Ubiwar on the Value of Social Media Tools
Tim of Ubiwar had a near-simultaneous post on Social Media yesterday that was congruent with mine and expands on aspects that I did not. Highly recommended:
An excerpt:
Alexander van Elsas wrote an excellent piece on mobile phone functionality in which he referenced a recent post by Scoble, Why Google News has no noise. Scoble’s thesis is that he is able to spot trends in news before the main web news carriers, Google News for mainstream news, and TechMeme for tech news, before either they or their readers can. The enabling media for Scoble’s prognostications are social aggregators like FriendFeed and microblogging services like Twitter. I won’t go into the details of exactly what these are but essentially they are services delivered direct to the device of your choice which provide frequent updates of what your friends and acquaintances are doing, thinking, writing, at all hours of the day. With a lot of people in your network these alerts can be relentless.
Scoble likes this, as do many others, because it provides him with a background of noise which allows him to discern patterns in the network of social interaction across these services. Scoble is a journalist by background and inclination and, arguably, he is a new sort of journalist through his work at Scobleizer, and ‘swimming in the noise’ these services provide is food and drink to someone of his bent:
So, how come services like Twitter and FriendFeed have so much noise? Who likes the noise? Who likes the news?
I like the noise. Why? Because I can see patterns before anyone else. I saw the Chinese earthquake happening 45 minutes before Google News reported it. Why? Because I was watching the noise, not the news.
This is an important and valid point. Scoble is watching the new news ‘wires’ to get a jump on the bigger outlets but also to discern the patterning in the information coming from across the globe. This process is aided by aggregative nodes which filter reports of activities into streamlined summaries of many people’s information. Once such example is ‘bridge blogging‘ which enables one bilingual individual to aggregate locally-generated ‘news’ in one language and to disseminate it in another. Scoble likes to avoid these nodes wherever possible but they serve a purpose, as any blogger will tell you.
I’m very curious about the pattern recognition part. Are Scoble and Jason Calacanis and other uber-geek bloggers following tens of thousands mentally upjumping in terms of discriminating patterns or are they gravitating to those signals in the noise that they are already predisposed to “see” anyway?
May 21st, 2008 at 6:19 am
Can anyone explain what he means by "goggle news has no noise"? Here is the post:
http://scobleizer.com/2008/05/18/why-google-news-has-no-noise/
"I saw the Chinese earthquake happening 45 minutes before Google News reported it. "
Scoble "knew" there had been some kind of earthquake somewhere in China a few minutes before the USGS alert (1 – 3, depending on the report). That’s because the USGS does not send a report until they determine the location and intensity of the quake. That’s not "noise" but close to it, as I doubt anything could be done with this. It’s like those folks who comment on a blog post "First!" Well, OK.
He "knew" before reading the news broadcasts, but that is probably because their customer base does not care for that kind of real time reporting. Value of news is not just speed, but also providing enough detail so we have a context for it. Flooding us with factoids is often of negative value.
Here is Scoble’s post about the quake:
http://scobleizer.com/2008/05/12/quake-in-china/
And a more critical look:
http://searchengineland.com/080512-130254.php
May 21st, 2008 at 7:32 am
That’s the key, isn’t it? Is there an element of ‘confirmation bias’, or are these guys skilled by experience in inductive inference? Are they somehow Homo sapiens informationensis (or something less clunky and etymologically laughable)? Post-human humans for the information age. Justin Borland and yourself both suggest that a new form of cognition may be at work here – somewhat analagous I suspect to the art of reading amongst the great unwashed, post-Gutenberg. Id est, it’s not exactly new, but it is significant.
I know there’s a vast amount of work out there on pattern recognition, language and the evolution of cognitive abilities, but it’s way outside my ken. This field of enquiry particularly exercises anthropologists and archaeologists dealing with pre-human evolution. How the creation of stone tools aided the development of language, for example. Thomas Wynn drew on the work of developmental theorist Jean Piaget, particularly his studies of children, to inform his fascinating ideas of cognitive evolution in deep time.
May 21st, 2008 at 1:05 pm
Great posts – and indicative of a shift in our methods of analysis and decision making. Agree with Tim’s previous comment about cognitive evolution, too. Man-cub (at the age of 7) has far more awareness and intuition than I had at 17, and given the evolving tools that will be at his disposal will continue to outpace me.
One thing that has amazed me, and that Scoble and Tim hint at, is the extremely short (and continuously accelerating) event horizon for "news". Even more "long-term" facets of the Internet (Wikipedia) are more responsive than traditional news channels: Wikipedia had its first entry on the Sichuan earthquake less than 44 minutes after the event, with more than 80 updates (i.e., rich content) in the first three hours.
May 22nd, 2008 at 2:43 am
Preference for complex patterns and data-rich environments is associated with psychosis, and hence creativity. It’s no surprise that one would observe these patterns among creative uber-bloggers like Scoble. (Not a diagnosis, just an elaboration of what I’m learning. 🙂 )
May 22nd, 2008 at 3:45 am
Hello gents,
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In order:
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FM – I mostly follow scoble’s maniacal chatter on twitter ( I have friendfeed but I don’t like the visual presentation – needs work to move beyond the geek set) and click links when he has something substantive to say. To your point, I think you could draw an information continuum with poles representing "speed" and "depth" and place various media platforms and outlets ( or IC agencies – note the old argument between reportage and clandestinity for collectors). Scoble is in a "speed" mode but he’s certainly capable of quality depth if he chooses.
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Tim – I think separating the confirmation bias from the pattern recognition is going to require some careful, expertly designed, controlled studies by cognitive psychologists. Of course, you could easily be getting both at once as they are not mutually exclusive phenomena per se. Regarding stone tools, that’s very interesting; artifacts are more or less "spatial memes" aren’t they ? My recollection ( which may very well be in error) was that Neanderthals had stone tools, buried their dead with flowers, objects etc. ( indication abstract thought of an afterlife concept) yet probably did not have language as we understand it. Correct ? Homo Sapiens Sapiens do have that capacity and you see a sharp increase in the cultural evolution curve at the onset of the agricultural revolution circa 20,000 -10,000 BC; does complex language precede the A.R. or did it require population density ??
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Obviously I am a historian, not a linguist or anthropologist/archaeologist. 🙂
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Shane of the Indiana Jones Hat – This is strictly anecdotal but I see a similar increase in "intuitive" capacity not just in my own children ( my son was using a computer as his language skills were coming in to line) but my students as well. Those I am teaching now are far more intuitive than those of ten or fifteen years ago. OTOH, their capacity for sustained logical reasoning or formal constructions are exceptionally mediocre. Their attention spans are terrible. I see among the brighter sort ( say IQ circa 120 +) fast processing but not much endurance for mental task persistance.
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Dan – Saw your post & liked it. " Psychosis" though is a very strong word and not, I think, very representative of the highly creative and likely to be misunderstood by laymen. Van Gogh – yes. John Nash or Ted Kacyzinski – certainly – but a Salvador Dali ? A Hemmingway ? A Mozart ? Neurotic or mildly manic-depressive are better descriptors of their post-creative mindset than "psychosis".
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Now that I think of it, not every aspect of mild mental or emotional problems are debilitating for creatives. Abraham Lincoln without familiarity with deep melancholy might have broken under the incredible stress of the Civil War. He felt it less and bore it better because emotional pain was habitual.
May 22nd, 2008 at 4:00 am
Indeed. I’m currently grokking "Creativity as a constrained stochastic process" by Dean Keith Simonton, in the book "Creativity : from potential to realization." Simonton focuses on divergent thinking with that regard, but comes close to arguing that psychoticism is a continuum in a manner to Baron-Cohen’s autism as an extreme mail mind.
May 22nd, 2008 at 4:49 am
That’s a very interesting analogy as it brings in to play the idea of a "spectrum" of creative capacity. There are a lot of folks who are -hmm- " Aspergerish" but don’t make the standardized instrument cut on the rating scale for Asperger’s.
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Creativity can be collaborative-stochastic. It can also be done in terms of great leaps by individuals whose breakthroughs are later modified, improved and corrected by near peers. Archimedes, Aristotle, Newton, Einstein, Heisenberg etc. etc.
May 22nd, 2008 at 4:54 am
Zen, O.K. — accepting that creativity can be collaborative-stochastic, does the waning attention span of information-saturated pundits equate to shorter "great leaps" and fewer "breakthroughs"?
May 22nd, 2008 at 4:58 am
Great question Shane. Hmmmmmm…..
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Tempted to say "yes" except that a flash of insight occurs…in a flash…and the implications that can be extrapolated from the insight are not dependent on the attention span of their originator.
May 22nd, 2008 at 7:55 am
Shane (comment #3)
You should see my 4-year old nephew on a Wii – staggering. He projects through the device, rather than ‘uses’ it.
…the extremely short (and continuously accelerating) event horizon for "news".
This ‘zero-time’ response is exercising certain thoughtful broadcasters in the UK, particularly Nik Gowing of the BBC. We shouldn’t be surprised about this – Virilio and Baudrillard flagged it up years ago. Justin’s <a href="http://ubiwar.com/2008/05/20/scoble-noise-news/#comment-85">wondering</a> what effect this has on the OODA Loop, and now I am too.
Mark (comment #5)
I think stone tools are exactly ‘spatial memes’, and subject to the same processes of transmission, mutation, etc, as any other meme.
Re. Neanderthals. It’s almost impossible to tell whether they had ‘language as we understand it’, but I think that their capacity for abstract thought, as you say, must have required some form of quite sophisticated communication. I can’t quite remember what laryngeal studies have concluded with respect to language but I could find out. Whilst the Neolithic revolution of agriculturalism, with its urbanisation twin, were drivers for written language (or vice versa perhaps – the material record is notoriously complicated in this respect) I’m sure that the spoken languages of the Levant and Babylonia were just as complex as our own. The cognitive frameworks were probably in place well before this time, although agriculture and urbanism undoubtedly spurred rapid linguistic developments.
May 23rd, 2008 at 7:29 pm
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