10 Dec 08 Everything you know is wrong, er, no, it is half-right

Cynics have been wrong about computers and people for about 20 years. Back then, at the advent of multimedia computing, those of us who predicted that every PC would come with a CD-ROM drive and sound card were met with skepticism by many. People are couch potatoes, they argued. Nothing will pry the TV remote from their hands. And so the arguments have gone for two decades. Wrong, wrong, wrong.

I occasionally marvel at the fact that people are reading and writing far, far more than they did even years ago – trillions, trillions, of emails, SMS messages, blog posts, Twitter tweets and so forth. Even if 80 or 90 percent of it is garbage, that is still a huge social change. Why were the cynics wrong? I think the answer is simple – people have been starved for connections.

The western world invented a lot of things that disconnected people from one another in the 20th century. Radio and television let us be entertained solo. Suburbs spread the population apart. Freeways isolated sections of cities. Nursing homes, for all the good they do, broke generational connections. School consolidation and integration, along with long commutes, meant that many schoolmates’ parents didn’t know each other any more.

I headlined this post “Everything you know is half-right” because we tend to miss things right in front of us (“We don’t know who discovered water, but we are pretty sure it wasn’t a fish.“). Social ROI is far squishier to define than “real” ROI, measured in revenue. Yet if we really want to understand the “why” of social networking, it is a mistake to ignore any of its drivers. The one word I choose to describe why people are writing and self-publishing so much is “acknowledgment.” People want to be acknowledged.

We don’t all need praise, advice, instruction and other human connections that might somehow improve or encourage us, but we all have a deep need to be acknowledged. Instead of trying to explain that, I’ll describe it in a completely different context.

A few times a month, I put on a very different hat as a volunteer with the Bay Area Critical Incident Stress Management Team. When you hear about “grief counselors” who are available to responders and victims of bad stuff, that’s us. Long ago I worked as a paramedic and so I often debrief first responders – medics, fire, police, dispatchers – but also the public. Recently, these included middle school children after one of their friends shot himself, a search team that found the body of a drowned baby, a fire crew that responded to a particularly bad fatal auto accident. It is grim stuff and wildly different from my day-to-day work. Except that is isn’t. It is social networking, face-to-face, when it really counts.

We start debriefings by telling people that we are not there to fix things or make them better, we’re there to help them live with what happened and support each other. In other words, we acknowledge that they have been through something really awful. That sounds simple, but it is profoundly powerful. I will never forget a family my wife and I debriefed after their father and husband was murdered, saying that although they obviously knew it was a terrible thing, it was so comforting to hear someone say so. Acknowledgment.

What does this mean for social media? If you, er, acknowledge that acknowledgment is a basic human desire, you realize that as the tools become available, you’re either part of it or you’re a Luddite. It means that the fundamental demand is broad and deep, but it also means that the tools that satisfy this hunger are likely to become commodities rapidly. Combine deep demand with network effects that make each added user more valuable (v. the “law” of decreasing returns) and the first-mover advantage is enormous. And yet perversely, the first-move advantage has a limited life because people will demand open systems. That is good news for open identity standards, portable reputations and such.

I’ll wrap this up by saying that as I see it, this is a wonderful time to be alive. I think history will look back at our time, despite occasional economic hiccups, as a period in which the modern world regained something important that it had lost.

Tags: CISM, human nature, Marshall McLuhan, network effects, social change, social media drivers