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I am sometimes asked ” What is the point of twitter?” by people who sign up and are bewildered by the flurry of seemingly disconnected “tweets”.  Even Dave Davison, a longtime investor in and enthusiast of media platforms has asked what is the “Return on Attention” with twitter ?

All social networking is not created equal. My usual answer based upon my own usage has been that twitter will make sense for you if you have an established network of people with whom you have a reason to be in frequent contact and a common set of interests. I have that on twitter with a sizable national security/mil/foreign policy/4GW/IC informal “twittersphere”. If you don’t have that kind of network at least in latent form when you sign up on twitter, its going to be very hard to build one from scratch by following strangers based on random tweets.

As it turns out, research has begun to validate my empirical observation. In social networking platforms there is your formal network but inside it is the real, “hidden” network with which you actually interact:

From Complexity Digest – “Social networks that matter: Twitter under the microscope” (PDF) by Bernardo A. Huberman, Daniel M. Romero and Fang Wu

“….This implies the existence of two different networks: a very dense one made up of followers and followees, and a sparser and simpler network of actual friends. The latter proves to be a more inuential network in driving Twitter usage since users with many actual friends tend to post more updates than users with few actual friends. On the other hand, users with many followers or followees post updates more infrequently than those with few followers or followees.”

What does this mean ? 

First, it means that if the IC or military or law enforcement are worried about terrorists or criminals using twitter or Facebook for nefarious purposes, the bad guys will not be able to conceal their cells amidst a large list of nominal “friends” because their manic activity stands out like neon lights against the passivity of the non-members of the network.

Secondly, I’m not certain if this research scales with “celebrity” figures on a platform with huge numbers of followers like Robert Scoble ( Scobleizer  50, 362) or the designer Guy Kawasaki ( guykawasaki  52, 506). These people are deep influencers well outside any realistic circle of actual friends and are followed in part because of their pre-existing status earned in other domains or media.

That said, it’s an interesting concept to think of social media networks having a surface and a hidden or inner network where the real action takes place and what causes transactional movement to occur between the two.

UPDATE:

A related post by Drew – Enabling the Power of Social Networks in the IC

The SWJ Blog published an op-ed by Colonel David Maxwell entitled “Random Thoughts on Irregular Warfare and Security Assistance (Full PDF Article)“. Like a lot of more open-ended, ruminating pieces, Maxwell’s post was “generative” in the sense of trying to articulate insights regarding a complex situation, which Col. Maxwell accomplished. Here’s the section that raised my eyebrow:

…First we need to look at ourselves critically and ask if we have been able to develop effective strategies and campaign plans and then support and execute them, respectively. I think that most all of our challenges can be attributed to our strategies and campaign plans (and I will caveat this and say we need to understand that in this world of irregular warfare, complex operations and hybrid warfare there is no cookie cutter strategy or campaign plan template that will work the first time, every time. We need to be agile and flexible and be able to adapt to constantly morphing conditions). But I would say that this is where we need to focus most of all because our forces at the tactical level from all Services have proven very adept and capable and have demonstrated that they are truly learning organizations

Why would the “tactical”level have acheived “learning organization” status and not the “operational” and “strategic” levels of military command? Some possibilities:

• The social networks within the official hierarchical org at the tactical level can effectively leverage both weak and strong ties 
• Greater degree of shared purpose and sense of mission
• The tactical level, being a “smaller world” in systems terms than the operational or strategic levels, has a much better “signal to noise” ratio.
• The social networks within the hierarchical org at the tactical level create an environment of greater transparency -discussion may be squelched but situational awareness can’t be.
• Encouragement of critical discussion and incentives for problem-solving.
• Greater tolerance for uncertainty and ambiguity.
• Tacit knowledge is likely to quickly become explicit organizational, knowledge through “shop talk”, the grapevine, de-briefing and formal “lessons learned” dissemination procedures.
• The stress and danger of the tactical evironment itself is an incentive to adapt and learn – “Depend upon it, sir, when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.” Dr. Samuel Johnson.
   

Can the operational and strategic levels of the military ( or any organization with a bureaucratic structure – schools, corporations, government agencies etc.) become a “learning organization” despite greater scale, distance from events, degrees of abstraction and other obstacles? Of course. However it depends greatly on two things – creating a “tighter” network with a high velocity of meaningful communication and a new kind of leadership committed to the hard work of re-engineering the organizational culture around adaptive “fitness” and learning.

Dr. Barnett, no doubt at the behest of his webmaster Sean Meade has joined me, Soob, Shane, John Robb, Shlok Vaidya,  Critt, A.E., Michael Tanji, Steve Schippert, Fantomplanet, Selil, Historyguy99, Valdis Krebs, Matt Devost, on Twitter.

UPDATE:

Without in intending to slight anyone and not intending to be exhaustive, in my hurry to post earlier today, I was not thorough enough in accounting for everyone in the above intel/national security/cyberwarfare/military/strategy/foreign policy Twittersphere and I would like to add….

mountainrunner, fester986 , SmittenEagle , larrydunbar , jeffreycarr skilluminati  ckras, ganeshpuri89 , Jimminy, iannarino, PrestoVivace, sandbaggerone, bobgourley, wishtank , ZachTumin, wfzimmerman, OnWar, daxe,   reihansalam, lewisshepherd, jessewilson1,  ChrisAlbon,  marvin_hutchens, PurpleSlog, MB2MB, greatpowers, robpatrob, hipbonegamer, CurtisGaleWeeks,  seanmeade ….

I think I have everyone listed now that I have typed out half of my follow list but I have inadvertantly missed someone please email or DM me and I will add you so others can “follow” you and not miss out on the conversation.

This is what I like best about the blogosphere and Web 2.0. The evolution of ideas.

Recently, Galrahn at Information Dissemination had an excellent post where he coined the term “Renaissance Networks” (he should trademark that one) where he argued, in part:

We think the concept of “Renaissance men” is evolving into “Renaissance networks”, they range from the generalists (like Matt and David), the interested citizens (you, being a politically active, informed citizen, in the case of this blog interested in military and specifically maritime strategy), and the larger network that extends to the specialists whom takes various forms like media and research, and who ultimately disseminate through various mediums including periodicals like Proceedings or even a Research organization like CSBA.

The point is, when one observes the evolution of social media networks, not only do we see a Think Tank 2.0 replacing the Think Tank in the future, we also see the development of a hierarchy of information dissemination from the generalists to the specialists for discussion, and back up to the generalists for broader information redistribution. This hierarchy is already well developed in politics, information technology, and entertainment, but the emergence of professional and topic centric blogs for the national security debate and foreign policymaking are slow in coming, but those blogs are emerging. It will take time for consensus to build among the “punditsphere” regarding who the professionals are, but we are already seeing movement on that as well.

That inspired my CTLab colleague Drew Conway to post up with “Points of Failure in the “Renaisance Network” :

Knol fits in ID’s hierarchical model somewhere at the top; however, we must be cautious of the inherent faults of this system. For example, Knol uses a ranking system of five stars to give the audience an idea of a piece’s quality. Like other social media outlets (del.icio.us and digg.com), the rankings can be skewed by intentional manipulation (paid services to increased the number of bookmarks or ratings), or online mob behavior to push flavor-of-the-week pieces to the front page. More troubling, though, is the digital tunnel vision that social media construct. Cass Sunstein has been the loudest voice on this issue for several years, and in his Republic.com 2.0 he points out

…people should be exposed to materials that they would not have chosen in advance. Unplanned, unanticipated encounters are central to democracy itself. Such encounters often involve topics and points of view that people have not sought out and perhaps find quite irritating.

It is one thing to allow social media to find the “hottest” site at any given moment, but it is a different thing entirely to allow that same system to determine authoritative works.

In turn, fellow SWC member Dr. Marc Tyrell picked up the meme and ran with it with “Renaissance networks”: social media and reciprocity systems. This is a heavily linked post but here is one part:

In most of my work, I’ve argued in one way or another, that this “shift” to a network society is not “new” by any stretch of the imagination. It is, in fact, a shifting to a form of social relations that was dominant throughout our species history, probably as early as Australopithicines (if not earlier), and not replaced by another form until circa 10-12,000 years ago with the Agricultural Revoltion (aka the Neolithic Revolution). I find it exceedingly unlikely that any species would evolve for several millions of years without developing specialized neural circuitry to handle the problems and opportunities inherent in their social environment (along with mechanisms to detect cheaters). As Cosmides and Tooby have noted, “Our modern skulls house a stone age mind”.

Inherent in much of the discussion over this “shift” is a concept of linear time that I find exceedingly frustrating. The implication is that this shift is either an evolution (or revolution… take your pick) that is following along some pre-determined teleological vector. What is lost in the discussion, mainly because the linearity of time is assumed, is the recognition that this is not a “radical” change but, rather, a “phase change” – a shift between different forms of social relations, all of which are inherent in the human species (see Alan Fiske’s Structures of Social Life).

“Phase transition” is a nice analogy from physics, which my longtime friend Dr. Von has applied to discussions of “emergence” and network theory in the past. I agree that it is a useful way of shorthanding complex but apparently seamless changes in human social network behavior, where “tipping points” mark significant alterations, that we cannot explain as a sequential process.

In any event, cyclical conceptions of society and time have a long pedigree. Polybius argued for cyclicality in governance as did Confucianist assumptions regarding virtue and the mandate of Heaven or salvation concepts inherent in Hinduism and Buddhism. What social network phase transitions may be creating may be less cyclical in nature though than asynchronous; permitting divergence, co-evolutionary development and fusion of behavioral trend lines.

Picked this up on Socialmedian:

Broadcasting Brain – Hyperconnectivity shakes up six degrees of separation

Type 0 and 1 plus:

• Social media and Web 2.0 (social news, social bookmarking, and social networking)
• Microblogging, aggregators, lifestreaming, blog commenting
• Audio and video blogging
• Open IM clients (e.g. GTalk)
• Wireless connectivity

Communication advances have generally created faster and easier to use methods. In the pre-Internet era, nothing was faster than a phone call except for a face-to-face meeting (although travel time to arrange a face-to-face meeting was often prohibitive). Today we have a number of methods that allow virtually real-time interaction and more variations on them seem to appear on a regular basis.

Lots of visuals in this post. The author seems to be alluding to attention economy variables in Part II.