potential for esteem. Basically, in many situations in which esteem is at issue, the potential esteemer judges not just the action but also the disposition. If calculation is obvious and the desire for recognition glaring, then you’re likely to give less esteem than if the estimable act occurred “for itself,” as it were. The public forum in which esteem is judged and the conditions under which credit is claimed ("I did this" or "I did this for the group") has an impact on this dispositional judgment. Too public and too obviously about you and not the good, and it might be showing off. But in conditions of limited publicity and partial anonymity your estimable act gives the impression that you’re doing it for its own sake. That is, an estimable act in situations where the probability of being seen and personally esteemed is relatively low (and all the other members knows this) renders much greater esteem if it is in fact seen and identified. In this situation, it looks like the act arose from a natural disposition and not esteem seeking. Near anonymity and limited visibility in some sense optimize esteem, in the words of Geoffrey Brennan and Philip Pettit.

Finally, esteem doesn’t have to circle back and add to our personal pool of accumulated esteem for us to feel it in some measure. That is, esteem attaching to your online identity, which nobody knows is really you, has its own reward. Indeed, we don’t always want the esteem we receive in one arena to mingle with (or be contaminated by) the personal esteem (or disesteem) earned in another. It’s a form of esteem management. Additionally, if Kai Spiekermann is right and the esteem others are willing to give often has less to do with what you’ve done than who you are, anonymity can level the playing field a bit and allow esteem to flow more freely than it would under more transparent conditions.

Playing Nice For the Wrong Reasons

2009-03-02T23:03:00.012+01:00

We were sold the story of being mainly self-interested, mainly rational actors interacting in market places. And the internet has shown that we have all these social, empathetic relationships with deep, authentic motivations that are nothing to do with selling and spending.

Clay Shirky

The Observer, Sunday 15 February 2009

One hears this sentiment a lot these days, particularly from American web pundits. It sounds like a lingering echo of the utopianist strains of early web propaganda; it's a rhetorical move positioning the web as a signal force in a new flourishing of hierarchy-smashing communitarianism against the old alienating and atomizing intellectual myths of “maximization” and “rationality.” The idea's intellectual sources include the recent widely touted corrections (e.g. behavioral economics) of some of the excesses of neo-classical economics and possibly the U.S. sociological tradition stemming from “functionalism.”

Anyway, I agree wholeheartedly that we often cooperate or collaborate on the web out of more or less benevolent – if not truly altruistic – impulses. But it’s also obvious that “deep, authentic motivations” aren’t the only incentives for acting in, or even just joining, groups. Significant “shallow” and “inauthentic” motivations impact social behavior as well. “Ignoble” motivations like esteem accumulation and status achievement – which are both distinct from reputation – significantly impact people’s behavior in social settings. Indeed, much of the functionality on the social web already has an esteem function baked into its primary or legitimate function. As a simple example, posting reviews is as much about displaying expertise or simple likes and dislikes as it is about helping others choose. As a rule, people genuinely like to play nice and help each other. But they’ll play nicer and help more if you also let them compete for group defined goods that are neither “authentic” nor “deep.”

Sticking with Clay Shirky, in his latest book he recognizes that there is a place for some sorts of less than noble rewards online. For example, he considers “vanity” and reputational benefit to be valid motivations for contribution. But the mention of reputation notwithstanding, he focuses on intrinsic, non-material motivations like self-esteem, the desire to produce something good and the need for communion. What he doesn’t talk about are the powerful extrinsic, non-material motivations involving the attention of and positive evaluation by others in your group. You contribute partly for the esteem your contribution can get you. And this holds true even if the esteeming group is minuscule. Indeed, it’s often the case that the smaller the esteeming group, the more valuable the esteem (“selling out” after all is the trading of esteem for popularity).

If we’re honest with ourselves, it seems pretty clear that some of our motivations for social interaction on the web (and elsewhere) are self-interested, operate by some sort of market principles and are neither authentic nor empathetic. We engage in behavior that is intended to "maximize" some in demand good – esteem – relative to the costs we're willing to bear. Other things equal, the greater the potential esteem the more cost we're willing to bear. Esteem seeking definitely isn't ideally authentic behavior: you can get it only to the extent that it’s not apparent – to yourself or others – that you’re actively seeking it. And although esteem seeking involves empathy – it assumes taking the point of view of others in order to determine the most estimable move – it’s not an “empathetic” motivation in the laudatory sense intended by Shirky. But, of course, this doesn’t mean that we don’t genuinely like helping and hanging out with others. It just means we have both sorts of motivations.

Shirky clearly recognizes this fact since he qualifies the whole thing with "mainly." Most likely, he just wants to make the point that we often act socially for the non-optimizing, genuinely pro-social reasons we say we act. Our actions are generally genuine and not cynical. But this is the tricky part: I don’t think that recognizing the importance of esteem to most contributors automatically commits us to cynicism. Furthermore I don't think that the distinction between Shirky's "good" motivations and my market-like esteem considerations is all that clear and easy to maintain in the first place. Esteem, like self-interest generally, is what Philip Pettit and Geoffrey Brennan call a standby or virtual cause of behavior. It’s not what’s directly sought from your actions, but if esteem wasn’t provided, you’d be less likely to behave that way. It’s a bias that steers us rather than an explicit principle that guides us. Esteem – the positive evaluations of others by the norm-based standards of whatever reference group you’re using – is the emotionally powerful implicit incentive within social groups that maintains conformity while allowing constant competitive evolution. Seeking it isn’t necessarily cynical, rather it's inextricably woven into group-focused behavior.

Why on earth are we so afraid of “rational motivations” that we have to banish them almost completely from talk of group action online? Beats me. Anyway, as someone who has to design interaction spaces online I think it’s dogmatic, maybe even superstitions, to think that esteem motivations are somehow less real or powerful because “inauthentic” and self-serving. After all, in public goods experiments, we are shown to be conditionally cooperative, meaning that we cooperate with a self-serving bias. If norms of cooperation or reciprocation aren’t sufficiently salient or aren’t otherwise maintained, we tend to stop playing nice and settle for getting all we can. The desire for esteem and status can actually get people to observe and stabilize cooperative norms for purely self-centered reasons; they’re self-serving incentives for pro-social behavior . We should design accordingly.

In the next couple of posts I’ll look more closely at esteem seeking, Shirky’s book and the popular bias against instrumental motivations online. I’ll use the example of the development of the Linux operating system to illustrate the distinction between two different versions of social capital as well as two different takes on the free rider problem. Of course, both of them will utilize the idea of esteem along with Bourdieu’s idea of the “economy of symbolic goods.”

Cultural Irony Ain't What It Used to Be

2009-02-12T14:07:00.024+01:00

In the last post I discussed trend uptake among trendsetters, hipsters and regular joes. In evaluating whether or not to partake of a trend, members of each group consider both their peers’ evaluations as well as the prevalence of the trend in their “community.” I just wanted to show how cultural items could be moved from the periphery to the mainstream by the mutually interdependent choices of motivationally distinct cultural sub-groups.

But that post didn’t really address what happens after the trend peaks. Most trends end, but not all end the same way. In the next post I’ll look at one class of trend ends: the ironic embrace. However, before I can do that, I need to look more closely at the contentious and much discussed subject of cultural irony itself. In particular, we’ll look at what cultural irony is commonly believed to be, what it probably really is, how it has changed and why some trendsetters reacted to the change with calls for “earnestness and authenticity.”

The Myth of Cultural Irony

Irony seems to be bound up with intention. Specifically, cultural irony is assumed to be like literary irony in that it’s the often comic tension between specifically doing or saying one thing but meaning or intending some totally different, often opposed, thing. Cultural irony is valorized in the literature as a critical strategy in the sense of being a self-conscious critique or questioning gesture. Back in the early ‘80s, Paul Fussell used irony as an identifying feature of his “Class X,” the class of urban and urbane hipsters and intellectuals who use camp and kitsch as a critical cultural tactic. Cultural irony in this sense is embrace – of bible school t-shirts, Jean-Claude Van Damme or velvet paintings – with a self-conscious commentary attached. It’s not doing what’s normal to fit in, it’s doing what’s “normal” to point out (particularly, to point out supposed tackiness, baseness or all around inanity).

But about 10 (some say 15) years ago cultural irony transformed into a fashionable style. Trendsetters and hipsters had made the strategy so visible and its cache so great that it finally caught on among the regular joes. Effectively, ironists’ self-aware embrace of the normal as a supposed critique of the “normal” was progressively replaced with a jokey cultural caricature, more reflexive than reflective, a fashionable scare-quoting of practically everything. The trendsetter’s strategic irony was overtaken by the regular joe’s purely stylistic version which mimicked some of the tropes and techniques of the earlier critical “ironists” without actually being critical. This caused some serious hand-wringing among the old ironic trendsetters and hipsters. As a result, a few years ago many trendsetters (and then hipsters) began advocating a return to earnestness.

Frankly, I don’t completely buy the above story of valiant and true trendsetting cultural ironists robbed of a vital critical technique by non-reflective, novelty-hungry cultural gluttons. I think it’s more likely that cultural irony is an in-group norm, which defines an esteem game. Let me elaborate.

The Game of Cultural Irony

Kierkegaard apparently claims that the greatest ironists want to be misunderstood. Half true. The greatest ironists want to be misunderstood by everyone, excluding a highly qualified and estimable few. That is, for irony to be ironic it has to allow the possibility of being taken at face value, but that possibility can’t be so overwhelmingly likely that absolutely no one gets the joke. Irony no one gets isn’t really ironic while irony everyone gets isn’t very good. The art comes in creating the aesthetic tension between appearance and intention; basically, coding so that the intention is hidden enough but still apparent to the initiate.

Like Kierkegaard’s great ironists, the greatest cultural ironists want to be understood by a sufficiently small and personally esteemed circle while being misunderstood by everyone else. In my preferred terms, they want to participate in a necessarily bounded esteem game that’s played by taking the appropriate attitude to pre-existing cultural artifacts.

Research on social group formation and identification suggests that they develop arbitrary conventions to increase both in-group cohesion and out-group difference. Consider styles of dress, types of music, uniforms, etc. and the presumed attitudes that go along with them. Sometimes these conventions develop into full-blown social norms with prescriptive impact (i.e. telling you what you’re expected to do in the ought to do sense of expectation). Among other things, norms – both conventions and social norms – define evaluative structures within social groups, i.e. esteem games within which members compete for esteem and evaluate each others’ performance in terms of the group’s prevailing normative standards.

My suggestion is that cultural irony is a norm: a coordinating set of strategies (conventions) for imbuing existing cultural artifacts (bands; t-shirts; cars; music styles; silly, cause-related rubber bracelets; etc.) with new, in-group determined meanings different from those of their original context. It may start with some sort of vague critical intent, but ultimately it stabilizes as one of several possible methods a self-consciously oppositional (counter-) cultural lineage manages to coordinate on for defining and evaluating in-group behaviors, attitudes and aesthetics. More simply, cultural irony is one of the many possible mechanisms a counter-cultural group can coordinate on to produce in-group cohesion and out-group difference. It's an internally coordinating means of external dissent. But once coordinated on, it determines an esteem game, a structure within which group members can attempt to gain esteem or status using various conventional strategies for appropriating and re-deploying other groups' cultural artifacts.

This story’s not as cool as the critical outsiders version, right? I agree, but think about it: Do you really think that all or even most of the culturally ironic fashion choices of trendsetters or hipsters through the ages – from today’s hip urbanites wearing funny thrift store tees touting middle American values to art savvy sophisticates collecting velvet paintings a couple of decades ago – were enacted with the sort of individual critical awareness that that story demands? No one really believes this. More often than not, our live choices are bounded by the coordinated conventions of our in-groups and those conventions are largely about heightening out-group difference. Sometimes we may more or less intentionally choose our in-group, but once chosen our actions tend to spring – not fully intentionally – from our desire to become and stay part of that group and our conditioned, group-appropriate expectations, esteem standards, dispositions or values. After a while – even if we're esteem seekers – we don’t reflect upon social norms and conventions, we act from within them. Generally it's only when we’re confused by a situation or a norm breaks down that we reflect on its content.

Also, it seems pretty clear that trendsetters and hipsters, within their in-groups, are just as motivated by esteem as everybody else, maybe even more so. Conventions and social norms are the strategies and standards of esteem games; they determine the viable moves as well as the criteria for evaluation.

So, the majority of trendsetting cultural ironists probably are not intentionally critiquing mass culture. Rather, they're participating in a group-defined and group-defining conventional game with others in their in-group. But cultural irony is in some sense critical. However, it is most often critical only at the strategic level – the level of in-group coordination on a mechanism of out-group differentiation – not the individual level. From a distance, the actions of cultural ironists appear critical because they re-define the cultural artifacts of other groups and times in order to define themselves. Yet at the level of personal choice, these actions are most often simply fashionable or conventional moves in an esteem game. Clearly, this is where the analogy between cultural and literary irony breaks down. Literary irony is also a convention, but it’s an intentionally selected one at the individual level. Cultural irony, on the other hand, is a norm coordinating consumption of and relations to cultural artifacts that is more often than not simply enacted rather than intentionally chosen.

Odds, Ends and Earnestness

Okay, but if cultural irony is a norm why and how did it spread like a trend? And if it was always a convention (like fashions), why does today’s fashionable cultural irony seem different from yesterday’s?

First of all we just need to notice that the spread of cultural irony seems to have the same structure as the trend curves model of the last post. It moved from trendsetters to hipsters and then, in its present form, to regular joes. By the time regular joes jumped on, trendsetters began moaning about the need for a return to earnestness (particularly the emo and indie rock kids of the early ‘90s).

Obviously, one group’s defining norm, which is a conventional and possibly prescriptive (i.e. ought) strategy, can be seen as simply an aspirational fashion by outsiders. That is, the emotionally charged, self-reinforcing and group-defining cultural mechanisms of one group can become the emulated fashion of another. Particularly if the object group has some sort of cultural cache or is otherwise aspirational. How does this work? Well, remember that cultural irony is most likely critical only at the strategic level – the level of group coordination – but not really at the individual level. It stabilized as a mechanism by which oppositional groups defined themselves, but the people in the group tend to live it as simply a fashion. When it’s emulated it loses its original group defining function – its oppositional or critical function – effectively reducing to a fashion or a simple coordinating function. The differentiating function has washed out through context change – from the oppositional trendsetter context to the less self-conscious regular joe context – leaving only the coordinating function.

Certainly, regular joes can be culturally ironic. But remember that good cultural irony depends on some people getting it and others not getting it. Quality irony requires a certain oppositional – in-group vs. out-group; those who get it vs. those who don’t – stance, and for regular joes that oppositional component is largely missing. Cultural irony is reduced to a funny fashion that may commandeer cultural artifacts, but it’s not really about re-defining those artifacts for oppositional in-group/out-group games. Everybody gets it. Effectively, when everybody’s ironic, nobody really is. Maybe this accounts for the felt but seldom articulated difference between the currently fashionable cultural irony and the sainted old sort fondly remembered by now aged hipsters and critical theorists.

But few, if any, old school bohemians were ever really culturally ironic in the idealized sense of fully self-consciously critical. That stance rapidly became an internalized or estimable way that folks who dig the cultural cache of the fringe gain esteem among their select peers. Those critics and hoary old hipsters pining for the glory days of critical irony are greatly overstating – and oversimplifying – their case. Basically, their kvetching is more a matter of wanting to maintain counter-cultural cache and difference than real sorrow at the dumbing of irony. As predicted by the trend curves, when cultural irony caught on among the regular joes, the trendsetters started clamoring for something different – authenticity and earnestness in this case – effectively coordinating on a new esteem game. That game, however, doesn't yet seem to have caught on like irony did.

Trendsetters, Hipsters and Regular Joes: value curves and cultural trends

2009-01-13T12:17:00.016+01:00

Luis Bettencourt suggests that trend setting and following can be thought of as a game that offers maximal benefit for those who partake of a successful trend as early as possible, ride it to its height and then bail before it loses momentum and crashes. But different people are likely to engage trends (and cultural artifacts in general) at different points in the trend’s life cycle and for different reasons. Some people self-consciously seek out novelty; others monitor the culture for the most promising up and coming trends; and still others simply follow the majority’s lead. It’s as if “communities” are comprised of sub-populations that differ in the way they evaluate trends relative to their uptake by the larger population.

Of course there are a large number of cultural factors (consumption/cultural capital; salient norms; symbolic capital and esteem; etc.) other than their fellow agents' behavior that impact people's evaluation of a trend. But for this post we want to hold those things steady and look at how the general uptake of a trend within a population impacts the trend’s attractiveness to three distinct sub-populations: trendsetters, hipsters and regular joes.

All in all it’s a system characterized by mutual interdependence, with agent’s evaluations of whether or not to join a trend strongly influenced by others’ opinions and expectations as evidenced by their actions (this includes the so-called trendsetters). With trends, it’s generally believed that the more others partake, the more valuable it is – up to a point – for the average agent to partake. For example, most people wouldn’t want to be the first person to introduce a fashion, but are willing to rock it once a significant (but not overwhelming) number of relevant others have. We can illustrate this idea with the following graph.

As the population partaking increases from 0 to n the value of partaking moves from negative to positive at point a. This is the so-called tipping point. From there it climbs until point b where saturation devalues the trend. To keep things simple, we’ll pretend that the trend eventually collapses and disappears or else becomes part of the cultural fabric – a presupposition – like wearing clothes in public in most Western cultures. In both of these cases, we’ll just say that the valuation tends to 0 as uptake approaches n. (Actually, there are several distinct possibilities for a trend’s life after point b, but those will be investigated in another post.)

That’s fine for the average cultural consumer, the regular joe, but what about people we would consider trendsetters? These people self-consciously value things few others do. Does their value curve look like this? Well, if we expressly confine n to their reference group – the people from whom they directly seek esteem and acceptance – then, yes. However, if we say n is some largish portion of the people in the trendsetter’s wider community, then, no. Trendsetters – or at least the cultural connoisseur and contrarian varieties – tend to value certain trends (and cultural artifacts generally, like bands, fashions, etc.) because they aren’t widely appreciated within their community (though they must be at least understandable within their reference group). Though many other cultural variables (consumption capital, cultural capital, etc.) come into play, the snotty urban movie store employee likes that movie you’ve never heard of partly because you’ve never heard of it.

So, those are two extremes, the regular joes and the trendsetters. The regular joes tend to hold off on positive evaluation until the expectation of general participation is high. Trendsetters on the other hand evaluate trends by more reference-group focused cultural standards (which we’ll ignore here) along with the trend’s uptake among the general public. For the little cultural caricature we’re doodling, we can say they’re pretty much opposed. As trend uptake moves toward the tipping point – point a in the graph above – it decreases in value for the trendsetter, ultimately becoming negative.

But there’s a third group worth looking at. I call this group the hipsters, but they aren’t exactly the tight-jeaned crew we associate with that word today. Some elements of the contemporary version, however, are descended from the more general hipster I’m considering here.

Hipsters aren’t trendsetters because they’re interested in finding only the winning trends. But they’re not regular joes either because they want to join prior to general uptake; they highly value joining before the tipping point. They want some of the cultural novelty, or attendant symbolic capital, of partaking of something others don’t currently but may soon value. But they also want that symbolic capital to extend beyond the trendsetter’s tightly focused reference group into the more general population. That is, they want the esteem that can be gotten from truthfully saying “I was into that before it was cool.” However, they also value novelty enough to bail on trends prior to their peak and subsequent collapse. So they value trends highest around the tipping point, but devaluation sets in shortly thereafter.

Anyway, putting all three idealized types together gives us the following graph.

The trendsetter disvalues the new and under-represented trend much less than the hipster and the regular joe, thus he starts from a point much closer to neutrality (of course, he could start from neutral or even positive). It also takes a much smaller portion of the population partaking (a couple of fellow trendsetters) for the trendsetter to positively evaluate the trend.

As the new thing catches on among the trendsetters, it approaches point a. At this point the hipsters, who have been monitoring the culture for up and coming trends, take note and the trend moves from negative to positive for them. This is a tipping point for the hipsters and it marks the beginning of devaluation for the trendsetter.

Absolute devaluation for the trendsetter occurs at point b, the tipping point for the regular joes and the point of highest value for the hipsters. The trend has nothing to offer the trendsetters anymore as it has now been officially accepted by the mainstream. The hipsters act as a bridge between the miniscule number of trendsetters and bulk of the population. Indeed, they are probably the ones that bring trends at the cultural periphery into the mainstream, giving them enough exposure to decrease their disvalue to the regular joes.

Moving from b to c, the trendsetter’s value curve declines while the regular joe’s peaks. The hipster, however, has had steadily diminishing value since the peak at b. Around c, it goes negative and only returns to neutrality as the trend is in absolute decline/disappearance on approach to n. In future posts I’ll look at a more complete model of the possibilities after c.

The most interesting thing about this model is that it paints a relatively intuitive picture of how three groups of cultural consumers/producers value trends relative to each other’s valuations. And if we squint a little, it meshes relatively well with Duncan Watts’s [pdf] contention that the most important element in a viral model isn’t necessarily the Influentials (here, the trendsetters, who are looked to by others as harbingers of hot new trends), but rather the connected subgroup of folks with low switching and adoption costs (here, the hipsters, who pick up and amplify trends that become highly valued among the trendsetters). Hipsters are seeking a broader display of cultural capital and the accumulation of symbolic capital or esteem in general and thus seek out potentially successful trends, joining early and switching often. To that end, they bring trends into the mainstream and give them enough exposure to potentially tip the regular joe’s. Without them, the trend might be noticed but not generally valued.

Authenticty and The Economy of Esteem

2008-11-13T11:07:00.009+01:00

Authenticity was much talked about in marketing circles a couple of years ago. Specifically, in trying to reach a coveted and marketing-wary demographic like young adults you have to appear to be “authentic” in your approach. Your whatsit must “authentically” appeal to them as a spontaneous product of their own milieu and not as a calculated, outsider’s attempt at cynically leveraging their culture against them.

The tricky bit, of course, is that everybody knows that everything for sale is positioned and marketed rather cynically and that “authenticity” as a desirable component of marketing sort of undoes itself. Is this kind of paradoxical? If you design something, particularly a marketing campaign, to be authentic haven’t you automatically rendered it inauthentic? Well, sort of yes and sort of no.

A recent book on the subject apparently claims that “authenticity” is a matter of consumer perception. I take this to mean something like authenticity is the consumer’s perception of the intentions of those producing the item. Particularly the perception that the cynical desire to mimic the target culture for gain wasn’t the (or the primary) motivation in the dingus’s design, presentation, etc. Most marketed things simply aren’t and can’t be authentic in the strict or ideal sense of non-reflective products of their intended demographic’s culture. But they can be more or less successful at giving that impression, effectively hiding their cynical origins.

That seems pretty obvious. What interests me is why hiding cynical origins should matter. Why do we care about authenticity and what is it we’re upset about when faced with inauthenticity?

Too Cool for School

When we see somebody going a little too far in a social situation, trying their damnedest to be cool or funny or drop the right references, slang and posture, we say they’re “trying too hard.” Often this makes us uncomfortable, annoyed, sympathetic and sometimes even angry. Personally, I’m most annoyed by “studied eccentricity,” or over-articulated individuality and forced, awkward public displays of “creativity.” For example, the artsy hipster whose outfits are precisely counter-trend in just the right way and purely on principle. To me, these folks are trying too hard and it makes me uncomfortable. Why?

Well, this situation sort of has the structure of norm compliance from the last post (suggested by a recent article by Learry Gagné, although Jon Elster, Dov Cohen, Georffrey Brennan and Philip Pettit have hit on many of these ideas as well). Keeping it simple, compliers ideally fall into three categories: true believers, esteem seekers and cynics. The incentive to comply is largely based on esteem, belonging and the withholding of both. But the whole thing seems to be governed by what Pierre Bourdieu calls the principle of “disinterestedness” (but Jon Elster hits on a similar idea in his Sour Grapes) If it’s apparent that you’re cynically going after esteem, that you’re complying just so you’ll fit in and be thought well of, then you aren’t likely to get as much of it as if you appeared to be a true believer, that is complying out of commitment to the values invested in the norm.

There tend to be relatively few true believers, yet most people don’t comply cynically just to get esteem. But their compliance can be explained by esteem. Paradoxical? Not really. Esteem seekers don’t comply expressly to get it, but if esteem wasn’t available through compliance, they wouldn’t comply. The availability of esteem is what keeps them complying, but not in the cynical sense that it’s what they’re expressly seeking. Rather esteem is the affective incentive that stabilizes their behavior around a norm. This sets up what Philip Petitt, Geoffrey Brennan and others call the economy of esteem.

Pierre Bourdieu noted that what he called the economy of symbolic goods, effectively the economy of esteem, assumed a “taboo on making things explicit." In a nutshell, the whole economy of esteem crumbles if it’s exposed. That is, true believers as well as esteem seekers and cynics have an incentive to never bring up the pseudo-instrumental nature of the economy of esteem. Realizing, displaying or communicating that it’s an economy, a system for the distribution of some commodity, strikes at its own foundation, i.e. disinterestedness. Esteem is given in proportion to the apparent disinterestedness of compliance. If instrumental interests in compliance are made explicit, Bourdieu’s taboo, the whole thing crumbles and no esteem may be given or accumulated. And as with all taboos, transgression breeds discomfort and chagrin.

The people who try too hard, like the “studied eccentrics” from above, effectively make the whole thing obvious by clumsily attempting to make a bold move in the esteem game. By playing one strategy too obviously – telegraphing the “individuality” hand – they’ve made the whole thing explicit and indirectly transgressed against Bourdieu’s taboo. In effect their bad play reveals the man behind the curtain and it’s sort of annoying; they reveal their probable cynicism and implicate us as fellow players of a game, the playing of which demands that it be taken for reality. Something that presents itself as entirely values based is revealed as partly instrumental and relatively shallow. This is unsettling.

The Inauthentic

Inauthentic marketing, for example, annoys because its cynicism is too obvious. It tries too hard to gain from playing on the tropes, codes and symbols we all use to gain esteem and a sense of belonging or meaning. Basically, it nastily and clumsily caricatures the mechanisms by which we all construct cultural meaning in social situations. The whole economy is rendered explicit and this threatens and implicates us all in a self-wrought but necessary and largely uncynical deception.

So personal authenticity isn’t even “authentic” in the strict or ideal sense (whatever that might mean). Getting back on theme, what we perceive as “authentic” marketing or products don’t try too hard. That is, they never do anything to make the norms, styles and other plays within the cultural economy of esteem explicit. I take it that’s how cynically produced items can be “authentic”; they’re quietly keyed into the playing of the game, not the gaming of the game.

The Case of "Compulsive Disclosure" - Social Functionality and Norms

2008-11-07T12:40:00.017+01:00

In the last post, I discussed the idea of “culture” and the norms that constitute it. You can think of norms in two complementary ways: as collectively converged upon mechanisms coordinating our repeated daily interactions and as affectively charged, behavior-reinforcing repositories of shared meaning and values. In this post I want to discuss how social functionality and social media impact our expectations and preferences in interactions, ultimately leading to convergence on new norms. Because it's pretty well entrenched and understood (if passe), I'll use blogging as my main example.

To older people, it’s alarming that younger people tend to be pretty easy and open with their personal information online. One reason may be that there are many more opportunities for sharing information online that are systematically legitimated, as in registration processes, profile development and online forms in general. But this sort of disclosure doesn’t have the “bare your soul” or “edit, please” quality that I’m interested in. What interests me is the use of social functionality to (effectively) broadcast what seem to be the most intimate and/or banal details of your life. A relatively familiar example is the hyper-frank "diary" blog sub-genre. People write these knowing that friends, acquaintances and strangers will read and respond. And both producers and consumers are not typically "outliers" or closet transgressors using anonymity as a means of catharsis. Rather, the vast majority of people sustaining the norm are “regular” folks baring their souls – often sharing what seem to be the most embarrassing, compromising and/or dull details of their lives – and owning up to it.

In face to face interactions or other real world self-presentations we tend to reserve most personal information about ourselves for our closest friends and family. Often, “opening up” is about displaying trust or forcing the hearer to feel as if they are somehow symbolically indebted or "down" with you. Clearly the norms of disclosure and relevance operating in “real life” aren’t the norms observed online. I don’t think this is only because blog posts are relatively anonymous and sort of like publishing, i.e. one-way. At some level, posts are intended to set the tone and define the situation for an ensuing interpersonal interaction in a public forum, albeit a relatively stilted one with no co-presence and formidable latency.

Anyway, under the old norms, the often wrenching (or incredibly dull) self-disclosure we see online would probably create discomfort and confusion as to how to understand the interaction offline. Under the new norm(s), however, it can generate praise, esteem, sympathy and positive normative response on at least some registers. Norms, by definition, carry their standards of value and evaluation with them. What has caused the stabilization of this norm of “compulsive disclosure?”

Nothing Like a Nice Bourdieu

Before looking at the case of compuslive disclosure, I'd like to suggest a mechanism by which an old norm may be nullified and new one developed without necessarily requiring everybody to be "true belivers" in the norm's values. In other words, a mechanism that lets me suggest how the counter-normative behavior of a small group of "outliers" – folks not operating by the norms of disclosure and relevance of the “real” world – can eventually result in the acceptance and stabilization of a new norm.

Following Learry Gagné, I return to Pierre Bourdieu for the mechanism. I’ve discussed this before. Effectively people seek symbolic gain in interactions, but importantly, the terms of that gain are set by the cultural milieu in which they’re operating. In Bourdieu’s terms you often have to use your cultural capital – your knowledge, skills and abilities in understanding and creating domain-appropriate cultural artifacts and situations – to gain symbolic capital – status, prestige, esteem or general recognition by your focal group.

Mechanisms like this create what Philip Petitt and Geoffrey Brennan call the economy of esteem. People engage in behaviors they wouldn't engage in were they not capable of gaining esteem from them. But they don't necessarily comply cynically. Esteem maintains the norm in the sense that people who aren't naturally "outliers" would cease the behavior were the norm no longer there to gain esteem from. But, they've internalized the norm to such an extent that their compliance is pretty much emotional or non-maximizing.

Does the Nature of Social Functionality Impact Norms?

Of course it does. Three properties of social media seem particularly relevant to the rapid stabilization of norms online.

1. The poster’s relatively low-costs (in time, money, attention, etc.) of forming a presence (blogging, posting a video, etc.)

2. The consumer’s low cost of switching and/or forwarding.

3. The ease and efficiency with which feedback accumulates from the consumer to the poster.

The first suggests that you’ll get relatively high volume of content, providing social and cultural “outliers” in particular an equalized platform. The relatively small number of people who really do have a need to bare their souls in a public forum – counter to the norms supported by the larger culture – now have a potentially much larger public forum.

The second suggests that people can zip between posters easily both because of the arbitrarily linked nature of the web and because of the conventions of social media content genres (short, easily digestible pieces, e.g. blog posts).

These two together give the "outliers" a forum and a mechanism for gaining an audience. Basically, the qualities of the medium allow potentially counter-normative behavior – behavior at the "edge" of normal – to be viewed from the center. The third helps solidify the self-disclosure sub-genre by providing a stabilizing and often legitimating feedback channel.

To unpack this a little, "outlier" producers – the people who naturally transgress against the "real world" norms – use the platform as a cathartic mechanism for logging their innermost feelings. The relative impoverishment of the context reduces the salience of applicable norms so the discomfort of witnessing the transgression isn't as acute as it would be in person. But norm transgression, in this case the enactment of intimate privacy in a public space, can be fascinating in itself and this appeals to a significant “outlier” subset within the audience.

So we have a platform that's just distinct enough from the real world to allow public transgression of dominant interaction norms without the crushing sanctions that would occur in the "real world." The platform also provides extensive means of getting this narrow-appeal content before appreciative eyes. Finally, the feedback channel largely provides validating evaluations of the transgressive performance (partly because of the self-selecting nature of the audience). Constant public transgression coupled with forwarding and positive, visible feedback via the third property effectively weakens the old norms while laying the normative framework for new ones. Enough exposure to a new way of framing an interaction or self-presentation coupled with public displays of acceptance and evaluation can create the sort of structures of expectation, preference and values that define new norms.

But what’s interesting beyond this formation of the norm among the “true believers” or "outliers," the folks who would break the old norm anyway, is the fact that the norm can stabilize among the mainstream. There is a lot more comfort with, expectation of, and preference for personal disclosure in some online contexts than there is in most offline contexts. Basically, I claim that the voiding of the offline norms was facilitated by the properties of the medium. They effectively amplified the dispositions of the “true believers” creating an environment in which new normative expectations – expectations of others expectations that conditionalize our preferences in situations – could stabilize and spread beyond the “true believers.”

The norm is adopted by the larger community because of user's expectations of other's expectations, i.e. the possibility of the earning or withholding of esteem. Considerations of esteem don’t enter into it for the “outliers” or true believers. They’re just that way; their behavior is a manifestation of their values. However, it does enter into it for the majority of people who perpetuate the norm, both as producers and consumers. They wouldn’t necessarily behave this way without the existence of the norm to generate esteem. The discomfort at transgression of the old norm is lost and a new set of normative standards – a set of felt preferences and eventually internalized ways of simply being in the world – replaces it. The normative standards provide mechanisms by which self-esteem and esteem can be gained, either consciously or rationally – for “posers” or cynics – and unconsciously or emotionally – for people who may not be outliers dispositionally, but adopt the norm “in good faith.” As long as no one knows everybody else’s true status – true believer, esteem seeker or poser – and the groups are effectively indistinguishable in behavior, then if esteem is flowing the norm will stabilize and perpetuate.

Clearly, the properties of social media have deep effects on the norms and (thus) culture online. Realizing this fact has important ramifications for how we design and deploy social functionality. We can see that we must design for the development of pro-social norms. We can also see how media and cultural dynamics interact in the abstract. But clearly even non-antisocial norms like compulsive disclosure can appear negative from the outside (though I personally don't think that they are). And because the norms that develop are the path dependent and immensely complex results of strategic negotiations and interactions among enormous numbers of actors, there’s no way you’ll be able to predict what norms will actually emerge. However, with this understanding you will be able to make non-judgmental sense of – and thus develop coherent, non-reactionary policy to address – the ones that do emerge.

The Social, The Cultural and The Difference

2008-11-03T15:01:00.012+01:00

In my line of work we use the word "social" a lot... social media, social networks, mobile social software, etc. And in analysis of these things, we generally use the word ambiguously to mean either the social or the cultural. What, even in caricature, is the difference? Here’s an intuitive first stab at the distinction.

The Social is about the connections and interactions between people, whereas The Cultural is about connections and interactions between people mediated by shared concepts, history, symbol systems, etc.

That is, most social interactions are mediated and structured by cultural mechanisms like norms and institutions.

Social functionality and social media obviously have some effects that are purely social in the sense above, i.e. that impact the number and quality of our interpersonal connections and the efficiency with which new connections may be made. But social media just as obviously operate on and respond to culture, i.e. the conventional meanings, preferences and distinctions that structure the interactions within our social network.

In this post, I’ll sketch a view of social norms and thus culture. Basically, I want to be able to use this formulation in future posts as a means of understanding how social media impact our preferences and expectations going into interactions. In other words, I ultimately want to look at how the specific properties of social media change culture, but first I'd like to clarify what culture is.

The Games People Play

Social norms are the informal rules of society that are maintained in several ways: by sanctions from others; by our expectations of others’ expectations; by our general desire to do as relevant others do or by some combination of all of the above. You can look at social norms in at least two ways.

1. Norms embed, encode and instantiate values.

2. Norms coordinate interactions.

To me, these are complementary ways of thinking about norms. The first is more of a lived, affective understanding. It’s about our motivating emotional states, presumed expectations and means of personal and interpersonal leverage. The second is a more cognitive understanding. It’s about the conventional structures of interaction and the delimited sets of feasible strategies that turn potentially destructive “state of nature” mixed-motive games into coordination games. The two ways of thinking of norms feed into each other: the affective reinforces and “operationalizes” the cognitive and the cognitive effect of coordination “justifies” the affective.

Culture is a system of norms that coordinates repeated interactions. Stanford political scientist David Laitin provides a tidy definition of culture in his book Nations, States, and Violence.

culture [is] an equilibrium in a well defined set of circumstances in which members of a group sharing in common descent, symbolic practices and/or high levels of interaction – and thereby becoming a cultural group – are able to condition their behavior on common knowledge beliefs about the behavior of all members of the group.

Basically, he’s using game theory jargon to say that culture is a set of complementary “plans” – or strategies – for interacting with other locals. The plans allow us to coordinate our actions efficiently and effectively. If we stick to our learned and conditioned plan we can greatly reduce the daunting task of keeping track of everybody’s probable motivations, expectations and preferences (i.e. what game they’re playing) in every interaction. Essentially, our plans tell us how we’re expected to proceed and what we should expect from others in most interactions. Once that’s out of the way, we can get down to the business of actually getting what we need out of the defined interaction. Others are using similar interaction-defining plans and expect the same from us. If we deviate, they may have incentive to try to get us back on plan. Thus feedback keeps the set of plans in a relatively stable equilibrium; deviation from conventionally understood plans often results in forces – from others and from within – that may pull us back on plan. So, in effect culture systematizes and stabilizes most of the repeated interactions we get into and defines the ones that might be unclear otherwise.

Why are cultures different in different places? Because there are a huge number of sets of plans that form equilibria for the repeated interactions we get into daily. Which equilibrium your group actually converges on is a path dependent accident of history. And of course, the “chosen” equilibrium could always fall apart and a new equilibrium could be converged upon.

So culture is just a locally stable, conditioned and self-reinforcing set of plans for coordinating the situations that continually arise in interactions with others. Specifically, they coordinate interactions by limiting the available plans for action given everybody else’s probable plans.

Seems pretty anemic, doesn’t it? Indeed, our daily experience is of the affective, values-embedding aspect of norms. It’s affective insofar as there’s a definite emotional and felt component to this conception of norms. We feel the draw of values and morals to comply or sanction non-compliance. We feel a certain dread (or delight) in transgressing them. Or when our fully internalized and purely habitual norm compliance is challenged we feel discomfort or confusion as to how to proceed.

It helps to think of these two aspects – the cognitive and the affective – as operating at different levels. If the equilibrium story describes culture from a broader perspective – of long term, pan-player negotiation that ultimately settles upon conventional ways of framing situations and thus structuring interactions with each other – then the affective aspect seems to be more about the short-run, lived experience of these coordinated interactions. That is, the equilibrium understanding is about the way we stabilize interactions through longer term development of coordinating conventions, while the affective understanding suggests something of the way we perpetuate, commit to, signal compliance with and internalize the equilibrium’s strategies in our daily lives.

My interest here is in motivation to comply and how that can stabilize and perpetuate norms. People like to belong. But more than that, they like to avoid sanction or be esteemed or attain high status or maintain a (good or bad) reputation. These are social needs that manifest themselves through the conventional “channels” and mechanisms of norms.

Some social norms, like fairness, have a clear benefit in coordination. Others, like wearing burkas, seem a little murky and arbitrary to cultural outsiders. We really can’t see any benefit in the custom and actually often perceive moral and political dangers to women. Still, the custom is valued by many and tolerated and perpetuated by many more for reasons of social pressure, perceptions of sanction and societal expectation. Still, those who don’t really feel that it’s god’s will that they wear a burka must act as if they are doing so out of devotion. It’s not enough that they do it, but rather they must do it as if they are true believers. If they didn’t they could face exclusion, disesteem or possible social and physical sanctions.

Following the work of Jon Elster and Learry Gagné, I claim the emotional aspect of norms – even though norms “really are” just arbitrary, conventional and clearly sub-optimal instances of behavioral coordination or sub-game equilibria of a higher level game equilibrium like religion – explains the perpetuation and spread of even the most detrimental customs and practices in a way that purely instrumental or utility maximizing accounts can’t. Emotions and values make these things sticky and resilient in the face of obvious sub-optimality and irrationality. Many of the people maintaining norms don’t even have to believe in the encoded values and may even suffer because of them. They simply have to believe that others believe and thus will sanction, not value or ostracize them if they don’t comply. Most importantly, they must desire the esteem, belonging and the self-respect that comes from acceptance by others. And, of course, they may fear both external sanctions and the emotional sanctions one gets from transgressing internalized norms. If there are vocal and salient norm believers, a significant number of compliers and a lot of folks interested in belonging and accumulating esteem, even lame, unpopular norms can be indefinitely perpetuated (if the incentive to change is outweighed by the incentive – rational and emotional – to maintain).

Properties of social media – in particular the ease with which feedback accumulates and speed with which items can be propagated – can impact dynamics of culture. I’ll explore this idea in the next post by looking at the new norm of “compulsive disclosure” online.

Defining the Situation: Goffman, Social Functionality and Minicultures

2008-10-22T14:38:00.021+02:00

When an individual enters into the presence of others, they commonly seek to acquire information about him or to bring into play information about him already possessed... Information about the individual helps to define the situation, enabling others to know in advance what he will expect of them and what they may expect of him. Informed in these ways, the others will know how best to act in order to call forth a desired response from him

That quote is from Erving Goffman’s classic, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. The book's basic claim is that human interactions are mediated by stagey appearances through which we imply – and from which others infer – our expectations, preferences, status, etc. We assume roles, staging presentations of ourselves, to ensure smooth, appropriately stable and beneficial interactions. The roles coordinate, structure and define our interactions as we negotiate a mutually agreeable definition of the situation.

Goffman was talking about face-to-face interactions, but I clearly agree with his main point as it pertains to digitally mediated interaction as well. When engaging with social functionality, we tend to throw out signals, intentionally and unintentionally, that indicate our expectations, preferences, etc. (i.e. "define the situation" in Goffman's terms) and coordinate our interactions with others. Display – a dimension of social functionality discussed in previous posts – is often about projecting a desirable position or estimable image, putting us in a position to get the most from our interactions. We then have to live up to or act consistently with that situation-defining image on pain of embarrassment, ridicule and situational discomfort.

However, situation definition in social interactions generally isn’t only determined by the people interacting. That is, there’s usually an externally imposed limit on the available “definitions.” Defining an interaction situation is sort of like declaring to each other what game we’re playing. I suggest, “Let’s play football” and you agree. We now roughly know what we can and can’t do. Our available strategies are bounded by the rules, but not wholly determined. We can still surprise each other and gain advantage within the game’s constitutive rules. Analogously, many interactions are about settling on the game to be played. But I claim the majority of interactions are about jockeying for advantage within an already determined meta-game. So, to sharpen the insight from Goffman's quote, I suggest that many of the broader aspects of most situations are already defined for us and the remaining definitional negotiations tend to be about fine-tuning or determining advantage. That is, we assume roles that are already defined and relatively definitive, we don't usually create the roles.

This is similar to what the philosopher of social science Don Ross suggests as the solution to the problem of game determination. In many social situations, culture handles this coordination: we more or less understand the expectations, obligations, etc. of the folks assuming the various roles in particular contexts because we’ve been conditioned to understand them. Understanding this stuff via conditioned expectations gets us past the cognitively intractable task of having to always figure out what game we’re playing first (i.e. what the best plan is given what others’ probable moves will be). In short, culture coordinates us on the arbitrary but stable games to be played while avoiding the destructive “state of nature” games in which we approach every interaction as if it were a mixed-motive game like the Prisoners Dilemma.

Designing as Defining

Social functionality, or the largely digital mechanisms that impact, amplify or alter our socialization online and off, are really weird if we think about them in terms of the ideas above. They’re generally anemic compared to face-to-face interaction spaces, providing only rudimentary means of interpersonal situation negotiation. Also, the cultural cues for defining situations – conventionally encoded in everything from architecture to tone of voice to uniforms and styles or dress, etc. – tend to be either missing or unconventionally signified. Social functionality tends to provide very limited and very strange means of “defining the situation” in the Goffman sense.

And even though recent public goods experiments show that people want to cooperate, it’s with a self-serving bias and conditional on others doing it in a way that can be observed. Reciprocation, cooperation and general decency tend to decrease on average over the long haul if not “structurally maintained”, i.e. if norms aren’t made salient. In situations involving social functionality, where there are few recognizable cultural institutions and coordination among individuals is tough, things can get messy quickly, devolving into potentially destructive mixed-motive situations where everyone acts like a selfish jerk.

Unlike the real world, though, systems incorporating social functionality have a third party in on the situation definition: the designer. Designers have a significant impact on the definition and – most importantly – maintenance of the situation. Design can help to stimulate the development of norms and the cobbling together of a simple “culture” within spaces employing social functionality. In particular, if the social functionality system isn’t a) structured for norm development or b) partially mapped onto an independently existing, institution embedding cultural group, it will often tear itself apart.

For example, in terms of structuring for norm development, Wikipedia’s use of Display inflected functionality coupled with iterative editing and negotiation mechanisms allows norms (in the sense of mutually held expectations of others’ expectations) to stabilize very quickly. This in turn keeps the majority of contentious entries from erupting into wholesale warfare. That is, the interactions are defined in terms of – bounded by – group developed norms of conduct and quality, the development of which was fostered by certain design decisions (essentially involving Display functionality, interestingly enough).

Wide open social spaces like MySpace and Facebook, on the other hand tend not to have this focused structure. Yet they also rely on a combination of positive and negative feedback mechanisms to help coordinate on norms. In particular, content can be tagged offensive or great; users can gain reputations and status; or they can get flagged and barred.

But stupid, antisocial behavior still arises because of the massive volume of users, the low join-and-drop overhead and the ease of anonymity. So, in terms of the second situation-defining design trick, I think we’ll find that the amount of disinhibition is inversely related to the closeness of the system’s mapping onto “real-world” networks. That is, if the system somehow extends or amplifies offline socialization, situation definitions from the real world can come to structure the interactions in the digital system. Situation definitions must be maintained if your real world friends are mixed in with your more tenuous “online only” friends. Similarly, but to a much lesser extent, systems that allow users to institute voluntary, displayable assortation – or self-grouping that can define some sort of in-group ethos – will also see significant norm development and stabilization.

Lurkers Aren’t Necessarily Free-riders

These are pretty obvious observations and have been put forward elsewhere, although without the theoretical structure of situation definition in terms of system-specific mini “cultures.” What’s interesting is that this allows us to look at things like “lurking” in a totally new light. Situation definition isn’t all about curbing jerky behavior. It’s also about determining appropriateness of interactions in subtler ways.

A while ago, people who cared about this stuff considered lurking – that is, partaking of the content on social sites without contributing any yourself – to be a from of free-riding on a public good. Lurkers were reaping the benefit without contributing to upkeep. Recently, however, some writers have begun to think of lurking in terms of cultural capital. On this view, many people lurk because they’re accumulating cultural capital, i.e. the skills, codes, knowledge, etc. that a user has for interpreting cultural artifacts. A significant proportion of lurking is about the user trying to figure out the community norms.

In our terms, lurkers are uncertain of situation definitions and the areas available for further negotiation. That is, they’re uncertain of the expectations of others and the proper way of expressing their own expectations and preferences so that will be understandable by others within the system and thus potentially beneficial to themselves. They don’t know how to act to coordinate on situation definitions that will be mutually understandable, useful and beneficial... or at least won’t result in discomfort.

So, designing for the emergence, stabilization and display of norms within systems utilizing social functionality can both curb disinhibition and more quickly convert lurkers into actors. Now, getting designers to realize that this is part of their job in a more than just “do what’s worked in the past” way – getting them to realize that social functionality design is embedded in and impacts cultural as well as social systems – is the really hard part.

The Display Aspect of Social Functionality

2008-10-07T23:55:00.019+02:00

In an earlier post, I suggested that what I broadly call social functionality (i.e. the sociality-enhancing, socially focused, largely UGC functionality, sites and applications currently so popular) operate within a space defined by the following three dimensions.

Knowledge: We use this stuff to learn. Specifically, we use it to learn from each other. For example, user reviews or Wikipedia.

Connection: We use this stuff to communicate, bond, meet, define affiliations and dislikes or just hang out where the people are. For example, friending on social sites or Twitter.

Display: We use this stuff to communicate and manage presentations of ourselves, truthfully or not, to others. For example, user profiles or Flickr.

No piece of social functionality is all one and none of the others, but they tend to be weighted differently in each case. To me, Display is the most interesting one, yet it’s the least explored of all of them. Web theorists and proselytizers tend to focus on Connection and Knowledge, assuming them to be the main drivers of online sociability. Display is often thought of as an embarrassing, “inauthentic,” or cynical counterpoint to these otherwise ennobling drives. In this post, I look at the Display dimension and suggest that it's crucially important for motivating contribution and can actually stabilize and help self-regulate systems of social functionality.

Even though Display frequently only makes sense in terms of Connection and Knowledge, the latter two get a lot of their user-motivating power from Display. That is, functionality in the Connection and Knowledge dimensions often provide a means of – and excuse for – Display. But Display often motivates contributions (and impacts the type of contributions) made via Knowledge and Connection functionality. For example, mixing elements of Display into Connection focused functionality (e.g. publicly visible comments on Flickr) arguably motivates more – and more interesting – use than simple Connection (comments viewable to the image poster).

Break It Down

Users are generally looking for one or more of the following things when they approach social functionality through Display.

Status: This is rank or position, often bound up with some expectations and obligations. These tend to be systemic or group based, like editor status in Wikipedia. It's a mark of distinction that sets certain users off from the rest. Some social sites actually allow the earning of status and thus it becomes aspirational for a devoted few. Others just require that you stick around and contribute for a long time, sort of like the “old hats” in the usenets of yesteryear.

Reputation: A user evaluation (positive or negative) based on past interactions that sticks with the user through future interactions. eBay’s reputation mechanism is the most famous and easiest example. These are usually associated with mixed-motive situations in which some folks may have an incentive to screw over other users. Generalizing, we can say that if your past interactions or contributions affect your future interactions, then you have a reputation.

Esteem: We seek positive evaluation of our contributions based on more or less well defined normative standards. This one is the most vague but also the most prevalent social function in the Display dimension. Whenever we write a review or post a picture we want to give off the best impression we can, even if we're posting to a group of friends who know us really well. We still tailor our presentation of self to whatever normative standards we think we can get away with. We pitch our performance to the normative standards of the group we are trying to garner esteem from. The desire for esteem, the desire to look good, is part of most user's motivation when using (UGC) social functionality.

Though often used more or less interchangeably, these three are in fact distinct but closely related ideas. You can have a high status – be a Wikipedia editor, for example – yet still not be particularly esteemed. The same goes for reputation. You can have a good reputation, meaning you haven’t screwed over anyone, yet not be a star. Similarly, a hack with a bad rep can create a good post, garnering some esteem, but this doesn’t mean she thereby has a good reputation. Also, a reputation can be good or bad while esteem is always positive.

So, they’re distinct ideas, but they’re also intimately related. For example, a mechanism that cuts across all three is Amazon’s “Top 100 Reviewer” tag. Review voting is primarily an esteem focused gadget intended to incentivize quality. These aggregate via a modified reputation system which then results in a status change.

Like the larger space of social dimensions, the three Display dimensions – Status, Reputation and Esteem– form a continuum. It’s rare that a piece of social functionality falls under just one. It’s also rare that a piece of functionality is expressly intended to operate within a single dimension, e.g. be expressly designed to allow the user to garner esteem by posting content. Rather, the dimensions articulate the different social functions actually played by the largely neutral mechanisms deployed in different contexts. Obviously, some social functionality mechanisms are expressly intended to focus on a single element, like reputation mechanisms. Most, however, are comprised of relatively neutral functionality that’s contextually deployed in such a way that it assumes the social function. For example the commenting functionality associated with pictures in Flickr often assumes a significant Esteem accumulating function. This doesn’t mean that the generic class of commenting functionality was designed to fulfill the Esteem needs of the owner of the target content any more than it was designed to facilitate the Connection needs of the commenter. It’s just used that way in this case.

So What

Surprisingly, these “individualistic” Display functions can have significant effects on the larger “ecology” of dimensions. That is, the elements of Display, which are simply mechanisms individuals use for self-presentation and self-image management online, can have surprising higher-level effects.

Motivating: Regardless of what traditional decision theorists say, status and esteem are powerful incentives[pdf] that can generate their own systems of distribution and accumulation. The desire for esteem in particular can be particularly motivating. A significant portion of the “altruistic” behavior in user created knowledge sites like Wikipedia is attributable to the motivating power of esteem. It can get people contributing even if the group from which esteem is sought is tiny, provided contribution costs are relatively low.

Stabilizing: Esteem mechanisms like voting on reviews and reputation mechanisms like some badge systems actually help to establish norms, thus stabilizing the systems they’re part of. In effect, these mechanisms create a means of negotiating, ratifying and displaying norms by continually motivating input, allowing voting on contributions and filtering out the less popular within whatever groups arise. The result can be something like a self-fulfilling system of expectations (an equilibrium, maybe?). New users see what garners esteem or creates a good reputation, allowing them to accumulate cultural capital, which then, of course, determines the norms their contributions follow.

Regulating: Display functions often introduce the “spectre of the future” via reputation mechanisms. Basically this means that in mixed-motive situations, you’re likely to cooperate and play nice if you think that this interaction will have repercussions on future interactions. Also, producing visible normative prototypes via the mechanisms discussed in the last item actually leads to more and more people honoring local (in the sense of relevant to their group) norms. Norms that arise from groups through action and feedback tend to be largely self-regulating.

All of this suggests (to me at least) that the Display aspects of social functionality are pretty important and not simply the embarrassing or cynical flip-side of the nobler Connection and Knowledge dimensions.

Why Some People Are So Pissed About the Facebook Redesign

2008-09-25T20:46:00.009+02:00

For the last couple of months there has been some fuss and furor over the Facebook redesign. Some love it, most don’t care, but a vocal, petition-waving few really, really don’t like it. Frankly, I think it’s a pretty good redesign. Most importantly for me, it cuts through the haze of humorous/cutsey/unused applications, placing them under a noncommittally named “Boxes” tab. Good move, I think. The majority of Facebook Apps remind me of the bulky, holstered PDAs that dangled predictably at every MBA’s hip a couple of years ago: a clumsy accessory masquerading as an interesting device. Of course, that’s what Facebook Apps really are, but I guess it’s just not for me.

Anyway, what interests me is the vehemence of the reaction and what it says about the idea of usability and the nature of design lock-in. In particular, the furor highlights the inadequacy or partial irrelevance of “objective” standards of classical usability. Obviously a considerable number of people feel that increased effectiveness, efficiency, learnability, etc. – whatever items comprise your favored usability checklist – isn’t an adequate rationale for changing a design mid-use. Nor do the measurable usability improvements seem to add up to satisfaction. Usability as preached by the industry is clearly distinct from the preferences that arise within the dynamics of actual use.

That last sentence is a mouthful, but it’s really just an observation that “usability” in the real world (i.e. the perception of comfort, effectiveness and satisfaction with some system) is as much about familiarity with arbitrary, usually suboptimal conventions as it is with traditional human factors issues. Given a choice in a non-laboratory, not “controlled for” situation, people generally choose what they know and understand over what’s new but ostensibly optimal. No matter how much the new one latches on to the tested realities of the human perceptual/cognitive machinery, people prefer what they already know.

So, one must ask, what was the assumed gain behind redesigning an interface with a familiarity base of 100 million? Hard to say, but usability in the wild is obviously as much about familiarity as optimality. Just because something has been and continues to be done in a particular way – just because coordination of goals and means has been achieved and internalized in some fashion – people become invested in that way of doing it regardless of whether or not it’s the best way. They have an unreasoned emotional response to change even though the change they’re reacting against is ultimately beneficial. From their perspective, any change represents a move from comfortably non-reflective “know how” to a comparatively frustrating re-investment in “learn how”. It’s bitterness over the perceived loss (insofar as they couldn’t vote on the switch) of time and attention spent internalizing the old system. And as research and common sense show, we hate losses.

Looking at it this way, we see why most of the detractors’ gripes are couched in terms of usability, without forcing us into a battle of intuitions about what constitutes “usable”. The usability issue is most likely just a salient rationalization. By most “objectively” recognized usability standards the new design is superior. People are really griping about the fact that they’ll have to reinvest or re-learn something and that the standards that determined the value of the change weren’t the standards by which they evaluate the site’s functionality. In other words, something not clearly broken was fixed without explicit agreement of the stakeholders, in effect forcing a new investment without due consideration of past investment.

Ups and Downs of Trendsetting

2008-09-22T15:55:00.020+02:00

In a previous post I suggested that the epidemic model most often associated with viral marketing seems to assume the susceptibility of the population – or “spreadability” of the contagion – without much analysis of what this might come to. In this post, I’ll look at some mechanisms that make cultural artifacts both valuable and the kind of thing someone might want to spread. The story I relate isn't specifically about viral marketing, but it does highlight the mechanisms any viral marketing campaign must address. Finally, I’ll draw some speculative conclusions about viral marketing’s lopsided – but understandable – focus on so-called influentials.

Obligatory Anecdote

A long time ago, a relatively regular acquaintance of mine showed up at a punk rock venue dressed to the nines in a sharp, trim sharkskin suit and brand new creepers. This getup was in clear contrast with the self-conscious filthiness of the post-punk slouches (like myself... and him previously) the show attracted. Noting my admiration for his duds, he pinched apart the breast of his jacket, danced a little jig and sang “I’m the only mod in town! I’m the only mod in town!”

Cultural artifacts, like fashions and fads, often display a peculiar value reversal. If the trend seems to be on a successful trajectory – seems like it’s going to be big, but isn’t yet – we have incentive to adopt. But once it reaches a certain level of dispersion in the relevant population, the incentive reverses for many people. If they get on early and whatever it is takes off, they get credit or some sort of cultural profit. If they remain after everyone else jumps off or they get on too late, however, it’s embarrassing. There’s coordination value at the beginning – they have incentive to do as relevant others do – but as uptake increases, dis-value sets in and their preferences switch. The trend goes from being profitable to dis-valued and at this point, profit lies in switching.

My acquaintance in this story was garnering symbolic profit by switching, distancing himself from a fashion he’d embraced at one time. He was a guy who knew what was cool and acceptable within his group and the move was intended to generate symbolic profit, or respect and recognition, by making a calculated move at the appropriate time in the uptake curve. He was a guy who noticed and partook of trends early and abandoned strategically. We’ll call those with low initial value and value-to-disvalue switching thresholds trendsetters, and those with moderate initial value and switching thresholds fashionables. Here’s an illustration of the basic idea.

This value-to-disvalue switch looks like what’s called a crowding game, the most famous of which is the El Farol Game. In this one, however, there are two thresholds: the point at which initially partaking seems valuable and the point at which it reverses. The preference matrices at the top of the graphic illustrate how your preferences of Best (B), Second (S), Third (T) and Worst (W) options for partaking (p) given what others do change as the population partaking (P(t)) increases. That is, as the population partaking of a particular cultural artifact increases with time, partaking of the artifact switches from symbolically profitable to unprofitable. Put another way, at some point (tx), it’s profitable to switch to something else. If you’re a trendsetter, someone hungry for symbolic profit, your switching threshold is pretty low.

What about the first threshold, the join threshold. The trendsetters are the important characters here. They're the ones that get the uptake into everyone elses' interest zones. My claim is that they won't see a cultural item as profitable unless it's understandable against the backdrop of their reference group. It has to damn conformity locally (or just be surprising) while honoring conformity globally (be within their reference group's range of valid moves). Even if the trendsetter is a so-called “Innovator” – i.e. the first threshold, the uptake population she feels indicates a viable trend, is really small, maybe even just one – the move won’t actually be profitable unless it makes some sort of sense to the group from which profit is sought.

Do You Know Your Capitals?

French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu is famous for developing the notion of cultural capital and popularizing the notion of social capital. Less celebrated is his idea of symbolic capital. Bourdieu analogizes socio-cultural fields to markets, with social, cultural and institutional differences between agents and classes generating potentials for profit and loss. The various “capitals” he posits (by loose analogy to economic capital) are resources that agents use to generate symbolic or material profit in interactions with others.

Cultural capital is the accumulated codes, conventional tastes, institutionally bestowed skills and general cultural abilities we each have that help us to succeed in a given domain. It’s our skill at deciphering, appreciating and generating cultural artifacts relative to some socio-cultural arena. Connoisseurs of film, for example, have a high degree of cultural capital in regards to film: they understand and consume films at a deeper, more broadly informed level than the rest of us do. They can also discuss film at a higher, potentially exclusionary and socially profitable (we feel stupid and they look smart), level. Social capital is the material and symbolic profits realized in your social circle. It’s what your group – club, neighborhood, gang, etc. – can do for you, as a resource, as a source of rights and obligations and as an instrument of self-presentation. Symbolic capital is the social recognition – prestige, status or esteem – an agent has relative to some group. It usually manifests itself in terms of deference and increased weight of input. Display of cultural capital – of your mastery of the cultural codes and themes of some domain – can generate symbolic capital. For example, being labeled a connoisseur isn’t simply descriptive, it’s also normative: it’s a term of appreciation for your consumption skills and abilities in some domain. Connoisseurs wield significant symbolic capital in virtue of their recognized cultural capital.

Now, I have some issues with Bourdieu, in particular that his “capitals” were articulated in a sort of fruity Continental tone in terms of old world class strata. But regardless of the embarrassingly Comp Lit-ish wrapper, the ideas of social, cultural and symbolic capital as sketched depict a pretty interesting picture. Socio-cultural interaction is a market within which we strive for some sort of symbolic profit and recognition by leveraging, displaying and deploying cultural skills, usually from within a more or less well-defined group.

Putting it Together

What I’m suggesting is that the Trendsetter Preference Reversal Phenomenon™ is often the effect of deploying cultural capital (knowing the bounds of acceptability and normative play within some reference group) for the accumulation of symbolic capital. My acquaintance’s move from filthy post-punk to dapper mod was made against the backdrop of a specific, historical subculture that had connections with the idea of mod culture (part of the popular conception of punk rock history). It was a historically informed move that made sense as a manifestation of cultural capital specific to its subcultural context. To generalize, in the case of trendsetters it’s the local variance within global conformity that generates symbolic capital. A local conformity was damned, but a larger subcultural conformity was honored and thus, symbolic capital was generated. Though the actual form of the move was surprising and thus able to generate profit, it made sense and could be evaluated against its larger subcultural backdrop.

Even though the story of my acquaintance's style shift isn't about viral marketing as such, it highlights the general mechanisms by which something may be judged potentially profitable within culture. Though rarely put in these terms, ultimately, that's what viral campaigns are about: trying to get me to see some cultural artifact as potentially profitable – as something I want to publicly partake of – and in so doing give me incentive to pass it on to you. But the passing it on is (often) about me generating symbolic profit. It's not simply (though of course this is part of it) because I think you'd like it. Rather it's because your enjoyment of it could potentially make me look better.

The trendsetter preference reversal phenomenon means your item will spread – if it's distinct yet understandable within the target group's culture – from those hungry for symbolic capital early in the uptake cycle. As it disperses, it's value will eventually reverse for these folks, but hopefully not before it has reached the point where the "fashionables" have noticed it.

So What? More Unrepentant Speculation

If we can harness this idea of symbolic capital, of creating things that the sender thinks could be symbolically profitable, then we might have a better sense of how to get these things to work a little more reliably. Though speculative (why change now?), I think the following conclusions are pretty plausible if we buy the general idea of the post.

1. Cultural artifacts are more spreadable if they honor larger cultural norms and patterns. They have to be initially evaluable by the intended cultural group. Even so-called innovations have to be initially couched in terms that can be understood and evaluated positively by the intended target. For viral marketing this means pay a lot of attention to the target culture. Understand it backwards and forwards, particularly the elements that allow for variation and creativity within normative bounds. I’ll write more about this later.

2. Understand that there has to be space for profit for a cultural artifact to spread. A trendsetter will never jump aboard a trend (or forward a microsite) if he or she doesn’t perceive the potential for symbolic profit. Remember that this potential is couched in terms of point 1. above: surprising yet understandable. It's not about aping the "host" group for there lies the kiss of death: "inauthenticity." It needs to come not from consideration of the group culture, but from within the culture. It's about understanding the space for symbolic profit, for appropriate creativity and difference, inherent in the target culture. And things like consumption capital, arguably a form of cultural capital, create a relatively slim range of potential profitability. More on these points in future posts.

3. Obviously, any given trend, fashion or viral campaign is ultimately unsustainable. We’ve always known this about trends, fashions, fads and viral marketing campaigns, but it bears repeating. The mechanism that drives these things through culture(s), in particular trendsetter preference reversal, tends to eat itself.

4. Wanna-bees, those (trendsetters) who want symbolic capital but haven’t yet accumulated much of it, are better targets of viral campaigns than so-called Influentials. Influentials, those with large accumulations of symbolic capital, are going to be harder to "incentivize" than those who don’t have – but want – symbolic capital. In other words, target the wanna-bees, not the “already-ares.” Influentials are more costly to convert: they’ve less incentive to jump on any particular trend (or forward any particular microsite) because they've already accumulated a large store of symbolic capital and thus each potentially hot trend provides diminishing returns. That is, they're more likely to be conservative and choosy because they require more incentive to forward any given item. And if Duncan Watts is right in claiming that what’s really determinative of epidemics is a connected sub-network of folks with low switching costs then we should target those who are seeking, not those who already have, appreciable symbolic capital. Wanna-bees have lower switching costs (they're looking for the next hot item), probably know many like-minded folks (because of pervasive social effects like homophily) and are eager to gain symbolic capital (and are thus more likely to partake of and spread any viable trend).

So, keep targeting "Influentials", but realize that they’re a harder sell, probably not as effective as the wanna-bees and, if displeased, can actually hurt your campaign. If an Influential decides that you’re “inauthentic” or too eager (issues I’ll discuss in later posts), then you’re dead. That sort of thing will kill the potential for symbolic profit on the part of any hungry wanna-bees, hurting your chances that anyone will spread your whatsit.

Viral Models are Incomplete

2008-09-10T11:24:00.008+02:00

For several years now “viral marketing” has been a part of most marketing campaigns, online and off. Now that the frenzy has effectively died out it’s clear that it doesn’t work the way many of its proponents would have us believe.

1. It tends to be of far lower impact than it’s assumed promise; success tends to be judged in terms of minimally positive ROI. In fact, the vast majority of viral marketing campaigns return negative ROI and only a tiny (really tiny) percentage ever return anything close to the epidemics popularized by Gladwell’s Tipping Point.

2. It’s virtually impossible to predict which items (movies, songs, fashions, etc.) will succeed in a cultural market (check out recent work by Duncan Watts et al. and Luis Bettencourt). Ironically, this is presumably because of the very forces – informational cascades (localized conformity) and network effects in general – that viral marketing supposedly harnesses.

3. Conversion of hub individuals, so-called “influentials”, isn’t nearly as simple or effective as it seems it should be. More research by Watts suggests that normally connected people have a nearly identical chance of starting epidemics as do the highly connected. The important mechanism seems to be the existence of a significant, connected sub-network of easily infected individuals. Also, it’s not at all clear that the basic influentials hypothesis isn’t conflating causation (do influentials cause cascades) and correlation (or are they highly visible people caught in them like everybody else, just slightly earlier). In social markets, which by definition are rife with externalities, correlation and causation are not clearly distinct. But viral marketing flatly identifies influentials as primary causes.

4. The epidemiological analogy isn’t complete. The idea of susceptibility to a cultural artifact is an unexamined assumption, rather than an explanatory mechanism.

My take on these points is that 2) and 3) explain 1). Controversially, I also hold that 4) at least partially explains 2) and 3).

The contagion model viral marketing claims as justification ideally explains (mechanistically) the spread of a contagion through a population. But a key assumption of the model is left largely unexamined. Susceptibility to a cultural contagion (fashion, song, movie, silly online video, etc.) is a parameter of these models, but the mechanism which actually determines this parameter’s value is effectively a black box. Emphasis is put on the spread dynamics and which structures effect the greatest spread, but very little consideration is given to the nature of the mechanisms that determine each agent’s susceptibility. This is a matter of focus and for contagion dynamics – models of how something spreads through a network – this is an appropriate omission. However, for marketing theory, this omission has significant consequences: it obscures the nature of susceptibility to cultural contagions, focusing us solely on the medium of transmission while assuming that the medium is agnostic as to the content transmitted. Network structure is key to explaining how a contagion spreads, if it’s spreadable. But understanding susceptibility mechanisms will help explain what can be spread if the structure is right. As Duncan Watts has said, the ideas that take off have to be right for the society and this comes down to susceptibility. An analysis of the mechanisms underlying susceptibility will help us develop a much better model for viral marketing specifically and cultural contagion generally.

Understanding these mechanisms will in no way guarantee the success of your viral campaigns, however. You’re still open to myriad chance-introducing externalities (the fragility of some types of cascades and the subsequent dicey nature of path dependent process) inherent in social/cultural markets. At best, it puts you in a position to better set success levels, determine rational outlay and generally make your offering more competitive in the cultural market.

In future posts I'll take a stab at some possible mechanisms, mostly drawn from sociology.

Dimensions of Social Functionality

2008-09-05T10:34:00.005+02:00

Social functionality is what I call most of the UGC-focused gadgets and applications both online and off. It’s sort of a catch-all term and I use it very broadly. A user review interface on Amazon is social functionality but so is a piece of mobile social software like Dodgeball (R.I.P.). I even call some entire sites social functionality, for example dating sites or Facebook. There seem to be three fundamental dimensions to the social functionality that has dominated digital "community" thought for the last 4 years or so.

1. Knowledge - we use social functionality to be or get informed, specifically by each other.

2. Connection - we use social functionality for communion, coordination and simple contact.

3. Display - we use social functionality to communicate, truthfully or untruthfully, ourselves to others.

None of these dimensions are hard and fast. They’re like the primary colors. Between them there’s a continuum of variations and I can’t think of a single piece of social functionality that’s all one with no hint of another. For example, most regular Wikipedia users experience it as a Knowledge site, while to editors and posters it has a significant Display aspect. Here’s a gratuitous graphic that lays some social functionality (both pieces of functionality and entire sites) into the space defined by the dimensions. Placement is just my opinion... I’ll discuss some aspects in future posts.

The Bottom Line is I Hate Jargon: why hated language is inescapable

2008-08-29T17:51:00.010+02:00

Everybody says they hate jargon, but everybody uses it. How can jargon be so hated yet so prevalent? It’s clearly more than just a personal shortcoming of your annoying co-workers. It’s more likely that jargon is a symptom of sociability and thus we’re all susceptible to it. Looking closely, there seem to be at least three types of irritating jargon (each with its own jargon-like name!):

Fluffy Neologisms (FuNs): Often a “verbized” noun or a verb phrase shortened to one word, e.g. conversate for have a conversation. Frequently an active sounding, metaphorical stock phrase for something simple, e.g. circle back for get back to you and take it offline for talk after the meeting. FuNs are most often emergent (bottom-up).

Pernicious Euphemisms (PEus): These are classic business speak, e.g. calling criticisms opportunities. The purpose is to mask some harsh reality, neutralize something negative or insinuate desired behavior (e.g. employees must be passionate – i.e. work-obsessed, myopic, ass-kissers – as opposed to just good at their jobs). PEus tend to be institutionally imposed (top-down).

Exclusionary Technicalities (ETs): These are jargon in the traditional sense of “words or expressions that are used by a particular profession or group and are difficult for others to understand”, e.g. AJAX interface or MVC Architecture. They’re domain specific “technical” terms intended to ease in-group communication. ETs can be either institutionally imposed (by e.g. standards bodies) or emergent (from e.g. open source developers).

We tend not to think of legitimate uses of ETs as jargon in the pejorative sense (unless you are particularly insecure). After all, these words have a technical rationale. What gets us miffed is inappropriate use by the tech guy in an effort to maintain his wizard status. So, for ETs it’s intention that matters. A lame, illegitimate use can turn an ET into a PEu and open the user up to justified criticism. Indeed, many words that end up as PEus probably started out as ETs in management science.

FuNs, though, seem inexcusable to most people. They probably stem from middle-management aping the “management science” consultants they caught the PEus from. And that’s part of my point: jargon is catching. It’s not simply some aggravating sign of your boss’s personality disorder. Rather, it’s a symptom of sociability which we all display; it's an equilibrium in a social market like a fad or a trend. Of course, there is the pretension to hate, but generally before the pretension there was the desire to communicate something in a codified way.

The net net on jargon...

Typically, we’re aggravated by jargon in one of the following three ways.

1. We consider it pretentious when the user is too obviously attempting to wring cultural or social profit from what should be a purely instrumental linguistic exchange.

2. We’re exasperated when some overused phrase, which has been nearly drained of significance by loose use, is unreflectively trotted out. This sort of hackneyed jargon is often used more as a combination filler/badge than as a thoughtful addition to the discourse, serving no purpose in the conversation other than a noise our type tends to make in situations like this one.

3. Worst of all, we’re infuriated when someone mixes 1) and 2), using hackneyed jargon pretentiously.

But if you look at these from the other direction – from the jargon user’s perspective – you can see how the user could derive value from using jargon. After all, people don’t use jargon in order to be negatively viewed by others; presented with socially informed options, they have made a choice, albeit a non-deliberative one. When we have questions about a choice, look to the expected value of the options for some answers.

Let’s start with the most straightforward example: legitimate uses of Exclusionary Technicalities (ETs). You can see how these are valuable: they are agreed upon domain specific names for objects, phenomena, etc. If we want to speak efficiently and non-circuitously when discussing these things with our peers, we should use the jargon. The more people who use the term for the intended thing, the more valuable the term becomes in the field and the more value it holds for a potential adopter. After a certain percentage of your peers start using the jargon it behooves you to climb aboard. We call this a network effect: the more folks using the jargon, the more valuable it becomes. Network effects can lead to cascades (where everyone sees the value of adopting the jargon as greater than not adopting) and suddenly the jargon is everywhere.

People legitimately using ETs tend to value communication; the jargon’s value to them is in speaking the language their peers speak. The “value function” is stable, producing a value that rises rapidly to a plateau and maintains high value for a long time provided there are no relevant shocks (say, new standards rendering the old ones obsolete). We call this a monotonic externality. The value function tends to go in one direction, up, until the plateau. It doesn’t suddenly reverse with changes in use of the term.

Illegitimate uses of ETs, however, are a slightly different story. For example, I hear of a technology that’s getting a lot of buzz in the tech blogs and that I’m sure all of my clients will want soon. I drop the new jargon in meetings, making myself more attractive to the client. Of course, all other strategists are doing the same thing. The ET, which solidified it’s value in the tech world enough to be noticed in our non-tech world, is clearly of value to a lot of smart people. So, we assume its value without doing any sort of true evaluation. Many other people do the same thing. Next thing you know, everybody’s talking about and asking for AJAX interfaces, or MVC Platforms, yet very few know just what these are. These ETs have become jargon in the bad sense. Now we’re in an Informational Cascade: given a certain number of visible and presumptively knowledgeable adopters, people stop evaluating and go straight to adopting. The more the jargon’s exposed by adopters, the faster it’s adopted by others.

However, informational cascades are very unstable. Once someone actually does stop and try to figure out what’s being talked about, the cascade can be very quickly shattered. Ideas that spread like wildfire can die out just as fast. The jargon then becomes an embarrassment... what was the big freakin’ deal about “Web 2.0”? Then a backlash can set in.

PEus and FuNs are the prime examples of this sort of success followed by backlash. Despite their differences, they tend to follow the same general cycle: acceptance and use followed by derision and annoyance.

This “value function” that increases rapidly creating a cascade and then crashes just as rapidly after a certain point seems to be what’s called a non-monotonic externality. That is, the value of adopting becomes negative after a certain level of adoption within your group; after a certain level of saturation it becomes uncool, embarrassing or simply over-inflated like a linguistic bubble in a socio-cultural market. A value curve like this looks just like a fad or fashion curve.

In this case, the value function is pretty interesting. There’s an element of “network externality” in that jargon serves as shorthand in recurring situations and it’s assortative, defining your in-group. For these reasons, it behooves you to adopt if others in your group are. But then there’s also an element of informational cascade in that we value adoption simply because others are doing it. It’s about unreflective conformity and social learning. So it’s coordinating to a large extent. Still the curve suggests that difference is significant. That is, the value function delivers disvalue given a certain saturation. But our experience with offices is that negative feelings don’t set in until much later than most fads. Often, an office has to be lousy with a particular bit of jargon before we start to hate it.

Everyone’s “value function” is different, of course. Some get annoyed very easily (“misfits”) and others never really get annoyed (“team players”). Also, whether we evaluate jargon negatively or not is very contextual. I could listen two techies spewing jargon at each other all day and not care, but if one of them scares a client with a string of acronyms, I could really get annoyed.

Basically, the big moral is that we all tend to use jargon and it’s not a personal shortcoming. Rather it’s the result of very common social market conditions. Social markets are noted for each actor’s actions being partly determined by the actions of others. Dynamics like this lead to equilibria, but because of things like the fragility of informational cascades and non-monotonic externalities, they are fragile equilibria. We start to disvalue jargon that was once valued (even if non-deliberatively) for, among other reasons, the desire to feel distinct. We don’t like to feel conformist, while at the same time we clearly value a certain amount of conformity (viz. network effects and informational cascades). That’s just the nature of a non-monotonic value curve; the fact that something’s being used by our peers is reason enough to start doing it, but after a certain level of saturation we start to disvalue what we once valued (we can think of slang in similar terms, though the value curve is usually much shorter, thus it’s much more fragile or fickle). So, the conformity arises, but is rebelled against after a certain level of saturation.

Some Things You Should Know Before Developing a Social Site

2008-07-16T11:23:00.030+02:00

Designing and building a social site, or “online community,” can be painful. When the client doesn’t understand what leads to success in this space, which is almost always the case, it can be excruciating. Marketers breeze in with MySpace and Facebook sized expectations fueled by the misconception that simply throwing up a mess of loosely themed, content-free social functionality (surrounded by a high wall) will somehow drive “connection” hungry users to their door. Not surprisingly, more often than not these projects fail. And, of course, the designer gets the blame. If the designer’s feature set or IA or visual design had been slightly better, the community would surely have thrived.

This post is a bit of tough love for those embarking on social site development. What I’m about to suggest might sound like the rationalizations of a burned designer, but understanding it can really help manage client expectations. The online social space just doesn’t work the way most of us think it does. Beyond a certain point, things that designers have direct control over tend to be minimally determinative of site success. That is, once your site looks credible/"genre-appropriate", has a non-scary modicum of differentiation and honors the default category expectations, the designer’s direct impact on success dwindles rapidly. Why? Because success in this space is largely (but not solely) driven by subtle, nonlinear social network-based phenomena that have very little to do with the qualities of the actual site itself. Good design is clearly necessary for marketing and sensible development, but it's nowhere near sufficient for success.

Three closely related phenomena seem particularly important to social site success. The first two are what’s called “externalities,” which for our purposes boil down to a person’s behavior being partially determined or influenced by other people’s observable behavior. Bearing that in mind, here are the three tricky phenomena.

1. Informational Cascades 
Cascades (for short) are what’s called an informational externality and they impact the decision to join a community. The idea is that it’s cheaper in time and attention (and thus still strictly “rational”) to join a community others join than it is to waste energy mulling over the pros and cons, regardless of your own judgment of community value. Learn from others and, if they’ve done okay, you’ll probably do okay, whatever your personal assessment of site worth may be.

So after a community platform gets some traffic, most users shut off judging for themselves and join because certain relevant others have. Differentiation or design based incentives to lure folks in only really matter for the first n users, where n is relatively small and extremely fickle (so-called early adopters?). After that, the join decision is often based on 1) the fact that others are doing so and 2) the assumption that they must have good informational reasons for doing so. Thus 3) new users often disregard private information, meaning that 4) the information of all but the first n becomes effectively irrelevant. Voilà, exponentially diminishing returns on design outlay (and testing!) beyond a relatively low threshold.

2. Network Effects
 Like cascades, these are also a type of “externality,” a consumption or production externality. Network effects impact the perceived value (or utility) of the site both before and after the join. In a nutshell, the value of social functionality increases nonlinearly (some say logarithmically, others exponentially... the jury’s still out) with the total number of users.

Actual details from economists and “theorists” in discussions of network effects are mostly fudged idealizations, but the kernel of truth is that people consider social functionality valuable only if some significant proportion of people (usually friends and acquaintances) are using it. So, your online community might have the coolest social functionality, but if you never managed to get a significant number of folks to make that initial commitment of time and attention (say by having decent content or non-social functionality to get traffic in the first place), you’ll never get off the ground. And without people, a community ain’t... and never will be.

3. Path Dependency 
This one tends to be the result of the other two processes working together. Often, the situation the world ends up in is the result of a large number of historical moments in which agents choose between a couple of alternatives. When we’re dealing with externalities like the one’s mentioned above, these small choices in the past can have a startlingly powerful impact on the present. A notorious feature of these path dependent processes is that small (really small) changes in the decisions made by individual users in the past can have radical effects on how the present turns out. Winners could have been losers but for some schmo joining one site and not the other. From this decision, cascades can occur, with incipient network effects following shortly behind. Presto, a path dependent process with significant potential for sub-optimal lock-in.

Some Elaborations and Lessons

Big words, scary ideas, but what does it mean? Below are some simple, realistic consequences of the above ideas with some suggestions for actual development. Keep these in mind when embarking on a social site project and let them guide your expectations and success parameters.

1. This one’s been said a lot, but has never really sunk in. Provide some reason for people to use your site even before there’s any socializing. You need content or independently useful, non-social functionality to get to the point where the externalities discussed can take hold (unless your product is just a cool bit of standalone social functionality like a “widget”).

2. Beyond a certain default determined threshold, fanciness of design and coolness of functionality are only really important in terms of innovation and differentiation not conversion. In other words, they won’t guarantee success (in traffic or use) no matter how relevant they are. They can get you noticed, which may start a cascade among those with a low switching threshold (early adopters?), but if the network effect threshold isn’t reached, you’ll remain niche (sorry, Virb). Remember, though, that trafficking in early adopters is particularly dicey given that they've especially low switching thresholds... they'll abandon you just as easily once something newer and cooler comes along. If they abandon before the cascade can reach a scale large enough to overcome the higher non-early adopter switching thresholds you won't reach your tipping point.

[ASIDE: The iPhone isn’t necessarily a counter-example. It does in a new space (mobile computing) what Apple does everywhere (simplify and amaze) and relies on Apple’s existing converts and proselytizers to fuel uptake (create a cascade). It’s success is the result of an already converted base expecting and getting really cool design, not of really cool design converting all comers regardless of prior commitments.]

3. A hallmark of path dependent processes is that they tend to be “irreversible” to a certain extent. For our purposes, this means that once your users have made an investment of time and attention, switching isn’t as easy (costless) as marketers think; switching isn’t zero-cost and this can create a kind of inertia in users. In other words, just because you build it, that doesn’t mean they’ll come. Users must perceive value significantly greater than the switching cost of time and attention. Without that initial threshold of users (network effects) or initial visible rush (potential cascade), there’s little perceptible value and no informational precedent that tells them joining might be a good idea.

4. The value of testing diminishes rapidly as uptake increases; it’s value is effectively nil beyond the first n users, where n is the “tipping point” (the point where a cascade occurs and network effects can start to be felt). Also, it won’t guarantee success, even if the product tests well. All testing really does for you is ensure you have made something that honors current design and functionality conventions, something that’s not scarily new. It will never guarantee success because you still have to provide extra value to overcome switching costs, no matter how low. And testing certainly won’t allow you to create new competitive landscapes through innovation. So, definitely test but with diminishing value and limited ends in mind. (Remember, this is only really applicable to social sites... transactional sites, etc. tend to get more value out of testing)

5. If the success or failure of online communities is a path dependent process, then copying the design of other social sites in hopes of copying their success makes very little sense. Of course you need to honor conventions, understand defaults and identify areas for relevant differentiation in the space, but beyond this you’re not really generating value (and it’s really lame to boot). Qualities matter insofar as truly bad or scarily unconventional sites won’t be in the running. However, the predictors of success typically aren’t site qualities (the various competitors all do pretty much the same, category-appropriate things), so imitating qualities of successful sites is no guarantee, only a good bet. Finally reproducing the winner is silly given non-negligible switching costs. People won't jump unless your offer exceeds the switching cost set by the current site and its value. Don't offer what they already have because there's no incentive to move.

6. It’s not always the case that the best community (by whatever standard) wins. Informational externalities (cascades) coupled with production/consumption externalities (network effects) often lead to a “sub-optimal” option taking the win. Lock-in as it’s called is clearly observable in situations like the maintained dominance of Windows, the market triumph of VHS over Beta, or (everybody’s favorite) the QWERTY keyboard. Of course, your product needs to be competitive, moderately differentiated and (if this is your thing) “innovative” in a non-alienating way. But developing and (especially!) testing at great expense your new category killer won’t really put you in a better position to recoup your investment. At most it means you’re a standout among the crowd of competitors. Without significant marketing and some lucky breaks, all that extra work simply sets you up to look new, feel cool and keep users IF you get them in the first place. It’s a set of sad facts that the best rarely win, first mover disadvantage is very real online, and the just good enough often get the biggest return (I’m talkin’ about you, MySpace).

Well, those are my observations. Hopefully, you can now embark on your development with clearer vision and a better sense of what can and cannot be accomplished through design. Anyway, hope it wasn't too scary...

The Miscellany, Nominalism and The Essence of the Web

2007-11-06T13:18:00.005+01:00

[NOTE: This version originally appeared on Armchair Media's blog. The more verbose version that was here has been removed... it was a drag.]

Given the tagged, user generated nature of the web today, is Information Architecture a dead practice that just won’t lay down? Are rigid ontologies a crime against the intrinsic nature of content on the web? Do outdated, hierarchical ways of ordering content on the web commit us to stifling and misleadingly authoritative structures that curtail innovation and invention?

David Weinberger seems to think so. He doesn’t like hierarchies, taxonomies or narrow instrumental classifications. His latest book, Everything is Miscellaneous, is devoted to drawing out just how inadequate these structures are when applied to the distributed, messy heap of content on the web. This isn’t a particularly new observation. Clay Shirky has been speaking to this point for years now. The basic idea is that the classificatory structures that we use to deal with the very real constraints of the physical world lend an artificial “essentialist” necessity to our task-based classificatory practices online. Ordering and making sense of the welter of stuff that populates our closets and sciences is necessary given the limitations of the physical world. That doesn’t mean they’re necessarily “true” in some big, extra-systemic sense, however. The need for strict, pre-determined structure is mitigated online because computers are really good at creating ad hoc order out of an undifferentiated mess. Online, not everything needs one and only one place. Acting and designing as if it did at best limits the democratic/utopianist promise of the web and at worst imposes or perpetuates illegitimate power structures. My interest is in what this does to the practice of web design.

First of all, I agree with most of what Weinberger and Shirky say about the changed face of order on the web. The majority of content falls into a miscellany. It’s just a mess of digital artifacts awaiting order. Anyone can throw stuff out there and it doesn’t really matter where it resides. If it has metadata on it or we can read its content, we can find it again and probably even put it to some use for which it was never intended. It's the potential for order that’s important. Designers have been working out the implications of these ideas for years now. Apparently, Weinberger’s book is intended for the decision makers near the top that may not have worked out the implications of ideas like tagging.

A key target of Weinberger and Shirky’s ire are ontologies or data structures intended to explicate the concepts in some domain of knowledge. Ontologies, in the information sciences sense, are the cornerstone of the Semantic Web. Shirky uses the term more broadly, thinking of it in philosophical terms as the sorts of things countenanced by some system, the sorts of things that some domain recognizes as constituents. The claim is that ontologies lead to a species of essentialism, or the world view that everything has some set of properties that uniquely identifies it in all possible situations. Both Shirky and Weinberger spend a lot of their time pointing out the fact that most ontologies are arbitrary and conventional, but that they can give the impression of necessity or self-evidence. For them, different ontologies are just competing webs of more or less useful concepts. In holding this view we can refer to them as nominalists.

My problem with most influential nominalists on this and other points is that, if not read or followed carefully, they can give the impression that there’s no place for local, designed order online at all. In other words, sometimes their fervent tone gives the impression that there’s absolutely no room or reason for islands of structure built from the welter of free form content. In their desire to rout “ontologizing” hierarchies simply on principle, they obscure the fact that a task-based local structure doesn’t automatically engender a totalizing, absolutism. The local structures on most sites are about sense-making and communication, not world-making and dictation. For instance, Flickr, Weinberger’s favorite example isn’t really the free-wheeling heap of free-range content he casts it as. Content enters Flickr neatly, if minimally, categorized (“category” isn’t coextensive with “hierarchy”) by user, camera type, etc. One could almost say that the user provides a loose ontology for Flickr. The user, a sort of default set, is the center of gravity that holds Flickr together; it’s the initial structuring principle that gives the content its potential for further order and defines possible transformations. It’s a wonderfully loose binding, but without this initial act of minimal categorization, the potential for further arbitrary re-ordering is lost. Though Weinberger and Shirky clearly know this, they should probably state it more explicitly as their management level audience may not be in the trenches enough to cut through the polemic and hyperbole.

There’s no such thing as order ex nihilo. Computers are really good at aggregating if they’ve access to some sort of potential ordering mechanism (tags, official metadata, etc.). If it’s text, this could be pure content. If not, we need to attach something, thus Flickr’s initial, user determined set. If we’ve no handle by which to grab the content, it might as well not be there (particularly with images and video). This is not to say that there’s no emergent order, which is a separate issue entirely.

As we’ve been stating for years, Information Architecture in the old fashioned tree-structure sense does seem pretty irrelevant. Definitely so for IA in the grand, Peter Morville sense, in which all sites are trees, everything has one and only one spot and there’s very little cross-linking of paths. Still any structure that gives sense a la Flickr’s implicit categorization is a form of architecture. It’s an ordering principle that somehow sensibly aggregates content on a local scale. So we’ve no longer Information Architecture in which all structures are made from custom built materials. Rather it’s more of an information shanty town in which personal structures are built from the miscellaneous heap of common materials. But the important point is that it’s still architecture, and still reproduces common elements like doors, windows, etc (to stretch the metaphor a little thin). We need pools of order with understandable principles of manipulation that briefly and locally coordinate elements from the miscellany. This point is often obscured in Weinberger’s book and we, as designers, will have to pay the price once it starts to circulate within marketing departments.

And though Weinberger (at least) seems to frown upon instrumental concerns on the web, we tend to have to design sites that people use to do things. At an abstract level, the nature of the miscellaneous mess of content means that it becomes more useful the more content there is and the more it’s tagged. For example, the more people upload and interact with content on Flickr, the better your chance of finding photos tagged “fruitcake” that are actually pictures of fruitcakes. Tagging after all is often more about the tagger than the tagged. Once enough people are doing it, however, the tags start to become useful content locators; at high volumes, idiosyncrasies and bad tags tend to filter out. Unfortunately, this suggests that loose structures, based entirely on tags tend to have an instrumental usefulness that varies with content volume and interaction. The moral: if you’re working on a project with
a smallish expected volume that needs to be useful out of the gate, you may still need to impose a strict categorization scheme in order to meet you goal. This, to Weinberger, is a sin, or at least a backwards looking crime against the essence of the web. At least that’s the impression one gets reading the book. (Shirky takes a more nuanced, “domain of discourse” based approached)

On the ground, designers realize that these quicksilver, local categorizations are the fundamental means by which we define our sites and some of our only means of communication online. They’re a part of the language of the web through which we communicate our clients’ messages. Without these structures, there would be no sites per se, just a grey fog of rootless content awaiting individual requests for order. This can’t be what Weinberger has in mind. Yes, Google is hugely popular. But it’s also a high-level general ordering mechanism and a liminal space intended to get people through it, not to it. The success of Google at what it does does not mean that we should all follow that example. Unless all we want to build from here on out are search engines.

So, we all agree that, in general, top down hierarchies are less and less relevant to a distributed, open access dumping ground like the web. And, of course, nobody really thinks that there’s only one relevant ontology. Ontologies are domain specific and the attributes assumed within them are never intended to be intrinsic to the content. Still, the need for order comes from two directions: the client and the user. Sites are doors into the mass of content, zones of order that communicate in part through the principles they impose on the miscellany. Users don’t yet want to get down to the level of the miscellany. Google, is the closest we like to get: a presentation of an ostensibly ordered set bound together by some minimal user-defined “intension.” The lower level domain-specific sites we generally concern ourselves with usually require a tighter sense of order than something high-level like Google. In general, as domain specificity increases so too the appropriate ordering principles (conventional content breaks, vocabulary, etc.). Users want a certain decrease in uncertainty as they become more specific in their searching behavior, but I agree that they never want its elimination. This is what the new ordering principles are all about. Allowing local order without stripping away the global properties of the miscellany.