“Simple” is unexpectedly complicated

One of my favorite books when I was in fifth grade was Cheaper by the Dozen and, while the large family was intriguing to someone with only one sibling, the idea that one could save time and increase productivity by eliminating extraneous motions in all aspects of life, including bathing, was one that would stay with me. Later, in high school, I was introduced to Strunk & White’s Elements of Style and embraced the idea of simple language perhaps a bit too wholeheartedly. I often had trouble meeting the minimum page requirements for papers because I just didn’t see the point of going on if I’d said all I wanted.

This is not to say I don’t have a tendency to ramble or waste time. I do both of those things when I’m not paying attention. Unless I'm under a deadline, I have a disregard for clocks that can drive other people (like my husband) insane. My father is the same way. But like my father, I tend to look at the way something is organized and try to figure out a way to turn the path from point A to point Q into a shorter path. Point A to point M, maybe. Or perhaps it is possible to start at point C. I don’t like to compromise quality; I just like to figure out what isn’t necessary and eliminate that part.

This part of my personality thoroughly enjoyed the “Simple” chapter in Made to Stick. I like the idea of getting to the core of a concept and keeping the message compact. And I appreciated that Heath and Heath emphasized that this did not mean “dumbing down” an idea since I hate that phrase more than almost any other. However, since I’ve been struggling with my one minute video for Ripple of One, I also found it a bit daunting to read that “great simple ideas have an elegance and utility that makes them function a lot like proverbs.” I can believe this and I admire this, but all I’ve got right now is simple and clumsy. I haven’t figured out the core or the lead for my video and I don’t have much of a story. There’s nothing unexpected. At least, not yet. It’s possible that I’ve listened to the video clips too many times and the message is now an old one to me.  I don’t even have any ideas that I could implement if I had greater technical skills (though my lack in that area is definitely an additional roadblock).

I want to tell Jessica’s story. I really do. She seems to be working hard on her goals. And ultimately, I think I will end up with a simple video and a fairly straightforward story. Before I read the two sections in Made to Stick, simple seemed okay. But simple and compelling at the same time? I’m going to try and re-examine what I do have and see if I can determine a core message. I may have to step back a little. While I was reading about knowledge gaps in the “Unexpected” chapter, I couldn’t help but think of movie trailers, especially the longer ones that play in movie theaters. Periodically, I’ll watch one and decide that I’ve seen enough, not because the movie seemed bad (though usually they do) but because I suspect I actually just saw the whole movie condensed into a minute or two. Perhaps I can create a “trailer” for Jessica? Minus the explosions and body-shaking audio, of course. Her story isn’t over, so maybe the gap can be the ending.

It’s boggling how much thought needs to go into simplicity and how much planning needs to go into determining what’s unexpected.

P.S. Since Heath and Heath mentioned one way to get the attention of air passengers, I thought I'd remind everyone of "The Bare Essentials of Safety".

Significance

The fairly simple concept of the paradox of exclusivity, the idea that “people are perverse; they want to be part of a group but they don’t want to be another face in the crowd” (Howard 168) flooded my brain with all sorts of examples. I couldn’t help but think of Google Wave. A bit over a year ago, Google launched Wave, an online collaboration tool. And you could only join if you were invited. Naturally, at least among my colleagues the information professionals, there was a certain cachet to having snagged a Wave invite. And once you were invited, you in turn had some invitations to give out and were therefore worthy of courting. This part of Google’s plan seemed to work, but Google stopped development in August of this year. Perhaps part of the problem, as stated in this Google Blog post, was that Google wasn’t “quite sure how users would respond to this radically different kind of communication.” I suspect that they developed a product that was exciting to the tech crowd but maybe a bit too much for the rest of the Google universe. They attempted to generate buzz using exclusivity tactics, but ultimately couldn’t reach enough committed users.  They had the influence and mined the sense of belonging, but didn’t quite make it on the remuneration and significance fronts. In this case, we are also reminded that “name recognition doesn’t equal significance” (173).

I also appreciated the mentions of Stanley Milgram’s “small-world phenomenon” study in both Design to Thrive and Web 2.0 (even though Web 2.0 continues to remind me of a word-problem-only math text). Now I know how the “six degrees of separation” were determined. While I don’t have any way to base this in fact, my gut feeling is that there are fewer degrees of separation within a community of practice, especially when specializations are factored in. As a library professional, I fall under a fairly broad category. I know the librarians who work at my institution and few from school. However, within library science, the specializations lead to roundtables within the large organizations (such as the American Library Association) and to smaller organizations, some national and most regional. Once we get to that level, I can say a name (like Chris Prom) or an acronym (like EAD) and everyone will know what or who I’m referring to. And if I need an introduction to Chris Prom, I am probably only a couple of degrees away (I tried testing my theory on LinkedIn but archivists seem to stay away from that network). I don’t think any of the networks for archivists are invitation-only, though many do require a registration process and/or a membership.

Perhaps a better small-community example is the ceramic arts community. This community is very active, often because the artists are small business owners which means that they need to hustle to survive. They have professional organizations with members-only benefits. Even better, this is a tightly-knit community that is also exceptionally open. They tend to share glaze recipes, firing methods, access, studio space, you name it. Introductions are fairly easy to come by and many of the best-known artists use a combination of the techniques Dr. Howard described on pages 184-186 of Design to Thrive. My husband’s current favorite is Ayumi Horie.

 He’d seen her work in journals but then he saw her speak at a regional conference. Not long after that, she was part of a “booth” (the Artstream gallery and library) at a national conference. He wanted one of her mugs but didn’t get one, so he signed up for her email list so he’d know when they were available. This week he spent about half of his grad assistant wages on a new coffee mug (hey, we celebrated our ten-year anniversary this year by going out for coffee and decided to blow the budget on this) because he got an email about new work. Most of her work sold within two days, taking advantage of limited supply and a fairly passionate fan base.

Horie also has a once-a-year contest for photos documenting “Pots in Action”, free downloads of past postcards and the expected artist’s statement, links, gallery and so on. If my husband ever wants to know Horie personally or get himself listed on her website, he can probably just call her, but he is also only two degrees away from her since she has collaborated with someone he assisted at a workshop. In other words, the ceramic arts community is heavy on connectors, mavens AND sales people, with a large number of people serving as all three.

Archivists also have connectors, mavens and a very few salesmen. As a community, we could probably do with more connectors and fewer mavens, but it was fun to read Malcolm Gladwell’s definitions in both Design to Thrive and Web 2.0. I couldn’t help but place people I know into categories. Like I said, I know a lot of mavens. They’re the ones who respond to listserv questions almost every time one crops up. They’re usually great on listservs and less endearing in person. The connectors are a bit harder to find, and they are mostly the people who are interested in digital information and Web 2.0 implementations. They’re the ones who know just who you should talk to for specific questions. They may lead to the mavens and they may also be mavens, but they are best known for making matches in the community.

All of this is making me think about creating and nurturing connections. There are so many ways to go about creating a community that I doubt I’ll ever have the brilliant idea that gets me a $240 million advertising deal, but maybe someday I’ll be part of what makes access and communication of archival content more user-friendly.

Endless Possibilities

The readings for this class infiltrate my daily life more than any other assigned readings I’ve ever had, perhaps because they apply directly to things I see and do every day. Today I went shopping for new glasses. For big purchases, I’m a very deliberate shopper, at least, I like to think that I am. I check prices, examine quality, read Consumer Reports, check online reviews. It took me two weeks to figure out which tires I would buy for my car (happy so far) and more than a month to choose a digital camera (not enamored). But last night, I read about choices in Neuro Web Design and I can’t help but wonder if I should just make a snap decision about a $250 pair of glasses.  Chances are, I’ll be at least as satisfied as if I go to Greenville and try on every pair in every eyewear store in town. And if I do make a snap decision, will my shopping persona begin to change?

And the types of choices we make! Conscious, unconscious, influenced, not. I kept thinking about the “marshmallow test” that got quite a lot of web play a couple of years ago. There are several versions of the test (including parodies, of course) in which children are offered the choice of one marshmallow now or two marshmallows later if they can only resist the one marshmallow now. The one marshmallow that is sitting on a plate in front of them without any adults around to influence their choice. The general idea is that the kids who wait are more likely to be successful later in life because they can delay gratification and work for their goals. But if you watch any of the videos, you can actually see these kids thinking. One marshmallow now? Or two if I wait? I can wait because I want two. But what if I wait and don’t get two? What if I don’t get any?

And are they really making a bad choice if they eat the marshmallow?

Such a tough decision. In the coming weeks, as we work with Ripple of One, we’ll be examining choices very carefully. Our own choices, naturally, because we’ll be writing and producing a video, but we’ll also be thinking about how to influence the choices of the viewers. We want viewers to choose to donate their time or money to a very specific non-profit organization. Why should they choose this organization over any other? What will they get out of it? When people give, the question is not usually “what’s in it for me?” but “how will this benefit the world that I live in?” And in the case of Ripple of One, we’re working with an organization that is attempting to re-form the way some people make decisions by offering tangible benefits if they change.

I’ve been turning over ideas for this video ever since we heard about the project in class. And with every reading, I change the approach I want to take. My first instinct was to use statistics. I’m comfortable with numbers and they often mean something to me. But the Credibility segment of Made to Stick made me look a little more closely at statistics and how they’re used. Some numbers are going to turn up (I can’t help it!) but I’m going to attempt to make them familiar and friendly. When we watched the current Ripple of One video, the repeated use of “they” and “them” struck me as isolating when it might be more profitable to unite the viewer with the subject. Chapter 6 in Neuro Web Design tells me that it’s all about me, or at least that I want it to be all about me, so I’m now reconsidering some of the wording I used while I was eliminating the “theys”. It’s a good thing we read about emotional appeals in Made to Stick before we got to Neuro Web Design or I might well be trying to work food, sex and danger into an appeal for a non-profit.

So many things to consider. I’m looking forward to seeing everyone’s storyboards. And choosing one!

Salad as a tool for social good

Jennie Bourne’s Web Video: Making It Great, Getting It Noticed continues to be full of technical information that is starting to make sense. And I now have in my possession two very useful bits of awareness:

• When we get to our own video production, no live switching, please.
•  I don’t ever want to build my own studio.

Beyond that, I have more things to consider to while I’m watching video. In particular, I’ll be paying attention to cuts and camera angles. And I finally know what the slate is for! I always assumed it was an early Hollywood holdover, but it serves a purpose. Can we have one when we go into production? Can I be the slate punk? Okay, I’m getting carried away now. It’s late and I’ve had a good day, just not a devoted to reading kind of day.

I’m glad we’ve returned to Made to Stick. I’d already begun to think about our Ripple of One video and this week’s reading was the perfect complement to some of my ideas. Of course, all of that might go tumbling out the window when we meet with Stephanie Enders, but I’m not concerned about that right now. I’ll address the section on emotional impact first because, while I think it will have a lot to do with our upcoming project, it’s an approach I’m not as familiar with. At least, not on the creating end. However, I have been susceptible to emotional pleas and it’s been interesting to realize them for what they are.

The story about the Pegasus dining hall really hit home. When I was a lowly staff member at a place that provided a subsidized staff lunch, I would queue up with everyone else, occasionally wondering what new horror awaited us. Carrot dogs, anyone? That’s a steamed carrot on a bun, in case you’re interested in trying that one at home. If we were lucky, there was dessert left over from dinner the night before. Dinner was always the better meal. The staff line assistant, the person who kept the steam trays full and endured the comments of the people opening the lid on the tray of limp carrots, was typically the least senior person in the kitchen. Needless to say, that job saw a lot of turnover. But for about two months, we would come in and be treated to a gorgeous salad. Every day. The woman who was the staff line assistant during that time would take ordinary salad ingredients and arrange the cut vegetables into swirls and flowers. People would try to dig out the lettuce from under the designs so as not to disturb them. Obviously, they not only appreciated the extra effort, but wanted to make sure that other people could see it and appreciate it, too.

I don’t know if we can relate vegetables to a non-profit in Seneca, South Carolina, but I can appreciate that “the most basic way to make people care is to form and association between something they don’t yet care about and something they do care about” (Heath and Heath 173). I’m pretty sure that we can find an approach that will hit home for Ms. Enders desired audience. We just have to figure out who those people are.

The section on credibility was far more familiar to me. I tend to think more analytically. It drives my husband crazy, but I get it honestly. I may have taken a liberal arts path, but genetically, I should be following a math-science path. My entire family tends to question statistics and try to figure out how they’ve been spun, so the statement that “ethically challenged people with lots of analytical smarts can, with enough contortions, make almost any case from a given set of statistics” (147) came as no surprise. However, I really like the idea of using statistics to illustrate a relationship in order to convey a concept. There are a lot of statistics (from credible sources) about poverty and dropout rates and some of those may prove useful for the Ripple of One project if we can use them to establish an emotional tie with the viewer.

Fade outs

I don't know if anyone else saw this music blog post at NPR.org, but someone had the temerity to ask WHY songs fade out at the end. I never thought to question the why. They just do? Right?

Talking to myself in a public place

First, I’ll apologize for posting late. I spent way too much time messing about with Audacity (a little more on that later) and was in my jammies for the watching of Michael Wesch’s Anthropology of YouTube. Unfortunately, my home DSL connection wasn’t up to the task and I didn’t feel like changing into clothes and driving to campus late at night.

I don’t have much to say about Jennie Bourne’s Web Video. I’ve never given much critical thought to video, web or otherwise, so it was useful for bringing up all sorts of things which I’d never considered. But it was kind of like reading Dear Abby for budding web videographers and I’ll find it most useful when we actually start making videos. It did, however, give me some things to think about when I watched Wesch’s video early this morning.

Wesch’s approach fascinates me because he's so interested in the people who use the technology and how they use it. He’s not concerned with video quality or lighting or compression, meaning that I can understand what he’s talking about. And when he points out that “a large percentage of [YouTube videos are] meant for 100 or fewer viewers,” he makes it clear why he is not concerned with the technological details.

I’ve always kind of disdained YouTube as a way to spend my time. I’d never heard of Gary Brolsma, I didn’t get the references to the Star Wars kid, I had no idea how SouljaBoy got his start and I now understand why someone was carrying a “Free Hugs” sign on campus last week (when I saw it, I just thought it was kind of creepy). I’ll watch some of the videos people share on Facebook, but I tend to skip anything that seems to be about a baby or a baby animal. Unless I personally know the baby or the baby animal. Now I’ve got a whole new approach for YouTube. The whole path of user-generated content to user-generated distribution to user-generated commentary appeals to my proletarian sensibilities. And the videos that Wesch used as examples were often meaningful and topical (He viewed what? 8000 videos in 3 weeks? Better him than me).

Because I had read parts of Web Video before watching the Wesch presentation, I found myself paying attention to lighting, camera shake and background. I don’t remember thinking consciously of any of these things before, but now I’m attuned. I almost wish I could give that knowledge back. But I can appreciate the effort of making oh-so-much. Watching the takes of the student vlogs resonated with me because I have spent several hours tussling with Audacity. It’s not Audacity that’s the problem; it’s me. I shut myself up in a room so no one could hear me or distract me. That was the easy part. I don’t like the sound of my own voice, I slur a word, I end a sentence on a down beat, I let the sentence trail off… The things that can go wrong are endless. I still don’t have anything that I’m willing to share with the public. Yet all those people out there are talking to an unknown audience and just letting it happen. Some are scripted, most are not. And I honestly don’t care if it’s real or fiction; if I can relate, it means that someone out there can relate to me.

I’ll finish with this screen shot from Facebook. A friend of mine posted a question. His girlfriend responded and the public status update turned into a private conversation. It’s still public, of course, but no one else joined in even though the original question is open-ended and (to me, at least) a good party conversation-starter.

Blogging

I came across this article about blogging today. It focuses on creating an institutional blog, but has a lot of good points about getting and keeping a reader's attention (only one of which I used in this particular post).

Community Continuity

When talking about belonging, we tend to refer to a “sense of belonging” rather than to “rules for belonging”. At least, we do until we’re contemplating joining a country club or some other formal organization with a prescribed set of membership expectations. Because I think of belonging or not belonging in terms of feelings, it was very interesting to read Dr. Howard’s chapter on Belonging in Design to Thrive and consider the idea of belonging.

I don’t think of myself as a joiner, yet I’m a member of numerous professional organizations and this past winter I volunteered with Habitat for Humanity for the first time since college. All of these things come with certain rituals and expectations (and remuneration, of course).

Professional membership often just requires a membership fee. In return I get newsletters, continuing education and networking opportunities. Sometimes I serve as an officer in which case more is required of me. There is an election/initiation ritual, a series of meetings at which stories are shared and, in time, I become more familiar with the group and its history and do not need to ask for explanations at meetings. I had never thought of this process as a leveling up, but in a way it is. I have more knowledge, more history, more to contribute and a greater sense of belonging. Professional organizations typically have stories of origin as well.

Habitat has an incredibly strong origination story, but it’s not always so easy for a woman to “belong”, especially in the south. For some reason, the men want to follow the schema they were born to, the one that tells them to take over heavy wheelbarrows, wield hammers and assume that a woman can’t possibly use a chop saw. Fortunately, Habitat has recognized this and created Women Build so that women can learn building skills and infiltrate the manly routines of the regular builds (and no, that’s not how they describe it on their website).

Reading about belonging helped me understand a lot of what makes a successful community, online or otherwise. I also realized that the techniques that contribute to success have to be ongoing; they can’t stop with the first wave of members. Too often, an early core group has access to the community but fails to retain new members because there is a disconnect somewhere. They may have forgotten to tell their stories, maybe even forgotten their stories, or abandoned an initiation ritual because it took too much time or cost too much money. I am so sorry that new employees at a company I used to work for no longer get a two day orientation with meals and teambuilding exercises but are instead subjected to one day of HR policy plus some name games. Perhaps a routine or protocol was never explained to new members and as the early members dropped out, the meaning of the “Fight Club” soap bar was lost. Identifying a bard or historian seems like a wonderful way to ensure continuity and thereby ensure the success of the community.

Why I don’t buy from Zappos

We’re all familiar with Zappos, right? The friendly online shoe company that offers free shipping and free return shipping and is notable for its excellent customer service? I have a problem with them. It has nothing to do with customer service. It has nothing to do with their website. It has to do with (thank you, Dr. Weinschenk, for the word) indebtedness.

I first ordered a pair of shoes from Zappos about four years ago. I saw a beautiful pair of green Dansko sandals in a shop but they didn’t have my size. So I did what anyone else would do – I searched online. Not only did I find my size, but they were the last pair at Zappos for a ridiculous percentage off AND I got free shipping and returns. I ordered them, they didn’t fit, I sent them back. All with almost no trouble on my part. A year ago, I was hunting for a pair of red sandals. I had red sandals on the brain. Zappos has lots of red sandals. I ordered three pairs, intending to keep one at the most. I sent them all back. Perfect, right?

Wrong. You may have noticed that I have not actually purchased anything from Zappos. And now, after my two good encounters with the company, I feel downright guilty. I still look at shoes on the website, I read the reviews that make me feel good about a particular item, I may even drool a little – but I don’t even put anything in my shopping cart anymore. I can tell myself that this is a huge corporation which undoubtedly has the price of returns worked into its business plan. I can tell myself that this is no different from taking up a salesperson’s time in a brick-and-mortar store and returning THOSE shoes. But I know that I will not order from Zappos again unless I plan to keep the shoes. Unless I have actually tried them on in a store. I feel like I owe them that. Yet, if I try shoes on in an actual store, I will probably just buy them in that store.

In this week’s readings, both Howard and Weinschenk discussed the importance of remuneration. Howard points out that “functionality is not a sufficient condition for remuneration” (47). Functionality is important, of course. No one enjoys running into “404 not found”, especially when you are convinced that THAT LINK led to the very answer you were looking for – if it only worked. But functionality, as Howard points out, serves the user best by running in the background, by being the “old brain”, so to speak.

I teach a few LIB 100 classes each fall. These are “introduction to the library website” classes for freshmen and transfer students. If you’ve looked at the library website, you’ll understand why an introduction is necessary. I try to make the classes fun and useful. I try to explain why it’s important to know how to use library databases. I try to explain why Google does not actually answer all questions or necessarily provide the best information. And I try to explain how to search a database for a journal article. And as I do this, I am inwardly cursing all of the database vendors and designers who have designed this part of the “deep web” to be impenetrable to the average user.

Here’s why. I do not use a database such as Academic Search Premier every day or even every week, mostly because I’m not a reference librarian. So when I teach one of these classes, I sometimes stumble. I can’t tell, unless I am watching every move a student makes, how he or she got to a certain point or even how he or she can get back to the starting point. There are layers and layers of choices (i.e. barriers) to navigate before getting to a manageable number of usable articles. Many students give up before they arrive at the final destination. There is absolutely no remuneration along the way. There often isn’t an indication that the path chosen is the correct one. But, as Google has shown us, people don’t need or want a zillion options. They want to ask a question and get the answer.

I completely understand why certain information is not available on the surface web – there are issues of remuneration and copyright and privacy at work – but I am looking forward to the day when a student can go to the library website, enter a search and come up with a reasonable result. Professionally, I’m interested in the nuts and bolts, because someone has to know the nuts and bolts or the functionality disappears, but personally, I want things to be easy. There are tools (called discovery layers) that can do this for a library. They’re still fairly new, but several are quite promising. Maybe the next time I teach LIB 100, I’ll be able to focus on where to find the typewriter instead of on how to find a research article. Perhaps by then I will have also gotten over my Zappos guilt.

"It's not technology, it's what you do with it"

Check out the two "Dot" films on the Nokia Europe website (they're "below the fold" on my screen so you'll have to scroll down). A friend shared this with me and I thought it an excellent example of communication using a combination of old and new technologies. I especially enjoyed seeing how they made the film and hearing the difficulties they had along the way. And, of course, now I think it would be fun to have one of these $550 phones that hasn't even been released yet.

Incidentally, the American Nokia website for the same phone? Blah. Another reason to appreciate the power of the internet.

Letters from a Scribe

This blog being a bit of “user-generated content” with a very limited audience as far as I know, I think you all know that I’m a librarian. Some of you may equate librarians with the scribes mentioned by both Howard and Shirky. As I was reading this week’s assignment, I certainly couldn’t keep that thought pushed too far back in my mind, perhaps because it’s not a new one to me or to the profession. It’s one of the reasons why the degree path is now most commonly “Library and Information Science” instead of simply “Library Science”.

Because the obsolete scribes are dancing in front of me, waving their pens and parchment, I thought I’d write a bit about what librarianship means to me.

For hundreds of years, librarians have been keepers of books (incidentally, I hate the idea of "professionals as gatekeepers", but it's definitely there and yes, I am one, though I like to think it's a wide-open gate). The root “libr-“ means book. Libraries are traditionally either a building for holding books or a collection of books. Now, of course, a library can be a collection of almost anything that is related to information, which is to say, almost everything. I’m uploading podcasts into my iTunes library while I write this, how convenient. If I’m looking for a picture of my mother-in-law for our family reunion, I go to my photo library. If I had actually taken the time to tag my photos, I could even find one of her quickly.

The tagging and the finding is a lot of what librarians do these days. Most of us have very specific functions. Technically, I’m an archivist, not a librarian. I happen to have an MLIS but I work with individually or institutionally generated materials (personal papers, university departmental records), not commercially generated materials (books, CDs, journals). Much of this is unpublished so my job is to make this material accessible to the public. It’s a bit of a struggle sometimes and the digital world has been very hard for a lot of archivists. It’s also hard for the people who want to use the archives. In the instant access world of blogging and scanning and 3G and wikis, it’s hard for people to understand that some things really do exist only on *gasp* paper. It’s harder still to explain that many of these things are fragile and that they can’t photocopy or scan them and that we don’t have a digital version because, quite frankly, we don’t have the time, money or staff to digitize everything.

I wish I didn’t have to explain this, which is why I do what I do. To me, librarianship is about access and preservation. I want to save things in whatever format, but I don’t see the point of saving them if no one can find them. For example, Clemson’s Special Collections has a copy of this incredibly cool image of Nikola Tesla’s Colorado Springs laboratory:

It’s a famous photograph (also a double exposure, in case you were wondering). Ours is inscribed to Bernard Behrend by Tesla. Behrend was a Swiss-born engineer, a contemporary of Tesla, and is also the donor of some of Clemson’s most valuable books. I happen to think that the value of this image, of our thousands of historical Clemson photos, of our Cooperative Extension records, lies in our ability to get the information out to people who need it but might not know that we have it. We don’t have the endless money, staff or time that it would take to get all of this information into a digital format, but we do have access to other tools. I want to learn about those tools and I hope someday to incorporate the appropriate tools into this area of librarianship.

It may be that I am falling into that trap where “it is easier to understand that you face competition than obsolescence” (Shirky 59), but I don’t think librarians are going away any time soon. This doesn’t mean that I think certain librarian roles aren’t going to go away. In fact, I’m surprised some roles haven’t already disappeared. I just happen to think that more filtering and sorting and presenting is going to be necessary when “the ability to connect everybody to everybody” is no longer what sells the network (Howard 221).

Wikipedia + Academia

This article about an aspect of Wikipedia's Public Policy Initiative showed up in this morning's edition of Inside Higher Ed. It seems like a good way to begin changing people from users into collaborators while simultaneously strengthening the quality of the information and citations.

Human-scale Inventions

My thoughts bounced around quite a bit as I was reading the last chapter and the epilogue of Clay Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody. There are so many intriguing paths that I was finding it difficult to focus on just one or two. I contemplated pursuing licensing and Creative Commons but that had the potential to turn into a dissertation. Shirky mentioned that “the most profound effects of social tools lag their invention by years…” (270), but I suspect that the gap is going to begin to narrow more and more rapidly. We probably won’t be sure until we can look back and say, “oh, yeah, now that was an amazing use for Twitter.” The implicit and explicit bargains made by and for tool users got me thinking about the episode of 30 Rock where two of the characters hijack the Janis Joplin Wikipedia page in order to convince a method actor to behave strangely (Retreat to Move Forward, January 22, 2009). By the next day, according to this possibly questionable blurb, Wikipedia itself was hijacked by “fun-hating administrators”.

But it was the mention of “human-scale inventions” (300), that put most of what we’ve been discussing in perspective. Shirky contends that the transistor and the birth-control pill had a greater effect on society than nuclear power “because no one was in control of how the technology was used, or by whom”. Actually, plenty of people and organizations put themselves in control of the Pill, but as with Prohibition, full restriction proved a losing battle in the United States. Social tools are about as human as a human-scale invention can be. They allow creativity, collaboration, organization, deception and a gazillion other human necessaries. They can be misused as in cases when “enough people’s behavior becomes antisocial enough to wreck things for everyone” (283) or they can be used with extraordinary effectiveness as in Shirky’s example of the Chinese parents expressing anger over school construction in the wake of the 2008 Sichuan earthquake (295).

These examples are on a manageable or at least conceivably useful scale, yet I am often overwhelmed by the amount of information out there. I never tweet and I rarely check my Twitter account because so much is just a tedious account of what’s going on right now by people who are too bored to do anything else (“plane is delayed”, “still in the airport”, “on my third latte need plane to arrive at gate now”). I try to follow far too many RSS feeds and have learned to appreciate people who write descriptive headings so that I can ignore subjects that aren’t quite within my realm. My delicious bookmarks are chock full of sites I find funny or useful, but I sometimes catch myself getting absorbed by something trivial like Regretsy or PassiveAggressiveNotes.

I’m currently trying to decide if this overload is a result of my age (I have personal experience with rotary phones, handwritten thank you notes and TRS-80’s) or my Meyers-Briggs personality type. I’ve been giving that last one a lot of thought lately. For some reason, it has been coming up in conversations. I’m typically an INTP (Introverted, Intuitive, Thinking Perceiver). The introverted, which I’ll touch on here, means that too much interaction exhausts me, not that I don’t like people or can’t be outgoing and friendly when a situation calls for it. Still, I definitely prefer small groups, whether they are virtual or corporeal. Virtual groups do have an advantage of being avoidable. I can bring even the most ponderous wiki into my own personal human scale by a finely-tuned search or by simply ignoring it. I don’t have to read blogs or contribute to wikis or tweet if I’ve reached my personal threshold. It’s much harder to ignore the people who complain about campus parking. In person. Every day.

Through endless choices and options for customization, social networks and online communities are a boon for both introverts and extroverts. The extroverts can create/antagonize/organize/share and quite possibly get input from other extroverts. The introverts can ingest or reject as much as they need to. In fact, they can even meet with extroverts on their own terms. What can be more human than a completely customizable interactive experience?

Organize This

“You know, if one person, just one person does it they may think he's really sick and they won't take him. And if two people, two people do it, in harmony, they may think they're both faggots and they won't take either of them. And three people do it, three, can you imagine, three people walking in singin a bar of Alice's Restaurant and walking out. They may think it's an organization. And can you, can you imagine fifty people a day, I said fifty people a day walking in singin a bar of Alice's Restaurant and walking out. And friends, they may think it's a movement.”

Arlo Guthrie

I’m intrigued by the levels of organizational complexity (sharing, cooperation/collaborative action and collective action, described by both Tharon Howard and Clay Shirky in Design to Thrive and Here Comes Everybody, respectively), but I’m having trouble getting a feel for the relationship between social media and online communities and collective action. As a result, I’m going to put my own confusion out on the table in hopes that I’ll get a little clarity out of any comments.

Sharing is an easy concept. After all, I experience that one every single day. I don’t watch TV which means I get my news online, where everyone and her second cousin feels a need to comment on every article. The news outlet provides the means and people flock to the comment boxes. I shop online and love that I can get a good idea of how something fits, looks and lasts simply by reading enough ratings on Zappos or Amazon. Again, a company is providing a forum and suddenly people have an outlet. Not only that, but they have an outlet that is potentially seen by thousands of people per day. I especially appreciate the retail websites where a company representative actually posts responses to complaints. They’re usually pretty bland (“I’m sorry to hear that you were disappointed in the product. We have adjusted the size chart to reflect the feedback posted by our customers”) but how nice is it to know that someone, probably a live human, is paying attention?

Collaboration is also easy to understand in the context of online outlets. Howard’s example of the D.W. Daniel Senior Fest (18-19) and Shirky’s example of Wikipedia (50) both helped define collaboration in an online environment, using online tools. It is highly conceivable that people can collaborate on a project and pull it off successfully without ever leaving home. The collaboration may be possible through a single tool, like a wiki, or multiple communication and sharing tools may be combined in a single effort, but entire collaborative efforts can take place digitally.

Then I started tangling with the concept of collective action and tried to place it in an digital environment. I had to back off and simply try to understand collective action. The main difference between collective action and collaboration seems to be scale and context. Clay Shirky uses a single Wikipedia page as an example of collaboration; the Wikepedia page on collective action tries to use Wikipedia as an example of collective action. It doesn’t exactly succeed, but it helped me get a little closer to a definition. Wikipedia describes itself as a collaborative venture (About Wikipedia), but it also recommends certain guidelines for editing and use and warns that substandard information may be removed. Contributors, for the most part, collectively agree to follow these guidelines and what’s more, they collectively agree to enforce them through editing.

If I’m understanding this even a little bit, Wikipedia is substantiating not just one but all of the reasons Howard gives for establishing an online community (29). It enhances “intellectual capital”, increases cross-fertilization, is in itself a prime example of an “epistemic community”, preserves institutional knowledge (its own and that of others), provides a high quality, albeit flexible, interaction with the organization, improves retention and loyalty, has very low training and support costs, identifies customer’s needs, addresses problems “just in time” and has a practically nonexistent organizational hierarchy. When I first started teaching information literacy classes (a fancy way of saying “giving a digital tour of the library”), librarians had a tendency to pooh-pooh wikis and other online sources. Now we work with them and point out the advantages (often a plain English explanation of the topic and, hey look! Handy references and citations to help you take your research further) and the limitations (don’t count on the chump editing that page to actually be 100% correct. Take a look at those references and citations). And that change has taken place in a few short years, without a revolution. Wikipedia, quite simply, has power.

So I’m willing to accept Wikipedia as something which entails collective action. I had to read a bit further in Here Comes Everybody to more fully understand the power of digital media in terms of collective action. Shirky uses the example of flash mobs to illustrate a certain type of collective action: seemingly harmless activities which actually have greater meaning for the participants and for knowledgeable observers (164-168). A group of Belarusians milling about eating ice cream shouldn’t be unusual except that it was a coordinated effort, not hidden from anyone, yet highly suspicious to the police in that they had a directive to quash any sort of organization of the citizens. However, the fact that no overtly illegal activity was taking place and the fact that all of the ice cream eaters agreed to a simple set of rules mean that the collective action was successful. As Shirky put it, “Nothing says ‘police state’ like detaining kids for eating ice cream” (167).

While I’m still a bit confused about collective action, Howard and Shirky both firmly established the role of social media and online communities in suggesting, creating and even sustaining organizations. While previously voice, body language and sheer physical presence were often necessary to lend credence to an organization, even for an “adhocracy” (Howard 25), instantaneous, accessible communication methods have stepped in and added a new dimension to the way people congregate.

"Neurotypicals"

I went straight from posting to my blog to Facebook and this article was right at the top of the news feed. Since we've been reading about/talking about social behavior, I thought it was appropriate to our class.

Stories for Good

If you asked me a week ago if I thought stories belonged in a professional environment, I would have said no. I tend to think of them as an ineffectual communication method, diversions that can be fun or, in less desirable circumstances, can induce boredom or skepticism. This may stem from the fact that seven of the nine people I see on a daily basis have history degrees. A typical question-and-answer session might go like this:

X: “Where would you like me to put the fruitcake collection?”
Y: “In 1827 we kept the fruitcakes on the second shelf on the east wall, but in 1854 it was necessary to move them to the southern end of the building. Why is that, you ask? Well, the east wall was susceptible to rays from the rising sun….”
X: “So do the fruitcakes go on the south wall, then?”
Y: “Actually, as an indirect result of the cadet walkout of 1920 we found it necessary to build a new shelving unit…”

And so on.

After reading the first five chapters of Squirrel Inc. I can accept that certain kinds of stories, the organizational stories, belong in the workplace. Susan Weinschenk has convinced me that storytelling is an integral part of how we as humans communicate (112). And Heath and Heath have shared the importance of visualization in communication and realization. Like Stephen Denning, I believed that the best way to communicate is by being direct (233). Or I thought I did. If someone asks me a question, I try for a direct answer. I appreciate direct answers. Yet, when I started thinking about these readings, I found myself thinking in terms of examples. I realized that I couldn’t get through a day without telling or hearing some sort of story.

As an experiment, I decided to pay attention to the stories that were going on during a typical workday. I would have started earlier, over breakfast with my husband, but we both overslept and all conversation was related to who would make lunch. At any rate, within 45 minutes, I had a tidy little collection of stories (I may have checked Facebook – lots of stories there). Alas, not one of them was useful for my job. I found out why a coworker was late (missed the bus), what someone did over the weekend (yardwork), shared what I did over the weekend (closet cleaning) and heard that Wendy’s is doing a great Frosty promotion (buy a little card for $.99 and get a Frosty a day until October 31). We were all chatty and lively for a little while at least. After about 10am we were all firmly ensconced in our cubes doing the same old stuff. No more stories. By 4pm I realized that, since about 10 am, I had heard nothing new, done nothing new and had a bit of a headache coming on (perhaps a little more social interaction have prevented that and made me more productive as a result). I had spent the afternoon doing a fairly repetitive task that I have tried unsuccessfully to share with my co-workers.

Is there a story that could convince my co-workers to share in my task? I don’t think there is. Heath and Heath describe three types of plot: the Challenge Plot, the Connection Plot and the Creativity Plot (226-229). Do I have a story about how data entry changed my life or the life of a friend? No. Can I appeal to everyone’s sense of order and talk about how the correct syntax for name authority records will allow disadvantaged children to search Strom Thurmond’s papers more easily? No. Can I find a new way of viewing the task or its outcome so that the importance of the project becomes devastatingly clear to all concerned? Maybe. I’ll have to work on that one.

I began to worry that workplace stories don’t apply to the routine. Then I remembered something. The introduction to UNC-Chapel Hill’s Louis Round Wilson Library processing manual is a brief story:

...in a now legendary processing project, a student (somewhat, but not completely new to the manuscripts biz) was asked to chronologize a correspondence series by month ("No need to sort by day," said her supervising archivist). And that is exactly what she did. She put all of the January letters together, all of the February letters together, etc., etc. Regardless of year. The funny thing was that it took her supervising archivist, not new to the biz at all, two days to figure out what was wrong with the correspondence series. Could happen to anyone. (How to Proceed)

The gist of the story is that everyone should read the manual and that no one should consider themselves mistake-proof. They could have just written “Everyone should read this manual; no one is mistake-proof.” Instead, someone came up with a slightly longer way to make the directive stick. It’s certainly stuck with me. I don’t work at Chapel Hill and I last read this at least two years ago, yet I have remembered the story and have even shared it with my own student assistants.

Keeping this in mind, I now have an entirely new way to think about storytelling. I still believe that stories can stick in the gears and get in the way and otherwise muddle things up, but I’ll pay better attention and look for the right stories: the ones that will allow listeners to visualize the process and the outcome and to see themselves as part of the story.