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What a waste of time, bandwidth, power consumption and cognitive surplus of thousands of people, who read your inane tweets, in the guise of your lifestream?
...and then the spammers who never give up DMing you, until you block them.
Ok. Someone tweeted about an earthquake within a minute of its happening, from California.
Hey! I am an average Joe. What can I do about the Earthquake in a remote place, and why can't I see it in CNN as Breaking News?
Fine. People use it as a tool to organize collective action. Like I said, I am just an average joe. Why do I care about changing the world and other lofty buzzwords?
Wait. If not for a phenomenon called connected consumption, all this would be meaningless chatter and Twitter would be the modern-day equivalent of a Barber Shop. It might be all about idle talk and spam, if not for the connected consumption part.
Ordinary People forage the web for information and Twitter creates a platform to share this curated information in real-time. However, for this curated information, I can endure the idle talk, but I hate the constant pruning activity of my following list to get rid of the spammers and the boring folks.
I am almost tempted to go back to using Facebook. But, how many people can I meaningfully 'friend' and so the scope of the curated stream is very small.
Kevin Kelly asks about the scenarios in which the "unstoppable" Google would get sidelined.
I think, when we start saying,
"I will not search here or there.
I will not search anywhere.
I do not want the keys jam,
I do not like them, Sam-I-am."
Consider the following three trends:
1. Everything is not miscellaneous anymore!!
In the present time,David Weinberger is absolutely right. "Everything is miscellaneous",is the central reason, Google is what it is. Google gives me a list, which is devoid of context and I use my interpretation to choose a few and filter out the rest.
But,one day this 'contextlessness' is not cool anymore. When the digital forests of information is so massive and my needs of information consumption is richer and subtler, that I don't want to construct meaning,everytime I want some information. I give out so much information about myself to the internet, that you should construct the context and give me what I want with surgical precision.
2. I don't want and can't handle everybody!!
"Here comes everybody", warned Clay Shirky. Sure the "Numa Numa" dance was interesting. I could learn all about the Marzipan cake from Wikipedia. Google certainly disrupted, "Knowledge is Power".
But, one day, with the posterous of the world and the speech-to-text tools in the mobile, literally, everybody is providing me information and entertainment, real-time, with a range of usefulness (from great to junk),that my cognitive surplus is going down, day by day, with the million Gary wannabes. I demand that, somebody set the "Bozo bit" correctly, after 'knowing' who I am.
3. Fingers are not the window to the internet
As long as the keyboard is the only interface to the world, I could tolerate a list. Google is certainly my window to the brave new world.
But, one day, when my expectation increased from getting a list, by typing, to commanding the 'mobileputer', "This dude is using the term, non-linear strategic action. I want to understand where he got the term from and how relevant is this term to the current context.", just like I command my automobile to increase the fan speed.
Or I am watching a movie and Jack Nicholson drops the name of that expensive coffee and I slap my forhead and my mobile wakes up to give me, yes, indeed this is true, that such a coffee exists. I don't care about any other info., only what I want. Just find out what I want from who I am and my gesture. But, don't make me wear those weird-looking gadgets all over my body, like the Sci-fi movies.
So, when the three trends hit the tipping point, Personalized curation would not only be the only means of preserving the richness and diversity afforded by the Long Tail, but the only way, for me, to do a great number of cool things with this connected intelligence, without expending my precious attention.
If you think, this ain't gonna happen, reflect upon how much information your eye filters to get the information that you decide to place attention on.
Google,"the window to the internet", would be replaced by the "Eye of the OM". (OM=One Machine is Kevin Kelly's term). Personally, it is going to a be a great while for that to happen.
Just like individuals have blindspots, that prevent us from understanding the complete picture, Organizations have blindspots too.
There was this "naughtiness" blindspot, about the picture, that was trending up, in Twitter.
Soon after, a Video rendered the "naughtiness" blindspot absurd, by widening the visual field.
While most of the organization ventures on the shared vision, a small group of people, must focus on getting "hard data" that discovers new mental models, that could support or contradict the current vision of the Organization.
This group should be completely oblivious to the Organization's Vision and is merely interested in collecting, sharing and presenting different mental models, pertinent to the business context of the Organization.
So, when a contrarian mental model is the 'right way', no persuasion is required to change the current collective mental model.
The more stronger the evidence, the more faster, the course correction could be.
In my previous birth, when I had a Garage Startup, the following incident illustrated the compelling need for Shared Values in an Organization.
A bright guy, let us call him, Rockstar Engineer, who worked with large telecommunication companies came to work with me. We worked on a Stack that will interact with a Voice-Over-IP Hardware, which was also under development, at the time.
After a few months, when we were almost done, I summoned the Rockstar Engineer.
"Will our Software work on the day, the Hardware arrives?"
"Well, Plan a month for integration testing and making fixes, after the hardware arrives."
"No. I am expecting it to work on the very same day, when the Shipment arrives."
"Are you kidding? It ain't gonna fly."
"No. I am serious."
"Well that is not how things work in telecommunications. It takes months for integration."
"I don't care about norms. I believe we can make it work. If you can't figure out, I will tell you how?"
The argument became more intense in the next few days and I got the attached flame email from the Rockstar Engineer.
I chose to ignore it for the time-being and waited for the Hardware to arrive.
The Hardware arrives on the appointed day, they unwrap it, provision it and tada!.
The very first conference call worked without any sort of tweaks. I still vividly remember the pure joy in the Rockstar Engineer's voice, when he conveyed the good news on the Phone.
The belief, I have is, "Passion dispels Constraints". The Rockstar Engineer was bright, open-minded and diligent, yet was blinded and conditioned by his past experience.
It dawned on me that, without shared core values, which defines an organization's culture, goals(even, if they were common) are hard to achieve and almost impossible to Scale elegantly.
As Peter Drucker wrote, "Every Enterprise requires commitment to common goals and shared values. Without such commitment there is no enterprise; there is only a mob."
If you want a practical example of Culture, you should attend the Zappos 2-day Bootcamp.
P.S.: The Rockstar Engineer is a great friend since then and we often joke about the email.
