Monkey Motives
It will become clear over time that the ‘Other People’ or ‘Us and Them’ theme is a regular element of my thinking about community and action. This isn’t (just) about obvious historical, social, ethnic or tribal (e.g. football club), divisions that have been recognised, documented, and maybe thus reinforced. It’s more about the underlying psychological processes that may be involved in our attitudes to others, in our immediate reactions to a situation and, thus, our relationship with our local community.
So I think I should try to clarify this, for when it crops up elsewhere in this blog. I don’t think I’m saying anything new, anything that hasn’t been dealt with academically by sociology (with its ‘conflict’ and ‘consensus’ models of society) or by evolutionary psychology with it’s intricate analysis of how certain genetic inheritance can be favoured by group behaviours as well as those of an individual. But I need my own personal version – simpler and more vivid – to work with.
I know humans aren’t monkeys – we are probably some kind of great ape – but the lives of monkey ‘troupes’ or even of other clannish species such as Meerkats are the easiest to relate to. Many species of monkey live out their lives in clans, essentially extended families. Within those families there are all sorts of different protocols and hierarchies that determine interaction and status – many of which we can relate to when explaining the psychology of organisations… body language, pecking order, nurture and so on. But one of the greatest sources of pressure on a monkey clan is another monkey clan. They compete for resources (territory, food, shelter, remoteness from predators) and they may also compete for genetic resources – one clan seeking to break up another and appropriate the DNA of the strongest specimens into their own dominant family tree.
Just as relationships within clans, even amongst relatively distant kin, can be tender, altruistic and mutual… conflicts between clans can be brutal, total and fatal – either directly or as a result of pushing the losers into dangerous and impoverished territory. The difference, however it may be sensed and experienced, is clan. The decisions about how to respond to any situation fork at that point – is this individual ‘My-clan’ or ‘Not-my-clan’? Thereafter the answers are very very different. ‘Us’ or ‘Them’.
The second thing I want to make clear is that these are primitive distinctions – they are run by older, simpler, more hard-wired parts of our brains (minds?) which may have been overlaid, but not deleted, by our more complex social, linguistic and intellectual selves. Hence I’m not so interested in more modern, explicit and established national/tribal boundaries. Read more…
Electric Cars… again!
Sometimes I’m compelled to blog a topic just to get a succinct point of view on the record… usually because of the way I have seen or heard it reported.
Today this was electric cars. For some reason the debate focusses on whether they are achieving the performance, capacity and range of cars with internal combustion engines. This also tends to sustain a rather cursory way of regarding electric cars – i.e. that they must be green because they emit no exhaust fumes.
So I just want to list some of the other critical considerations that should be raised every time the credentials of electric cars are examined. These are my questions or challenges, I’m not offering the answers:
- Electric cars are, at best, as green as the means of generating the electricity which is used to recharge them. In a country served by old-style coal-fired power stations, an electric car is a coal-burner.
- It’s worse than that – because there is an extra inefficiency – the loss of power during transmission and transformation over the grid. [I think these losses are quite high – compared to the delivery of the power from an internal combustion engine when delivered via a local mechanical transmission].
- Once the electrical charge is “on board”, then the efficiency of the electric motor in converting it into mechanical energy needs to be considered.
- The evaluation should also take account of the ‘whole life’ energy costs of an electric car, i.e. is more or less energy required to source the materials, fabricate the parts and assemble the car, than for other types of vehicle. Similarly – how do the energy costs of decommissioning and recycling stack up.
- Finally – moving away from energy efficiency per se – what are the relative environmental impacts of the extraction, processing and manipulation of the materials required for electric cars and for other types? In particular I am thinking about the batteries and about the magnets and motor windings.
I’m sure there’s a combination of answers to those questions which would put electric cars out in front. I would love to know some of the answers and considerations… but I would also love to know why the media seem to cover electric cars on such a superficial level, thus encouraging the rest of us to do the same. Government is making decisions right now about investing in electric cars, and that debate should be informed and properly democratised.
“Other People” and the sub-contracting of civic duty
There’s another common theme to my thinking – I’ll be writing about it soon and, indeed, re-posting an item from my old blog about it. If nothing else it will prove that I’ve been going about it for quite a while.
There were also elements of this idea in what I said yesterday, concerning the way we seem to want to use “Other People” to deal with “Other People”, not least via the use of legislation, regulation and good old BANNING THINGS! At best we pay a service charge to our local authorities in order to fund that intervention and, at the same time, distance ourselves from the conflict.
Anyhow, more of that anon. But I was prompted to jump the gun a little on this topic, because I wanted to share this article from BBC News Online which demonstrates some of the practical responses that I am interested in fostering. The quoted phrase, “the disengagement of the criminal justice systems makes it harder for communities to fight crime” has something in common with my “Other People” issue. More later then…
Banning Things: Facebook, using a Mobile, then what?
At least two news stories last week were about banning things.
The first was Portsmouth Council banning staff from using Facebook after discovering that they spent 413 hours per month using it.
The second was the suggestion that ‘people’ should be banned from using mobile phones in various kinds of shared public space.
In the Portsmouth Council case I resisted the temptation to go for a straight “Doh!” After all this is a responsible public body looking for a way to cut down on time-wasting, and the default way to look at Facebook use is that it is at best recreation, and at worst trivia. But there are some ways I think that either the action, or the reporting of it, should have delved deeper.
- On a technical level, is this time that some people spent actively using Facebook or the total length of time that there were some browser windows open at a Facebook URL? If the latter, then these windows may have been in the background with the user occasionally glancing at it for an update.
- Then there’s the distribution of the usage. The Council probably had to respond to some grossly aggregated stats – hence the headline total of 413 hours per month. Neither that, nor the 4 minutes per month per employee figure, tells us anything useful. Was this a handful of people spending large periods of time with Facebook open, or many people grabbing a few minutes here and there? Which departments and networks were involved, and in which of these might there be IT security implications.
- Crucially – exactly how were people using Facebook. “Using Facebook” probably has the status that “Looking at the Internet” had a few years ago in terms of vagueness and superficial disreputableness. Facebook is almost an operating system – there are all kinds of uses to which people might be putting it – just as there are all sorts of uses to which people might be putting e-mail.
Sitting across the top of this scope for greater discrimination and sophistication in the Council’s response there is a principle involved. It hinges on how you regard people. Are they inherently ‘naughty’ people who will do the wrong thing unless constrained – and is outright banning, as opposed to culture, motivation, peer pressure and job design, the only form of available constraint or guidance? The message is “we know you will be bad unless we stop you”, and “you are all the same”, and by implication, “anything we don’t actively stop you from doing is therefore OK, you don’t have to exercise your own judgement, or self-restraint, or sense of what’s right and fair”. I’m sure that’s not a message that Portsmouth Council would have wished to send. Read more…
Back…
Interesting. I had a couple of weeks holiday at the beginning of August, and then two further weeks when I’ve been back at work – but all spare time has been taken up by the visit of my brother and sister-in-law from Australia (a once in ten years event).
The holiday started with me being away from convenient web access most of the time, and maybe that was the trigger, but I haven’t blogged since the holiday started.
Conclusion? Although I think of my blog as a mixture of personal and professional thinking, it would appear that I only blog when a) I’m working and b) I have sufficient time outside of work to organise my thoughts.
OK – that’s based on the evidence of one occurrence, at least since I embarked on the new blog, so let’s see what happens next.
On Frankness… …and Charisma
It’s a curious looking word, ‘Frank’. It looks a bit old fashioned, it gets played around with because of also being a name and it is connected, via Middle English from the Old French ‘Franc’ and the late Latin ‘Francus’, to that ancient European people – the Franks.
The most common dictionary connotations are with openness and with honesty. It then extends into outspokenness and (a word I will want to come back to) directness.
Even better, given my attraction to the word, ‘Frank’, it turns out to be derived from the Middle English for ‘free‘. The Franks must have been regarded as, in some way, the free people.
Perhaps the whole point of this blog is that I am endorsing ‘frankness’ – so I had better be pretty thorough in my groundwork. But that’s probably enough linguistic and historic set-up for now.
I’m advocating frankness in individuals, but I’m also particularly interested in how, why and whether organisations should pursue frankness. By organisation I mean everything from a loose association of individuals to a highly structured and organised corporation, institution or ‘party’.
So, starting with individuals, why should we avoid the Bull and ‘be frank’…?
First day of a new blog
Thursday the 16th of July. North Kent rolling away from the foot of my back garden. Traffic labouring up the A2 in the distance towards Bluewater and, who knows, thence to the coast and France? Heat building and thunder on its way. School holidays just kicking off.
I’ll write the ‘About’ page, and that will be enough for now. After all – I might want to move all this ‘furniture’ around quite a lot.
Today’s most important news story for me? The BBC’s Mark Easton on how the media treat our crime figures.
It's only a week away and, at rather short notice, I was asked to take part in the 'The Future of Policy Making' session. http://rebootbritain.sched.org/
I've thought of some hooks for this – and I may as well share them in case anyone has ideas to add.
1. Market Research faces certain issues when it gets involved with studying or using Social Media. I'm going to look at some of these, and our responses to them, and then I'm going to examine what the parallels are with something like 'deliberative e-Democracy' or whatever the newer names for this are.
2. One of these issues is the inequality of participation online. A little of this is about access to the channels, but much much more is about personality types and motivation. So let's look at the 1-9-90 of research and the 1-9-90 of policy making on-and-off line.
3. A key element in understanding inequality of participation, and wider issues of 'representativeness', is the crudely worded meta-question… 'who are these people?'. To what extent can we treat every 'input' as having come from a uniform and rational agent, or to what extent must it be contextualised by knowing who it comes from? To be clear, I don't think this is about good old demographics, or even values/lifestyles, any more. I argue it's about personality types, and therefore about what such people will also do in the world, in their lives. I will illustrate this by talking about 'who am I?' and showing how my background contextualises the reception to my presentation.
4. Is about emotion. Market Researchers are becoming more and more at home with, and attuned to exploring, the role of emotion, the subconscious, the group effect, etc in making what might otherwise be isolated as rational judgements and decisions. This goes hand in hand with what Social Media can give us access to – such as images as well as text – or to moments of personal experience. Yet the temptation for 'Social Media Policy Making' will be to make the process more rational, more structured, more prone to cleaning up the evidence. How does this stack up?
5. Is about three modes of 'getting communal' that Market Research has to contemplate… a) creating, and recruiting, artificial social spaces (and 'just for Christmas?') or b) striking up relationships with (and or recruting from) existing online communities, or c) eavesdropping on publicly conducted conversations on the web, often at scale and using automated crawling, harvesting and analysis.
6. Is maybe about the 'short circuit'. I've been thinking about the parallels here, between online adjuncts to policy making, and Market Research. But of course one way that the former can happen is when the policy makers employ Market Researchers to do 'online and social' with citizens in order to inform policy making. The main point I want to make here is that the 'client' in these scenarios is most often an official. Does this create competition with elected representatives and with political activists or pressure groups etc? This is probably a good place to briefly consider whether all this Policy Making stuff is about service design and civic consumerism, or whether it's about governance per se. In short – who sets the original agenda – another question, perhaps surprisingly, that some of our clients are waking up to.
Throughout, just to make it easy, I want to keep glancing across to the practical questions posed for Social Media usability, features, functions, architecture and 'marketing' by all of the above.
And the final afterthought. Crowdsourcing is often part of a recognition that a few people can't get their heads around the definition, status of and solution for some kind of problem. However, most models still (paradoxically?) work on the premise that the crowdsourced wisdom can then be condensed down to 'insights', followed by plans, that a small number of people can get their heads around. Can this be correct/right? What does the alternative look like – i.e. where the application of the 'distributed crowd insight' is also devolved to the crowd, where the elite representatives and officials 'let go'? Is it possible? Does Social Media make it more possible, conceivable or acceptable….? That, to me, seems like a good question to leave with Reboot Britain.
Human Connectedness and ‘”Society'”
I was walking up the hill towards home the other day. There was a man walking towards me – slightly older than me I guess. To my unconscious social auto-pilot I now reckon he was a 'probable' – that is, somebody it was worth turning my open face to in the expectation of making eye contact and saying "hello". I don't know him, hadn't seen him before, but he was just of a certain generation…
I was wrong – there was no mutual connection. If anything his social radar tipped him off that I was looking towards him and, it seems, there was an intentional avoidance as we passed – to ensure we didn't connect by accident.
It made me think – as it does when this happens… on the assumption that I wasn't wearing a particularly scary face at the time, or that I am generally intimidating in dress, posture and demeanour.
This isn't what it was like where and when I grew up – and where I live now isn't much different as a place. I'm pretty sure that if I went back to my childhood neighbourhood, similar to this one, I would now get just as high a 'no-contact' score. Don't get me wrong – plenty of strangers say "hello" – but the count is down and seems to be dropping, not least amongst those I consider my generation.., people like me.
If I'm right – and it has something to do with inhibition, less social living, more concentration on small groups of trusted friends and family, fear of confrontation or just lack of experience and confidence in connecting with those we don't know… how does this sit with the supposed explosion in social media, in social networks and sharing, and in all that voting and joining in with Britain's Got Talent and Strictly Come Dancing?
Is it that we now connect by proxy? That somehow we can connect at the mind level because our faces and physical presences and social incompetence can't get in the way? Or is it that this is a facile poor substitute for the direct social contact that we are getting less good at, because we do it less – drive to the shopping mall, sit in a personal iPod bubble on the train, work with a small group of people – and deal with the rest by phone and e-mail?
There's plenty of society going on still – of course there is. But I'm interested in the trends and the majorities and how these relate to my personal count of those turned-away faces.
A grand scale argument would be that we are evolving again – into beings who can derive part of our social and mental satisfaction by connecting at a distance, via partial or virtual personae, and that in some ways this may lead to a larger number of deeper relationships – to supplement our 'normal' socialising and family life.
One's first reaction is to think of this as artificial – in particular to wonder whether our physiological and deep cognitive make-up can keep pace with such a change – if change there is – whether this will cause more disfunction and illness through a separation of physical and intellectual presence… a widening of Descartes' dualism.
But then – where do we draw the baseline for 'normal' levels of socialisation for the human species? If our natural programming is still that which works for a large family/small tribe living a semi-nomadic life on the African savannah… were the medieval agricultural fixed settlements of the Middle Ages (let alone the English suburbs and small towns of 'my' 1960s) any more natural to us than a world where we directly encounter few people – treat the rest as economic transactors (shop assistants, restaurant staff…) – and have quite other meaningful relationships with people we rarely or never see in the flesh?
This puts me in mind to do three things:
1. Go looking for whatever constitutes the hard data as regards real world 'connection' between strangers and its relationship to online connections and relationships.
2. Find out more about why campaigns like 'Love where you Live' and 'The Big Lunch' are suddenly cropping up. They bear a striking resemblance to ideas we discussed at UpMyStreet about local connection and the UpMyStreet Party… or UpMyStreet Street Party…
3. Resolve to keep turning my open face to everybody, put up with the disappointment when it's not returned, and refuse to be part of a process of disengagement. (One, that is, I've checked my teeth for spinach…)
Oh – by the way – "Good Morning" ;0)
Keeping things simple – again!
When I'm digging in my garden, and the activity clears out all the trivia, I often find myself thinking about work. It's OK… I really like my work, or at least the part that I think about when I'm digging, which is perhaps the ideal work that I would be doing all the time, if I could just clear out all the other stuff.
Typically it will be a movie playing in my head – of me addressing an audience of my colleagues – maybe small, maybe a full hall. It's not that when the movie starts I already know what I think about a particular subject, or that I know how I want to communicate it, the movie is to some degree the real time process through which I both clarify and share those thoughts.
Hang on – that's thinking out loud but in my head !!!
Anyway, I wish it was possible to record these movies, with their passion and humour and, yes, self confidence because if I think, "Hang on that's a blog entry", by the time I sit down to write they have faded to something much more laborious. Also, as I write the first bits, reflect on them and ensure they are in tidy 'propositional' sentences – the later bits get overwritten in my memory, or fall off the end of the different kind of memory I'm accessing by then.
One – narcissistic – idea I had was to run in and sit down infront of our HDD video camera, or our web cam, and speak it rather than write it. Hmmm. [Is this a variant of that 'learning styles' thing?]
Anyway – here are the remains of todays (literally 'dug') thought.
When I'm explaining promoting some things to my colleagues about the web, about web2.0 and social media, one of the problems is that it is too wide a range of 'importances' and, since we all tend to start with background and the web2.0/social media background is MASSIVE!, I'm not left with time, stamina or audience forbearance, to move on to the other aspects. You'll see what I mean in a minute.
Solution. Deal with each of the three on different occasions. Supporting solutions: Ask some questions at the start to show, and to let the audience show each other, that we all have different degrees of understanding of, levels of enthusiasm for, and degree of personal immersion in, any of the 3 (yes three) dimensions of web2.0/social media for market researchers.
So I need three different (or three different families of) expositions on this subject.
1. World. How these things are being played out in the world – spread, types of activity, historical perspective – what it influences, but also what it is influenced by and confused with. THEORY. ACADEMIA.
2. Object of Study. What out clients ar interested in – so what they might ask us to investigate. How marketers are trying to interract with 'consumers' through these media. New behaviours and segmentations. New theories of marketing or the death of marketing. This is where considerations, and versions, of the 1-9-90 question belong.
3. Medium of study. i.e. how we (i.e. our company) have, could, and how others have, used, and sought to use, the machinery of web2.0 to conduct research studies. In particular encourage exploration of whether each case is 'old work with new tools' or 'new work' – also how it relates to considerations, at 2, about types of participant… not just familiar segmentations – but segmentations by online behaviour, connectedness, openness.
Interestingly – social web mining – something I'm looking at at the moment, is one thiong that really straddles 2 and 3 in a stubborn way. Though I think it leans towards 3 at the moment.
So I need to deal with each of these, briefly and penetratingly, on it's own.
My notes to self are…
In each case be prepared to talk (not to 'present') and hence tap into my emotion/belief/hopes. Let the outcome be a group discussion and then the firing up of a number of bilateral conversations thereafter (more of those movies maybe, but no longer in my head) – this is in contrast to the outcome being a deck or a set of notes that people take away.
I think the next thing I need to do is collect favourite quotes, examples and things that make me rant.
Nick Buckley : Practically Mindful 