Social Nation Building, Part 2

Last summer, I blogged about the fact that both Twitter and Facebook had achieved membership numbers that were on a par with many of the larger nations on the planet. I wondered what those virtual nations were good for, aside from playing games and stalking ex’s.  Over the last few weeks, we seem to have discovered at least one of the answers to that question: virtual nations seem to be really good at overthrowing real nations.

We’ve known for a long time that the true value of social networks lies in their number of connections and the quality of their exchanges: the greater number of connections and the higher the quality of exchanges, the more powerful the network (which is one of the biggest reasons why social networking “pilot projects” usually fail—too few connections and too little value exchanges).  This power gets harnessed in lots of commercial ways by sites like Amazon.com (through recommendations) and eBay (through ratings) and Facebook (by targeted advertising).  But it now seems obvious that the ability of social networks to connect ordinary members of a society to one another and to enable political exchanges between them has become a big enabler (if not the biggest) of actual, real-world social change. 

It is a political tsunami unlike any before. Starting with Tunisia in and then Egypt, regime change now seems inevitable in Libya (as of this writing) and perhaps a few additional countries in North Africa and the Middle East.  This defiance and ultimate overthrow of some long-time autocratic rulers has happened with incredible speed (it is mind-boggling to realize this has all happened within the last 60 days). 

And the role that both Twitter and Facebook have played in these popular uprisings seems to be substantial.  They certainly didn’t cause the unrest, but they enabled the unrest that was already there to explode.  In a sense, these giant, pervasive social networks acted as catalysts to speed social reactions that might otherwise have taken months or years to reach fruition, if they reached it at all. Amazing.

This “social network as political catalyst” is certainly a remarkable effect, and one can only guess what will happen as these and other networks like them continue to grow.  We have already seen governments try to defuse these social networks in different ways.  From Egypt, we learned that turning off the cell phone networks and blocking the internet really didn’t seem to have much effect on the ultimate outcome.  In a completely different kind of approach, King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia has offered $36 billion worth of “gifts” to Saudi citizens in the form of new jobless benefits, education and housing subsidies.  While certainly a more positive tactic to defusing social unrest, it remains to be seen whether it will be effective in the long run (or not so long, given the velocity with which events in other countries have unfolded).

Even in the United States, a breaking story this week involved an apparent solicitation from the Air Force to create software that would allow a person to create numerous artificial personas in a social networking site, in an attempt to influence its exchanges (but that’s a story for another blog entry).

It seems that real nations have awakened to the potential power of these virtual nations. And I would have to believe that, for the most part, they don’t like what they see.

Watson. Come Here. I Need You.

Although it doesn’t have much to do with social networking (or anything to do with it, for that matter) I wanted to write this week about a rather remarkable achievement in computing.

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you know that this was the week that the syndicated game show Jeopardy! aired a three-part tournament pitting IBM’s newest computer wunderkind “Watson” against two of the best human players ever, Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter.  Watson (spoiler alert) won easily.

Don’t get me wrong: I don’t in any way, shape or form belittle IBM’s achievement with Watson (well, actually I do a little—read on).  It is truly remarkable that Watson, unconnected to the internet, drew from a vast well of facts that ranged from Beatles songs to Art History (although it seemed, ironically, to not be able to parse questions about keyboards or U.S. Cities, both categories I would have guessed it would do well in).  Without a doubt, the ability to parse Jeopardy! clues and come up with the correct questions as often as it did was amazing.

I was hoping that Ken and Brad would do a bit better.  Before the show aired, I thought that perhaps the humans might stand a reasonable chance against Watson.   After all, people have the advantage of first-hand contextual knowledge about a lot of subjects, they are much better at associative memory and they had the advantage of listening to Alex Trebek read the clues, so they could anticipate when they could buzz in rather than react to a signal that the clue was complete (as Watson did). I realize after I watched the show that Brad and Ken never stood a change, and in a sense the deck was stacked against them. 

For one thing, all the questions were presented in textual format, easy for Watson to parse, analyze, and look up the answers.  There were no “video” questions that would have required Watson to “see” a picture or understand what the clue presenter was referring to in a video clip.  So, there was no complex visual contextual analysis for Watson to try to decipher.  Advantage Watson.

Although Watson was indeed relying on a signal that it could ring in—rather than have to anticipate when Alex was done speaking—everyone has to realize that computers are lightning fast: microseconds (at most) after the signal was given, Watson was able to send the signal to actuate the buzzer to ring in.  No human can match that speed, and a lucky button press might *occasionally* beat the computer to the punch but not very often.  Also, if the human rings in early, their buzzer is locked for a fraction of a second: this is something that Watson was *incapable* of doing.  And, if you think about it, they could have built in a “human-sized” delay into the button actuator Watson used.  What do you think adding a few dozen milliseconds to the button press would have done to Watson’s success rate?  Again, advantage Watson.

Another point: Watson doesn’t get nervous, tired, or frustrated. And while Ken and Brad were likely well rested and have nerves of steel, they very much appeared frustrated at times, which certainly might have had some effect on their performance. Once again, advantage Watson.

The final advantage is simply one of timing.  IBM rehearsed Watson for months before the contest was taped, pitting it against IBM employees at first and then actual Jeopardy! Champions.  Does anyone think that IBM would have suggested the contest if they weren’t *convinced* that Watson could beat the best players on the planet? 

So congratulations to IBM and Watson (and don’t feel sorry for Brad and Ken, they were well compensated for a day’s work).  The lessons learned from building Watson will impact all our lives in ways we probably can’t even begin to imagine.

People are still better than computers at lots of things.  First and foremost is that we can build computers like Watson: computers can’t (yet).  Arthur C. Clark once observed that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic,” and Watson is well on the way to proving that any sufficiently advanced Artificial Intelligence is indistinguishable from real intelligence.

So like Ken, I also welcome our new computer overlords.

Social Media Overload

Instant Messaging.  You probably use it at work with your co-workers and at home on Facebook with your friends. But I can’t help but remember how I used instant messaging when it was new vs. the way I use it today, and wonder if something similar isn’t going to happen with social media.

When instant messaging first hit in a big way back in the late 1990’s, there were initially a few big players. (Of course, IRC messaging had been around for a while but wasn’t ever really mainstream.) AOL instant messenger was one of the first to achieve wide adoption, along with ICQ, MSN chat, Yahoo chat, and then a whole bunch of others.  Two things about this early IM environment seem relevant to today’s social networking landscape.  First, in those early years none of the IM clients were interoperable. In fact, if one service announced compatibility with another the other promptly changed their protocols to break the interoperability (Yahoo and AOL went through several rounds of this chat arms race).  The net effect was that for some time if you had some friends on MSN, some on Yahoo, some on ICQ, and some on AOL you had to have four different IM clients running at the same time.  Second, IM usage (at least for me) was very different than it is today. When instant messaging was new and exciting and everyone just discovering it for the first time, everyone wanted to chat.  A lot.  And usually all at the same time.  I remember that it wasn’t unusual for me to have four, five or even six or more chat windows open at the same time (in two or three different clients).  It quickly became apparent to me that it was darn near impossible to carry on four or five simultaneous conversations—even if they were important or interesting.  Today, I use the same consolidated IM client at home and at work and rarely have more than one conversation open at any given time.  IM’ing is much more manageable now than it was then.

So what got me thinking about chat, and how the changes I’ve seen might be relevant to future changes to the way I use social media? USA Today had an interesting article a few days ago about how a lot of social media users are grappling with social media overload.  The author, Jon Swartz, talked with AOL executive Brad Garlinghouse who said something that certainly sounded familiar: “consumers don’t have the bandwidth to process so many fragmented convos online and, often, at once.”  At any given time at work, I usually have browser tabs open for Twitter and Yammer (an internal corporate “Twitter”-like site) and sometimes others like LinkedIn, Plaxo, Quora, Google and at home, those sites plus Reddit and Facebook (hey, I work for a social media firm).  

I’ve thought for some time that trying to keep up with all the different things happening in all my different social networks was becoming unmanageable.  And guess what, I’m not alone.  My suspicion is that although all of us have a different tolerance level to the number of different networks/tools/conversations that we can absorb (and yes, it may be a generational thing), everyone has their limit.  I strongly suspect that, like chat, the social networking sites we use today will be integrated in one form or another (probably in some meta-client like Trillian or Pidgen that allow people to use multiple chat protocols in one integrated client) over the next few years, making our social networking lives much more manageable.

This phenomenon of social networking information overload should also raise a red flag for organizations planning to get into social media.  If you decide to run your social media campaigns through a popular social networking site like Facebook, for instance, you have to accept all the restrictions and controls that they impose (not the least of which is that you don’t really own your data). On the other hand if you decide to create your own social media destination site that you completely control, you run the risk of being lost amid the noise and bustle of all the other social networks out there clamoring for eyeballs.

The Humanity of Social Networking

In a recent article, MSN blogger Suzanne Choney discusses some observations that MIT professor Sherry Turkle makes in her new book "Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other." In the book, Turkle writes that all the interaction that people have with social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter are taking away from time that would otherwise be spent interacting face-to-face with other people, and that such interaction makes us “less human.”

Without critiquing Professor Turkle (since I haven’t read her book yet) I did want to talk about this concept that too much social networking might somehow make us “less human.”  I’m always amused when someone attempts to define humanity: It is, of course, a moving target. What it meant to be human 1,000 years ago was different than what it means today; what it meant to be human 10,000 years ago was very different; what it meant 100,000 years ago, a million years ago or 10 million years ago graphically illustrates the inherent flaw in the analysis.  If our far-distant ancestors weren’t human (i.e., “like us”) then what happens when we ourselves aren’t “like us” anymore? Are we more than human, less than human, or just differently human? And how much do you have to change to become “not human?” (It’s an interesting problem that science fiction writers have had forever: it’s nearly impossible to write a story from the perspective of “trans-humans” since no one knows what that might be (and if you think you do, how do you make their motivations understandable to mere humans?))

I would argue that technology has always taken time away from face-to-face interaction beginning with the written word. When writing was invented, people started to spend time reading instead of listening to other people tell stories; or they perhaps spent time writing rather than telling stories.  What that ultimately enabled, of course, was the broadening of the scope of impact one person could have on another.  Instead of just communicating with a small group of people in your immediate proximity, people had the ability to “speak to” and “listen to” other people from all over the world.  Indeed, writers could speak to people not yet born, and people could listen to people who had long since died.  Did that change what it meant to be “human?”  Now granted, if people spend their lives reading or writing exclusively, that certainly will have a detrimental impact on their other human interactions, which I suspect is likely the point of Professor Turkle’s book. 

Addiction to technology is certainly a common problem (particularly among introverts) but even if you are a socially awkward “nerd” you are still human (or so I assume).

It seems to me that the change in the way people interact through social networking is similar to the change most technology has had: it enables us to communicate in ways and with people that we otherwise would not. But the fundamental “human” element of communication is still there.

Now when we all start communicating telepathically, we’ll have to talk. (An interesting question: if we evolved telepathic abilities vs. invented them via technology, would either change the definition of what it meant to be “human?”)