Amplification & the changing role of media
Posted: October 13, 2012 Filed under: social media | Tags: Facebook, Jack Dorsey, journalism, Mark Zuckerberg, OM Malik, social media, technology, Twitter Comments Off
For the past few days, I have been thinking about the evolution of what media is and its expanded role in the information ecosystem. What got me thinking was Twitter co-founder and Square CEO Jack Dorsey's decision to blog his side of the story about his reduced role at Twitter. A few months ago, when Facebook was buying Instagram, …
Marketing the Narrative of Complexity
Posted: July 6, 2012 Filed under: complexity, systems thinking | Tags: complex adaptive systems, complexity, data visualization, design fiction, Dr. McCoy, fiction, health, healthcare, marketing, narrative, science, science fiction, Star Trek, storytelling, technology, tricorder, weather, wellbeing Comments Off
Complexity, by its very nature, is not a simple concept to communicate, yet it is increasingly becoming one that will define our times and may be the key to ensuring human survival and wellbeing in the years to come. If society is to respond to complex challenges the meaning of complexity needs to be communicated to the world in a manner that is understandable to a wide audience. This is the first in a series of posts that are looking at the concept of complexity and the challenges and opportunities with marketing it to the world.
Across North America this week the temperatures are vastly exceeding normal levels into ranges more akin to places like India or East Africa. The climate is changing and regardless of what the causes are the complexities that this introduces require changes in our thinking and actions or human health and wellbeing will be at risk. To follow Einstein’s famous quote:
“We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them”
Many U.S. States are suffering hurricane-like after-effects from a Derecho that hit last week, knocking out power at a time when temperatures are into the high 90′s and low 100′s. Derechos are rapid moving hot air systems that are difficult to predict and can only be anticipated under certain conditions. The heat wave combined with the lack of air conditioning and supplies left 13 dead, maybe more. The heat wave is continuing and is expected to last throughout the weekend.
But this post is not really about the weather, but the challenges with complexity that it represents and how we need to be better understanding what complexity is and how to work with it if we are to survive and thrive in the years to come.
Blog interrupted
It’s ironic that this post was delayed by blackout. I live in Toronto, Canada and we have a remarkably stable power supply, yet last night and through this morning I was without power due to suspected overheated circuits attributed to high air conditioning use, shutting down my Internet and everything else with it. In many parts of the world, this kind of blackout is commonplace and a fact of daily living, but not here…yet. This fortuitous bit of timing illustrates the fragility of many of our systems given the reliance on power to fuel much of what we do (e.g., cooking, food storage, Internet, traffic signals, lighting, etc..).
Virtually all of the infrastructure of modern life (here and increasingly globally) is tied to electricity. If you’re interested in imagining what would happen if it all shuts off, I’d highly recommend reading The World Without Us by Alan Weisman. Weisman uses a complexity scientist and futurists’ tool called a thought experiment to craft a book about what New York City would look like if humans suddenly disappeared. The book illustrates how nature might take over, how the underground subways would flood and collapse because of the millions of litres of water needed to be pumped out of it each day, and how certain human-built structures would decay over time (some far faster than we might hope).
Thought experiments take data from things that have happened already, theories, and conjecture and project scenarios into the future based on the amalgam of these. It provides some grounded means of anticipating possible futures to guide present action.
From present delays to future/tense
The Guardian asked a number of scientists working on climate about whether this current spate of extreme weather events is attributable to global warming. The scientists offered a range of answers that (not surprisingly) lacked a definitive statement around cause-and-effect, yet the comments hint at a deep concern. These anomalous conditions are starting to move further towards the end of the normal curve, meaning that they are becoming less statistically plausible to be caused by chance. What this means for the weather, for climate, for our economies is not known; all we have is thought experiments and scenarios. But the future is coming and we may want to be prepared by helping create one we want, not just one we get.
Unfortunately, we cannot wait for the data to confirm that global warming is happening or determine that we are contributing to it and to what degree. This is not just a weather issue; the same situation is playing itself out with issues worldwide ranging from healthcare funding to immigration policies and migration patterns. Interconnected, interdependent and diverse agents and information forms are interacting to create, emergent patterns of activity.
It is for this reason that weather patterns — despite being one of the most monitored and studied phenomenon — can’t be accurately predicted outside of a few hours in advance, if at all. There is too much information coming together between air flows, humidity, land forms, physical structure and human intervention (e.g., airplane contrails) interacting simultaneously in a dynamic manner to create a reliable model of the data. David Orrell’s book Apollo’s Arrow is a terrific read if you want to understand complexity in relation to weather (and more) or see his talk at TEDX on YouTube.
Two’s company, three’s complexity (and other analogies)
The above heading is taken from a title of another book on complexity and tries to simply point to how adding just a little bit of information (another person to a conversation perhaps) can radically alter the experience from being simple or complicated to complex. Just thinking about planning a night out with two people vs. three and you’ll know a little of what this means.
Analogies and metaphors are ways in which complexity scholars commonly seek to convey how the differences in conditions represent varying states of order. Brenda Zimmerman and others write about putting a rocket to the moon as being complicated and raising a child as being complex. One of my favourites is Dave Snowden‘s video on How to Organize a Children’s Party. One of the reasons we resort to analogies is that we need a narrative that fits with their experience. All of us were children and some of us have had them as parents so we can relate to Zimmerman and Snowden’s ideas because we’ve experienced it firsthand.
We haven’t experienced anything like what is anticipated from global warming. In the Americas, parts of Europe and Asia we are enormously fortunate to have entire generations that don’t know what it’s like to be hungry, have no healthcare, be without electricity, or have no access to safe water and proper sanitations. Stories about children’s parties might not bring these scenarios home. It is why Weisman’s book is so clever: it makes a plausible scenario fiction.
Science fact as science fiction
The role of fiction might be the key to opening the marketing vault to complexity. Scott Smith and others have been exploring how the use of science fiction helped pave the way for some of today’s modern technologies and innovations. By weaving together fantasy narratives and imaginations on the future, technologists have managed to re-create these tools for current life. Witness the Tricorder Project that seeks to develop the same multifunction health and information tool used by Dr. McCoy on Star Trek.
We are making headway with complex information as witnessed by the popularity of infographics and data visualizations. But there is much more to be done.
Complex problems require complex solutions. Artists, designers, scientists, marketers, journalists and anyone who can communicate well can play a role. Making complexity something that people not only know about, but want to know about is the task at hand. In doing so, we may find people reaching for and advocating for complex solutions rather than stop-gap, band-aid ones like buying a car with better fuel economy as the main strategy to combat carbon emissions.
It’s been done before. Marshall McLuhan wrote about esoteric, yet remarkably insightful and complex topics and became a household name in part to his appearance in Woody Allen‘s Annie Hall. Our media landscape is far more complex now (no pun intended) to think that a single appearance of any complexity superstar (if one existed) would change public perception of the topic in the same way that McLuhan’s did for his theories on media. Yet, Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth might have done more to get people talking about the environment than anything. And while Gore is not known for his witty storytelling, his slide show did a good job.
To begin our journey of marketing complexity we need to come up with our stories so that we can tell ones that are pleasant, rather than the ones that are less so. And if you want one that fits this latter category, I strongly recommend reading Gwynn Dyer’s chilling Climate Wars. Instead, let’s get closer to living what Peter Diamandis and Steven Kotler write about in Abundance.
The future is ours to write.
For more books and resources on complexity, check out the library page on Censemaking.
Disruption by Design
Posted: March 13, 2012 Filed under: design thinking, education & learning, innovation, social media | Tags: Andrea Yip, Clayton Christensen, design, disruptive innovation, education, graphic design, health, health promotion, human services, infographics, innovation, psychology, public health, social determinants of health, social innovation, social work, technology 1 Comment »
DISRUPT by Paul Woot
Innovation, new thinking, and a change in consciousness can upset the way we see our world and the manner in which we relate to it. This disruption can happen by happenstance or intention encouraging us to consider ways to design change before forces outside our influence change us.
disrupt |disˈrəpt|
verb [ with obj. ]
interrupt (an event, activity, or process) by causing a disturbance or problem: a rail strike that could disrupt both passenger and freight service.
• drastically alter or destroy the structure of (something): alcohol can disrupt the chromosomes of an unfertilized egg.
DERIVATIVES
disrupter (also disruptor |-tər|)noun
Observing the city I live in, the media I consume, and the way I learn, I can’t help but be amazed at how much of my life has been disrupted over the past few years. I can access nearly everything I need to run my business and do my research from my handheld or a tablet computer. I can hand that tablet or handheld to someone else and allow them to interact with the content on it by using gestural movements, not a keyboard.
If I am engaged in health communications or scholarly research, I look to places like Twitter and blogs as much if not more than I do academic databases. Many of the journals I respect and publish content that counts in fields like public health, such as the Journal of Medical Internet Research, are open access and free to anyone who wants to read them. And these open access publications are becoming leaders in their fields, not just cheap versions of “real” journals. This makes the content of my academic work and that of my many colleagues accessible and much more likely to be used.
If you’re a graphic designer your work has never been more important. Whether websites, infographics, high-quality interpretations of traditional media (for a great example see the re-imagined journal article by my colleague Andrea Yip) the world has become more visual and the weight of good graphic design is heavier than ever. At the same time, tools like easel.ly allow anyone to make an infographic, or WordPress for those who want websites (this one included), and even offers to do a $42 logo as reported in Creative Review.
Want to raise awareness of issues? Grab a film camera and put together a small film like Kony 2012, the most viral success story of any video to date.
Or write a book on an important, if somewhat arcane, topic like the meaning of making and get people from all over the world to invest in it on Kickstarter (that’s what Seung Chan Lim or Slim as he is known did and I invested in this venture with enthusiasm).
Or charge a mere $5 like comedian Louis C.K. did for a high-quality copy of his recent comedy show filmed at the Beacon Theatre in New York and let your buyers download up to five copies at once for one price.
Or write a book and let your customers determine its price (including free!) like Jon Kolko and his AC4D colleagues have done with Wicked Problems.
This couldn’t have happened five years ago. The production costs were too high, the distribution channels too primitive, and the bandwidth too low. Now, it’s all different and the disruptions are no longer happenstance, but designed.
Harvard professor Clayton Christensen coined the term ‘disruptive innovation‘ which ”describes a process by which a product or service takes root initially in simple applications at the bottom of a market and then relentlessly moves ‘up market’, eventually displacing established competitors.”
Christensen adds:
An innovation that is disruptive allows a whole new population of consumers access to a product or service that was historically only accessible to consumers with a lot of money or a lot of skill. Characteristics of disruptive businesses, at least in their initial stages, can include: lower gross margins, smaller target markets, and simpler products and services that may not appear as attractive as existing solutions when compared against traditional performance metrics.
Health promotion and public health are fields ripe for this kind of innovation, so is healthcare. Indeed, movements like those embodied in Patients Like Me, a social network portal aimed at supporting human empowerment in health care.
We are on the cusp of this taking place in health promotion and human services — whether they are governmental, non-profit or social enterprise based. Health promotion is largely about enabling individuals, groups and communities to better adapt to change, support themselves and gain greater control over the social determinants of health. At present, we teach students theory and research, but what about business dynamics or systems thinking or visual methods of presentation or social innovation? These are the tools and strategies that the abovementioned examples used. Many of them also used design.
The same challenge holds true for social work, psychology and education.
These are the fields that are key supports for promoting wellbeing in our community. It is perhaps not surprising that the concept of design is noticeably absent from all of these fields.
That doesn’t need to be the case.
This past week I had the privilege of spending an afternoon with Scott Conti and his staff at the New Design High School in New York City. There I saw students working through everyday problems using design, building business ideas to support themselves and their communities, and applying their various creativities to making a difference in their lives using design as the lens. This environment was where social work, education, psychology and health promotion intersect. Scott — who delivers a great talk on his work as part of TEDX Dumbo — is a health promoter and social innovator. So are his teachers.
None of them were trained for what they do. They have adapted, modified, created and innovated. They disrupted their own patterns of work and learning so that they could better disrupt those around them, for good. They did this by design.
If we are to expect that the fields most connected to social action and the promotion of wellbeing are to contribute to our betterment in the future, they need to change. Disruptive design for programs, services and the ways we fund such things is what is necessary if these fields are to have benefit beyond themselves. Long past are the days when doing good was something that belonged to those with a title (e.g., doctor, health promoter, social worker) or that what we called ourselves (e.g., teacher) meant we did something else unequivocally (e.g., educate). Now we are all teachers, all health promoters, all designers, and all entrepreneurs if we want to be. Some will be better than others and some will be more effective than others, but by disrupting these ideas we can design a better future.
Asking if Technology Can Reinvent Education is the Wrong Question
Posted: March 21, 2011 Filed under: education & learning | Tags: education, Harvard Business Review, learning, systems thinking, technology 8 Comments »
Harvard Business Review is running a multi-part series looking for answers to the question: Can Technology Re-invent education? While there are lots of answers, perhaps more importantly is considering whether that is the right question in the first place.
Technology captures our collective attention like few other social and technical artefacts. Whether it is robots, flying cars, jet packs, cold fusion, or sub-orbital rockets, we love our technology and expect that it will solve all kinds of social problems. Except, most often, these predictions of utopia are far off the mark.
Computers were supposed to make our lives easier, yet I don’t know many colleagues that find their lives easier — rather the opposite has come true: we live much more complicated lives, which are impacting our hearts and our health (even for public health professionals). Our faster computers do allow us to do more with less energy, yet somehow we manage to fill the time saved with more work (PDF), leading to an overall increase in work rather than a decrease.
So it is not a surprise that Harvard Business Review is asking the question about whether technology will reinvent education. If we could just use education the “right way” and to its fullest potential, imagine what we could do? Imagine how much time we could save? What kind of productivity gains we could achieve? It would be amazing.
It would be amazing, because it is unlikely that we are going to see much in the way of improved learning because of technology. We might be better at gathering information, distributing it, sharing it, and reaching people in new ways, but I am skeptical that we’ll see any real “reinvention” of education through technology. Do things different? Absolutely. Better? That’s not the right question.
To be fair, the author of the lead post in the Advanced Leadership Initiative for HBR, Robin Willner, doesn’t believe in a techo-utopia and, remarking on the success of Watson the computer against human Jeopardy champions, states:
It’s time to think systemically about the long standing barriers to school improvement and education reform.
Technology alone is never the answer — that’s the main lesson from Watson’s Jeopardy win. Technology supporting innovative teachers and school leaders will be the solution for our students.
Yet, the title of the series belies at least some faint hope that the problem of learning and educating can be solved with technology. If we just implemented the right tools we could solve the problem. Willner is writing on the issue of school improvement, not education and it is an important distinction.
As I’ve discussed before, the current model for schools do little to support learning relative to the apprenticeship-style models that they replaced. Most of this is due to a conflation between information provision and education. Computers and technology are excellent at providing information, and even displaying it in ways that enable learners to interact with it. Technology does not provide great opportunities to take content into social contexts where we apply lessons with real people or physical artefacts that are not machines. The complexities of the encounters — having conversations for example — are not easily mimicked by computers and thus, provide only weak substitutes. In short: technology is not about eduction, just better information delivery.
Simulations, one of the areas where technology offers much promise for learning, are often designed for particular purposes, thus enhancing specific skills, but less about general ones. But this is only one narrow use of technology for education, although certainly promising.
But all of this gets us away from the question itself, which focuses on technology’s ability to reinvent education. Education is a human endeavour and a social one at that. Technology may aid in our strategy development, implementation of certain tactics for teaching, but it will not provide the grist for improving the social component of learning. Just as Facebook friends are (mostly) extensions of the friendships we create in everyday life without technology, so is learning. Technology is an aid, not the purpose and thus, focusing on the aids as the means for reinvention sidesteps whether we’re educating effectively in the first place and risks us doing what Russell Ackoff calls doing the wrongs righter. Without questioning the very system in which that technology is deployed, we will continue to do just that and this is where asking new, bigger questions comes into play.
The iPad and True Social Computing
Posted: June 24, 2010 Filed under: science & technology | Tags: Apple, computer, innovation, iPad, social computing, technology 8 Comments »
Like more than 3 million others, I recently bought an iPad. I have given myself a lot of reasons to do so from making life easier for my shoulders (no more packing my laptop and all its cords with me), an interest in changing the way I work (slowing down), and because it is the latest innovation that could be used for health and research purposes.
And they’re pretty neat.
But behind all of the bells and whistles and justifications for using the iPad, the thing that sold me on it more than anything was that it may be the first social computer.
Watch how people interact with the iPad and you’ll see something that goes beyond a slimmer touch-screen computer and you see a social engagement technology. People gather around them and its shape and size allows it to be passed back and forth, resized, and shifted around in a manner that allows people to truly interact with it socially. And by socially, I mean as people, together, in one place. Place itself is also different, not just because it provides an attractor for physical interaction, but because its web platform allows that physical interaction to connect to the online social world at the same time.
Last night this was demonstrated as I went to dinner with some friends. I brought my iPad with me as a couple of my dinner mates wanted to see one in action. What transpired was an interactive, engaged and often hilarious series of interactions between us, the iPad and videos, text and pictures we pulled from the web. Unlike a laptop, which creates a physical barrier between people and their space (the screen goes up to block your view, the keyboard goes down to cover your table), the iPad can be manipulated in a way that it becomes far less intrusive.
The computer is sharable and something that can be passed around, which also means that the person who brings the computer isn’t tied to it and can let others work with it.
The prospects for using this in both personal and professional life are tremendous. Imagine how much more likely we would be to engage in genuine sharing of an article, or book (e-book I suppose) with another in the moment if we had tools that reduced the physical barriers that make computing so isolating? Imagine creating opportunities for newcomers to a country or a social circle to use these sharable tools as a method of transcending barriers to social engagement or information. Consider it.
What would you do if you could draw people in and communicate outward with a technology that allowed you to do 90% of what your laptop does, but is immensely more portable and sharable?
There are few technologies that deserve the title “game changer” but I think the iPad is one of them.
Science of Team Science 2
Posted: April 24, 2010 Filed under: complexity, education & learning, research, science & technology | Tags: innovation, Jaron Lanier, psychology, research, science, social networks, team science, technology, wicked problems 2 Comments »
Day two of the Science of Team Science Conference wrapped up yesterday with a lot of energy and enthusiasm (plus some anticipation at today’s 1/2 day workshop on social network analysis). The tell-tale sign that the conference was a hit was the observation that nearly 4/5 of the room was full to hear the convener provide general closing remarks on a Friday afternoon (this after 20 hours of sitting in a hotel ballroom for two days). That speaks volumes about the conference and how much interest there is in the topic.
It is perhaps because of this interest that there is genuine hope that something will come from this beyond just another conference. The question I asked myself is: Why did this conference and this topic yield such interest and a positive response?
What is it about teams that makes this such a compelling issue?
I see three primary reasons:
1. Teams fit our basic need for human relatedness. As the barrier between work and the rest of life (ROL) dissolves further due to changing job structures, information technology, and human mobility the potential to become isolated is high. The gap between connection and community is enormous. We have ‘friends’ on Facebook, ‘followers’ on Twitter, and ‘connections’ on LinkedIn, yet of these many dozens or hundreds only a few really count. Of those, even fewer are ones that we can comfortably relate to. Yet, this appearance of hyperconnectedness provides a false sense of relationships and transmits into a remarkable leveling off of human experience (see Jaron Lanier‘s You Are Not a Gadget, discussed here).
David Whyte’s Crossing the Unknown Sea , Parker Palmer’s A Hidden Wholeness, or Meg Wheatley’s Turning to One Another are works that do a wonderful job of pointing to this problem of disconnection in work and argue for greater integration between one’s personal and spiritual life and their vocation. Seth Godin’s Linchpin (discussed in previous posts) is another book that illustrates the power of bringing one’s “art” to work with others. Science has traditionally been the domain of individual effort, working in small groups at best, but generally alone. This is isolating in itself, but add to the myriad other factors that foster isolation in modern scientific work it is not surprising that any avenue to build connections to others, while continuing to do the work that scientists love, has been embraced.
2. Teams confer genuine advantages in terms of productivity and outcomes. The conference offered a blend of theory, research and strategy, which is probably why it had such broad appeal to an audience that comprised people interested in all three of those things. When the focus was on evidence, it became clear that there is an emergent literature on team science impact. Team science is not a panacea, but it is effective for certain types of problems and provides an alternative option for those wishing to do research, stay social, and tackle complex, wicked problems. Some of the data presented in panels or posters points to teams being more successful at getting large grants, and that, for some, team science can boost productivity. Much more research is needed, but the early results are promising.
Conceptually, this makes sense. Diverse teams of individuals will see problems differently and, particularly with complex problems, complex responses are necessary and diversity provides this complexity. Teams are an ideal structure to addressing a problem that requires new ways of working, knowledge from many areas, and a method of coordinating that knowledge in order to mobilize it.
3. Team science is becoming “hot”. This is the more cynical perspective, but it nonetheless describes reasons why people pursue fields of inquiry. In recent years the creation of funding structures from the National Institutes of Health and National Science Foundation in the U.S. has led a lot of people to consider team science simply as a mechanism to raise research funding. This conference is a byproduct of those decisions. This is not to say that those who pursue team science funding are doing it just because of the money, but it is a powerful incentive. Research flourishes where there are resources to sustain it. It draws in researchers, attracts graduate students and post-docs, and shapes the way many create proposals.
Last night over dinner, a group of us discussed the role that financing plays and whether teams that come together because they want to work together and are looking for funding to support that function differently than those that come together to get funding and then do research based on the details of that grant. Like the conference as a whole, the responses were diverse and no agreement on what would work and why was made. Nor was one expected.
The conference organizers have proclaimed that this is the first annual event, which will mean that we have an opportunity to see where this goes and what a year will do to shaping this field. The conference website is going to be transformed into a community website, enabling researchers, practitioners and policy makers to interact and even create teams. Whether they form based on personal interest, whether we need a ‘coach’ or two, or whether there will be funding to draw people in remains to be seen.
For readers looking for another take on the conference and some insightful reflections on what was discussed, I’d encourage you to visit Stephanie Jo Kent’s Reflexivity blog and read the play-by-play comments on Twitter by searching the hashtag #teamsci10.
Education for Innovation
Posted: March 25, 2010 Filed under: education & learning, innovation, research, science & technology | Tags: digital economy, education, innovation, learning, technology, training, university Comments Off
Are we creating the type of innovators that suit the digital economy? That respond to any opportunity, not just the ones that we plan for? There’s a lot of thinking out there that suggests we’re not.
I recently read an article on considerations around how to train for innovation in the December 2009 issue of the Harvard Business Review. When most people speak of innovation, it seems as if they do with an idea that there are some key steps or tricks to being an innovator and that is about it. But what Gina Colarelli O’Connor, Andrew Corbett, and Ron Pierantozzi argue is that there are three types of innovators that all have three stages that build on each other depending on where they are in their career. This is an important and interesting idea and a shift from the traditional mindset.
The authors state:
Companies must first understand that breakthrough innovation consists of three phases:
Discovery: Creating or identifying high-impact market opportunities.
Incubation: Experimenting with technology and business concepts to design a viable model for a new business.
Acceleration: Developing a business until it can stand on its own.
To address this, they suggest training people to match these distinct stages and phases:
Each phase lends itself to distinct career paths, as well. The bench scientist, for instance, may eventually want to be involved in policy discussions about emerging technologies and how they may influence the company’s future. The incubator may want to pursue a technical path – managing larger, longer-term projects – or to manage a portfolio of emerging businesses. And the accelerating manager may want to stay with the business as it grows, take on a leadership role.
Rather than develop those paths, however, many firms assume that an individual will be promoted along with a project as it grows from discovery through to acceleration. In reality, individuals with that breadth of skill sets are extremely rare. In other words, companies have essentially been setting their innovators up to fail.
Johnston said the country’s university system must shoulder part of the blame for the lag in Canada’s technological mindset. The schools haven’t done enough to train students to work smarter, he said, which means that few Canadian companies succeed based on innovation. Of Canada’s biggest companies, most are banks, while only BlackBerry maker Research In Motion — also based in Waterloo — has succeeded internationally, mainly because it has focused on innovation.
(Read more: http://www.cbc.ca/technology/story/2010/03/15/waterloo-digital-economy-johnston.html#ixzz0iHYyEgf8 )
Perhaps the problem is that we use the term innovation so loosely that graduates fail to recognize where innovations are or how to move them along. Or, as Colarelli O’Connor and colleagues point out, they are trained for the wrong set of skills for the right kind of innovation stage.
Jaron Lanier and Dominant Design
Posted: March 11, 2010 Filed under: complexity, design thinking, education & learning, social media, social systems | Tags: book, complexity theory, critical theory, discovery, innovation, review, social innovation, social media, technology 4 Comments »
What happens when the system of innovation that serves us so well provides the very means of hindering creativity and limiting our potential? That is a process that Jaron Lanier calls”Lock in” and it is something that doesn’t get enough attention as we contemplate the systems we’re in. The term “lock-in” refers to what we might associate with path dependence in complexity science. It is the well-worn path that guides us in certain ways, often without us knowing it, and consequently limits the range of possibilities that we have before us.
Designer or technologists might also call this phenomenon ‘dominant design‘ . Regardless of what you call it, the phenomenon is worth looking at intently, which is just what Lanier does in his new new book. Jaron Lanier is a unique figure in the technology world, filling the role of both pioneer, advocate and intense critic. His work on virtual reality has paved the way for a host of later innovations in ways of marrying the person and their perception with technology that can amplify or mediate this experience in virtual environments. Second Life, Flight Simulator and the very real use of VR to explore case scenarios (such as the one that Loyalist College in Ontario has used to train border guards via Second Life) for practical purposes owe a lot to his him.
It is for this reason that Lanier’s opinion holds some weight. His recent book is a critical look at how we’ve unwittingly created paths that are leading us to stifle innovation, creativity and expression through tools that invoke a type of non-reflective “hive mind” that rewards the mediocre, the middle, and shaves off the edges, where much creative work really happens. Wikipedia, while useful and generating content that might not otherwise be available, also rewards the view of the majority or those types most likely to edit, re-edit and commit to a topic. In a drive towards providing a version of the truth, albeit an edited one, tools like Wikipedia aim for the middle or the points of agreement as the focus of the articles. This might be fine if there were many Wikipedias out there, but there really isn’t. It has become the dominant form of ‘encyclopedia’ out there.
Think of search and you get: Google. The reason is likely because it provides a great search, but also becomes something you’re accustomed to. Have you considered what other relevant things you are NOT seeing because they don’t fit Google’s search algorithm?
Ever organize your files into something other than a folder or dragging it to your desktop? Probably not very often. The reason is that there is a dominant design out there that pushes us to create spaces with similar features across conditions so we have Macs and PCs use folders, have desktops, employ icons and organize information using hierarchies.
Jaron Lanier is worried that we’re creating a social web where creative opportunities that favour individual expression and innovation are getting squashed at the expense of tools and resources that appeal broadly, but have little depth or breadth for innovation. He’s not an anti-technology luddite here, rather providing a series of arguments for why we need to spend more energy contemplating the systems we create and critically examining their impact. Otherwise, we create knowledge generating tools that do little to help people learn, music programs that limit sound quality, and problem-solving tools that actually create more problems than they solve. It’s an interesting read and, while I don’t agree with all of his arguments, there is much to consider as social media becomes bigger, more connected and an ever-greater part of our life. More on this to come.
