Telephone box by Malias. Used under CC license.
The recent Gladwell article on innovation in the New Yorker - which is focused around former Microsoft man Nathan Myrhvold - suggests that innovation is less the product of genius than the zeitgeist.
Like many of Gladwell’s pieces, it’s about an idea that hides in plain sight. “Yes!” you cry, “Of course are a product of their time.” It seems obvious - but few people have actually said it.
He’s really talking about the historical inevitability of technologies: that new things would happen regardless, because of the prevailing intellectual climate. His primary historical example for the idea that innovations would happen regardless is the case of Alexander Graham Bell (usually acknowledged as the man behind the telephone) and Elisha Gray (who had the same idea at the same time, but didn’t win the battle).
Gray was simply a very adept inventor. He was the author of a number of discoveries relating to the telegraph industry [...] and was working on the telephone at the same time that Bell was. [...] until Gray’s team was forced to settle a lawsuit with Bell’s company, the general consensus was that Gray and Edison’s telephone was better than Bell’s telephone.
In order to get one of the greatest inventions of the modern age, in other words, we thought we needed the solitary genius. But if Alexander Graham Bell had fallen into the Grand River and drowned that day back in Brantford, the world would still have had the telephone, the only difference being that the telephone company would have been nicknamed Ma Gray, not Ma Bell.
A nice idea, though in mentioning Edison, it skips over his career as a patent buster. The story works, but actually Gladwell’s argument is about something slightly different from what the Bell/Gray example appears to tell us: it’s about whether it’s possible to replicate the intellectual innovation of a genius by spreading the load among across many very clever people.
Later in the piece:
A scientific genius is not a person who does what no one else can do; he or she is someone who does what it takes many others to do. The genius is not a unique source of insight; he is merely an efficient source of insight.
This is, surely, what an invention session is: it is Hankel, Pfaff, Homer Lane, Varley, and Lamé in a room together, and if you have them on your staff you can get a big chunk of Kelvin’s discoveries, without ever needing to have Kelvin—which is fortunate, because, although there are plenty of Homer Lanes, Varleys, and Pfaffs in the world, there are very few Kelvins.
The article’s a great read - Gladwell’s essays are much better than his books, I think - but I couldn’t help feeling sad by the time I got to the end. Not because, as Kevin Kelly rightly points out, Gladwell seems to attribute this innovation in innovating to Myhrvold alone (ironic, given the subject).
No, what saddened me was the lingering idea that all these brilliant minds were being put to use simply to build a patent factory.
⌘
Reading list by Brian Teutsch. Used under CC license
We all know that lists are linkbait, but I’ve always thought that the crucial number for critical list mass was somewhere between seven and 10. Given the sweet spot of the human attention span, it freaks me out when those horrid “pro” blogs (a moniker which I’m lead to believe is a euphemism for “vile click factories”) shout about “64.5 WAYS TO MAKE MONEY THROUGH BLOGGING!!!”.
Still, sometimes big works. Kottke’s been going through a series of ‘1001 best’ lists - books and movies, so far.
The books one, which uses a list from the 1morechapter blog, is a weird old list. Still, it seems to be predicated on one person’s tastes and plans for future reading (rather than on books she’s read herself).
I found myself pleasantly surprised that I’d managed to read 179 of the titles on the list (and probably a few more that I missed out) - surprised because even though I’m an English Lit graduate, thankyouverymuch, my fiction reading for the past few years is almost non-existent.
Still, I’ve got a few recommendations for those who might be tempted to use the idiosyncratic list as a workbook.
I wouldn’t put any poor bugger through the tedious, overintellectual mush of Salman Rushdie’s Grimus, for example, aside from those who want to scratch their heads in bemusement over fact that the next book he could come up with was the unutterably stupendous Midnight’s Children.
There seems to be an overwhelming towards modern literary giants (pretty much everything Coetzee has written seems to be on there, for example) and a total lack of plays, poetry and non-fiction. Which should form part of anyone’s reading habits.
And, of course, nobody has time to read 1001 books before they die. Get your list down to somewhere between seven and 10 and I’ll be a happy man.
⌘
Your Saturday may well have been spent doing normal Bank Holiday weekend things - barbecues, strolls in the park, sitting by the beach - but mine was spent hanging around in Spitalfields with people I didn’t really know.
That’s because it was the day for GameCamp, a one-day event about games and play that I threw together with a little help from my friends.
The idea first struck me a month or so ago, when I started wondering: Could it be done? What would it be like? Would I be able to get lots of people from varied fields to come along?
A few short meetings with the braintrust - Aleks, Dan, Adrian, Rachel and Dave - things were rolling. A couple of weeks later it was all over!
Photograph: Justin Hall in Matt Jones’ Flickr stream, used under CC license
In the end it felt like GameCamp worked - and better than I expected. This was, I think, due to the mixture of people (many inquiring minds and great thinkers), Sony’s incredible 3Rooms venue (one loft-style floor, a large bar and a roof garden) and the attitude (nearly everyone seemed prepared to give it a go).
Given that I knew a huge number of people coming along weren’t familiar with the BarCamp concept, I decided to break the normal protocol for this sort of event in several ways.
Single day
First I chose to hold the event on one (short) day, rather than the usual deal of spreading things over two days. Often people stay at the venue itself (hence, you know, the camp bit) and the proximity helps break down barriers between . Afterwards, talking to some friends about how the day had gone, a couple suggested that it would have been better to have a second day - things were just getting started, and certainly having a few drinks helped break down those social barriers that were still there. If we’d have gone to day two, everybody (the theory goes) would have been totally comfortable.
In many ways I think they’re right, but it was a trade-off: I don’t think we could have convinced so many people who were new to the concept to give up two days for an unknown result. And, crucially, we weren’t out to make anything. In my experience, two day camps work best if they are hinged around (I think of Hackday or Social Innovation Camp). If and when we run another, I think two days would work: at least now there’s a proof of concept for people who are new to the thing.
Photograph by Alex Muller. Used under CC license.
Invitations
Right from the start I knew I wanted to personally invite a large number of the attendees, rather than just open it up to everyone. We had a limited number of spaces - just 120 maximum - and it was important that (a) we managed to get a quorum of people who represented different sorts of play (computer games, web games, tabletop games etc) and (b) we could minimise the number of no-shows.
However, it was always incredibly important to me that - once the basic framework had been set - we opened up as many tickets as we could to anyone who wanted to come. In the end it was about 50% invited guests and 50% public tickets… that seemed to mix things up pretty well. And given that tickets were all free, I don’t think anyone had a problem with it.
However, if I was doing it again, I’d be more careful about how we publicised it - we seeded notice of the event before tickets were actually available, which was a little confusing for people. We didn’t have a good notification system for people who’d expressed interest, and we didn’t have a proper waiting list system. Those things could do with fixing.
Aside from changes from the *camp model, there were a couple of other things I wanted to note for those who are interested.
Photograph by Roo Reynolds. Used under CC license.
Ticket numbers
In an ideal world I would have loved to accommodate everyone who wanted to come. There were plenty of backchannel moans and groans from people who didn’t get a ticket, didn’t hear about it until it was too late or thought we should have had more space. The size was largely limited by the venue, which was fantastic and being provided free of charge to us by Sony - massive thanks particularly go to Jonathan Fargher at Sony Computer Entertainment Europe and Roland and Sarah from 3Rooms - but I’d always had in mind not many more than 100 people. To me it’s important to keep things personal and intimate.
That means that even though the theory of having more tickets would have been great, for those who did come, I think the size was pretty good. Many more people and I think some of the coherence and closeness would have been lost. At any given time we had about 100 people spread across six or seven sessions, but groups hanging out in the bar area (generally playing Rock Band) or on the roof garden, lapping up the sun.
Photograph by Roo Reynolds. Used under CC license.
Noise
The venue was perfect: light, spacious, funky, gamey and VERY informal. It set the scene perfectly, and had plenty of places for play and relaxation. A little hot at times, but hey, it was one of the warmest days of the year. The one *slightly* was that the lack of physical separation between areas. In the upstairs rooms, where we had Rock Band set up, there was a lot of noise leakage. Downstairs, people were very respectful of each other but it didn’t lend itself to bombastics. This actually made things better, in some ways, but it would have been great to have one or two totally soundproofed zones for the really loud stuff.
Plus sides
This is all really nitpicking and notes for myself. These little tweaks shouldn’t make it sound like things weren’t great - I know I’m biased, but I can’t imagine how it could have gone much better. It was my first experience of organising and hosting an event of any description (I’ve been involved as a guest or speaker at several, but never really got stuck into the business of pulling something together) and it was about as good as I could have possibly hoped for.
The content of the day seemed to go down well with everyone. The beauty of a *camp is that if anybody gets bored it’s probably their own fault; but of course I can’t take credit for any of that. We had plenty of variety (though there was probably more discussion about ARGs than I expected and less about physical gaming than I wanted) and a useful amount of hands-on stuff to balance out all the talking.
Pretty much everyone got stuck in - far more than expected. And although I think it was actually best described as a mixer, I think I may have used the word “unconference” to describe it at one point, which should have been enough for anyone to come and punch me.
I won’t say it didn’t take a lot of organising - it did eat up a fair chunk of my brain cycles - but it was thrown together in a few weeks by a handful of people… and it worked.
If you came, thanks very much - we couldn’t have done it without you. If you didn’t, then see you at the next one.
⌘
Things you don’t want to see in your inbox
“SUBJECT: I have used your photo in my blog post
Dear Bobbie,
I have used your photo in my blog post “Genital herpes and shingles symptoms”
Please have a look and let me know if you want anything changed.”
⌘
I’m listening to the football on Radio 5 via my television, and I spot something disturbing.
There’s a big fat bit of screen burn happening down in the bottom right hand side of my TV screen, and I don’t like it.
Radio on the telly: it needs to move.
That is all.
⌘
For the past week I have been mostly here.
Firefox v the TripAdvisor Owl smackdown. Photograph by Dan Lurie, used under CC license
Some ROFLCon observations:
· Some people take the internet far too seriously. Some people take a bunch of people joking about the internet far too seriously.
· Anonymous is increasingly less about being an anti-scientology protest group, and more about being a bunch of pricks.
· I’m a little surprised and cheered by the fact that the guy who runs 4Chan seems to be concerned about the real world.
· Irony isn’t as interesting as enthusiasm. Compare Leslie Hall with Tron Guy. On the surface, they’re not too dissimilar - but one is basically a joke about the other.
· Beyond all of the stuff about luck and humour, the crucial piece of the puzzle for creating a successful meme appears to be dedication. Do something obsessively, and somebody will take notice.
⌘
I still haven’t actually got round to reading my copy of Nick Davies’ Flat Earth News, despite first mentioning it more than two months ago. But this piece on the Channel 4 website by Jon Bernstein supports most of my initial thoughts.
Bernstein wonders whether the Cardiff research on which so much of the book’s thrust is based actually understood the data it was looking at, and whether this is a story about inherent structural decline, or about the bad behaviour of some individuals.
“Rather than an issue of infrastructural vunerability could it be that there are good journalists and bad journalist, good editors and bad editors, hands-off owners and hands-on owners?”, Bernstein wonders.
⌘
You know when a technology has really hit the mainstream when…
Columnists start using the national press to write articles about amusing search referrals on their blog.
⌘
Our lonely planet, 3: ambient emotions
This is the final part of series about the social web, why we use it and what it says about us. It’s based largely on a talk I gave at De Haagse Hogeschool late last year. Here are the first and second parts.
We’ve seen how various levels of passivity and personalisation have been important to the social web. Now, however, we’re reaching a point where a new phase is being entered into.
Now we’re seeing the development of the passive/personal sphere, pioneered by websites like Facebook.
This is similar to ideas about constant partial attention, although it remains separate. Even microblogging services like Twitter don’t fit into this category (even though on first glance they might feel like it) because the user still has to actively publish their thoughts or observances.
The Facebook news feed, however, is an entirely passive experience. It’s built from the actions I am already doing, rather than from actions created explicitly for the news feed.
So, I leave a message for a friend, and Facebook tells other people “Bobbie left a message on Jim’s wall. “Hello Jim!”.”
I don’t have to tell Facebook “I am leaving a message on Jim’s wall” - although there is a status update for this sort of thing, if I want it.
The result is that I leave behind me a string of actions across the web, created simply through the process of moving from one place to another. It is a contrail.
For many services, tapping into that contrail is a tremendous opportunity. The combination of passivity and personal information is incredible; Last.fm uses it to build profiles of our listening habits. Facebook creates advertising opportunities through it.
On a human level, however, it allows you to create a sense of friendship without ever engaging in what we might call “being friendly”.
I understand the intent behind this sort of thing. It’s the virtual equivalent of body language - allowing the web to represent all of those little pieces of information we take for granted in the physical world.
People can use it to create and supplement relationships which they might foster in meatspace. That is ambient intimacy, described very well by Lisa Reichelt.
But what about when you are creating the appearance of relationships without ever actually doing anything? That might be ambient emotion.
Tthere’s also an insidious quality here. You can fill your life with vicarious pleasures, watching the actions of other people through a filter. It has the potential to unfurl our horizons, but also the potential to limit it massively.
And let’s not forget the newsfeed isn’t necessarily about people you actually know. It is also about people you wish you knew, or people you are interested in becoming friends with, or people you hate but want to keep track of, or people you are sexually attracted to. None of this is necessarily new, and there are comparisons in real life.
But the process is so much more direct now, and less mediated through third parties, that its potential to change the basic blocks of many human interactions is incredible.
This, I worry, is where virtual loneliness might become a force.
In trying to combat the dislocation of modern life, we’re actually encouraging isolation - reducing our friendships into robotic streams of information. We’re endlessly clicking “refresh” to see what our friends, colleagues and acquaintances might be doing - when it could be easier to actually contact them instead.
⌘
Our lonely planet, 2: double axis
This is the second part of series about the social web, why we use it and what it says about us. It’s based largely on a talk I gave at De Haagse Hogeschool late last year. The first part is here.
So if we’ve thought about the why of social networking, what about how?
Well, to my mind there’s a spread of websites and services that range on one axis from being impersonal to personal (depending on how much of the ‘real you’ is revealed) and on the other axis from passive to active (depending on how much action you have to take in order to engage with these sites).
Down in the bottom left, there’s the general web – that’s the area which is most like other forms of media like television, radio or recorded music. That’s both passive and impersonal – you sit back and are broadcast to. You’re a consumer of other services.
We’ll skip over anything further about this, because engaging with the world this way is fine (it’s the main method of using the web) but stretches little further that flicking a switch or pushing a button – and the personal connections are severely limited.
Over on the active/impersonal area we see discussion lists. This is where people are incredibly active – they have to create every question, answer, response or flame – but have only limited links to their actual identity. Of course, you could always reveal your deepest personal secrets on a discussion list, but the amount of personal information you must push out is extremely limited.
A while back I spoke to Marc Smith, a researcher at Microsoft, who talks about a variety of archetypal discussion list users – “answer guy”, “flame warrior”, “spammer”. In these instances, many people become empowered by the combination of activity and impersonality. It becomes something like a game, or a new way of forging a personality that has few links to your physical identity.
This sort of action developed, in the 1990s and early 2000s, into something more fixed. That means on the top right, perhaps, we have blogging or personal homepages - the sort of fixed space that is usually tied to an individual’s identity (although not always their usual persona).
Blogging requires explicit action, but it’s also highly personalised. It’s an evolutionary process, where you have a central space for the opinions you might have previously. In many cases, traditional social networks inhabit this area too; they are the GeoCities for the YouTube generation.
However, there’s one area that’s increasingly developing and fascinates me for all kinds of reasons - social, technological, business. That’s the passive + impersonal space, which has been opened up by Facebook.
And that’s for the next part.
⌘
This is the first part of series about the social web, why we use it and what it says about us. It’s based largely on a talk I gave at De Haagse Hogeschool late last year. The second part is here.
We are on the cusp of being an urbanised race: this year, for the first time, more than 50% of the world’s populations will live in cities, according to recent figures. This means that megacities - or even metacities - are becoming the norm, even if many of them are shanty towns.
According to United Nations statistics, there are 25 cities with populations of more than 10 million. Tokyo is an immense and heavily populated urban sprawl, with an estimated 35m people living in its reach. The Nigerian city of Lagos (pictured above) is growing at around 300,000 people per year. That’s nearly a thousand people a day turning up on its doorstep, largely in one of its many slums.
In these vast urban landscapes we crave connections and traditional social activity, and yet the behaviours of modern city life mean that it becomes increasingly hard to find.
Let’s take a city like London. It’s got an official population of around 7.5m, but the wider catchment of London is accepted as much larger. It’s expected to grow to become one of the world’s handful of cities with a population of 20 million or more.
And its reach continues to grow. For example I live in Brighton, about 55 miles from the centre of London, but considered by many to be part of the commuter belt (I’m one of the thousands of people in the city who travel to London for work every day).
Samuel Johnson - no relation - might well have remarked that “when a man is tired of London, he is tired of life”, but that adage is increasingly tenuous. After all, what is the London we have now compared to his city?
There’s tension in such vastness.
Of course, cities like London have their advantages: commerce, entertainment, infrastructure, jobs and the spread of information among them. But they also have their disadvantages - and foremost among them is social dislocation.
Making friends is difficult, but keeping them is harder. Crossing from one side of London to the other takes a long time. Transport for London tells me that crossing from London’s north-east fringe (Epping) to the south-west (Heathrow) takes around 90 minutes. And that’s by Tube.
Imagine if, like many people, you live on one side of the same city as your parents but you are still hours away. Are you really in the same city at all? Faced with this sort of situation, many residents of London live more or less like villagers (or at least small townspeople) in order to retain some semblance of social cohesion.
What do you do when faced with this sort of dislocation? In the past you’d simply make friends with local people or be reclusive. You might have used the post to send letters, and you probably still use the telephone.
Now you can use the internet, though, and the social networking tools it offers. Keep in touch with the people you already know; or find new friends through the web. Now we can connect with people virtually (in fact, we often choose to complete social transactions this way), transcending the limitations of our geography, our knowledge or our social circles.
So. What does this mean?
⌘
I was flicking through my site looking for something tonight and came across this post about Twitter written in January 2007. I’d tried writing about Twitter for the Guardian already, without much luck. So I popped a few thoughts down here.
Reading it back is intriguing from a couple of angles: Firstly, because the service’s scale has certainly shifted since then. For example, talking about A-list bloggers who had turned into Twitterers, I said “Take Robert Scoble, who tracks 61 friends but is tracked by a massive 235.”
As I write, Scoble is now followed by 18,267 people (though, of course, he’s started to insist it’s how many people you follow that counts (as I mentioned recently).
How many orders of magnitude is that?
On the other hand, however, not much has changed at all. My initial prognosis, that it would be popular because it’s so lightweight that you can use it for a million different things, holds true.
“So how do I use it? In a mixture of ways. Essentially I keep track of a handful of people (36 at last count, that’s probably more than enough) - many of whom I see on a regular basis, some rarely seen friends, and a few contacts.”
While I’ve swelled in terms of the people who receive my messages (a recent flurry of activity - wherever they’re coming from - has pushed me beyond 500 followers), I still follow just 36 Twitter accounts directly. It’s something about the neatness of a square.
I’m clearly not that into change.
⌘
More than a few people have pointed to the recent study by Pollara, citing the differing influence of your circle of friends versus the importance of bloggers.
To quote MediaPost:
“Of more than 1,100 adults polled in December, nearly 80% said they were very or somewhat more likely to consider buying products recommended by real-world friends and family, while only 23% reported being very or somewhat likely to consider a product pushed by “well-known bloggers.”
“This shows that popularity doesn’t always equate to credibility,” said Robert Hutton, executive vice president and general manager at Pollara. “Marketers might have to reconsider who the real influencers are out there.”
Those are certainly some compelling numbers.
Oh, by the way… here’s a newsflash for you: the sky is blue.
Wouldn’t you be a little surprised if it were any other way? Trust has always been most powerful between individuals who know each other.
I’m a believer in trust, and personally I think it’s more important to be credible than it is to have massive reach. That’s how you get by as a niche publication or a specialist journalist.
But all the conversation I’ve seen - from the likes of Steve Rubel or Fast Company - suggests that this means that reach is no longer important.
Of course it’s not either/or. It’s not total trust versus no trust; or total reach versus no reach. Reach isn’t purely about the number of people who see you, it’s about just enough trust to make the numbers work.
So, if my “real world friends and family” influence stretched to 100 people, by these numbers I’d be able to influence 80 of them. But my personal influence isn’t likely to stretch much beyond that 100 people (Dunbar would suggest I could go up to about 120 influencees).
If, however, my reach is far wider - because I’m a popular blogger or (don’t say it) a mainstream media group - that means that the extra influence I have is weaker but can be applied to an order of magnitude more people, then the numbers shift. Yes, only 23% are influenced in such a way. But perhaps I can see 10,000 of them: that’s 2,300 people. (And the 120 people close to me as well).
It’s not either/or. It’s about where you decide the balance is between just enough trust and just enough reach in order to make the numbers work. It’s a trade-off, and it’s different for everyone.
There is no right answer.
⌘
At the end of last summer I spent a day or two in Malmo, Sweden, meeting up with the guys behind the Pirate Bay. Doing the story was interesting enough, but there was another little bonus along the way that I haven’t mentioned before.
Even before I got to Malmo, I had heard that there was a music festival there every August (my old flatmate, Emilia, is from the nearby city of Lund) and by fluke it happened to be taking place at the same time . By the time I’d arrived in town and checked into my hotel, things were starting to get busy - so I went out for a wander.
The main town square was stuffed with people and bands playing, but I could also hear music coming from somewhere in the distance. I follwed the noise - for a while it felt like I was dancing after the pied piper - but, after cutting my way through the city’s parks, I came across .
It turned out to be Klaxons, who (arguably) made one of the best British albums of last year. It was strange - and more than a little surreal - to accidentally come across them bouncing on stage in the middle of a foreign country. The kids in the crowd didn’t care that I’d turned up by accident; they didn’t care where I was from. We just listened to the music together as the sun went down. It was a moment of serendipity that left me smiling all night.
⌘