Multi-subjectivity and objectivity
Objectivity is a fiction!
In my presentations on information abundance and social media I often say that 'objectivity is a fiction, it really is multi-subjectivity' and then go on to say that using social media is a good way of exposing yourself to a diverse enough multi-subjectivity to be able to detect patterns in what is going on around you.
But that's just my subjective view, isn't it?
Now when I say objectivity is a fiction, that can be easily challenged of course. That I am writing this in my hometown Enschede, or the existence of water in our world are objective facts (even if the words to describe them, such a hometown, aren't).
Lucky for me I've never been challenged that way in my presentations.
Probably because they were smart and knew that I was talking about different kinds of objective facts.
Social facts
During our vacation in the Austrian Alps I read Steven Pinker's Blank Slate and he provided me with the two words to say more precisely where we need to replace the word objectivity with multi-subjectivity.
Those words are: social facts.
If objects of sociality (Jyri Engestrom's term) are catalysts for human relationships, social facts provide core stability to groups of relationships.
That George Bush is the US President, or Beatrix of Orange-Nassau is the Queen of the Netherlands is a social fact not an objective one. It is something we merely generally agree upon to be true (even those opposing monarchy, or those thinking Bush never beat Al Gore). We all behave like it is true. If we would stop that, it would indeed seize to be true.
Money systems, number and measures systems, religious belief systems etc. are social facts too. They're designed. They can be changed by groups simply stopping to accept them. Social facts are the emperor's new clothes. Social facts are the product of multi-subjectivity. We pretend that social facts are objective facts.
Social facts provide stability
Social facts do serve a useful role of course. Social facts provide core stability to groups of relationships. It would be very inefficient if the US President would have to get all US citizens to agree to each of his actions now allowed by his role as US President. Transactions would dry up if we would need to make sure our money would be good elsewhere everytime. (And in financial crises they do dry up precisely because the 'fact' is coming undone.) Religion has been a corner stone of many cultures and still is. Social facts allow for more complex societal structures
Social facts however need to be seen I think as what they are: agreements.
Because sometimes we need to escape social facts. When they have become inefficient or ineffective. The American Revolution was the correction of the innefficiency of having to pay taxes without representation or self-decision. The Declaration of Independence changed the social fact of the British King having power over the American colonies. The ensuing violence was needed to convince the British to accept that changed 'reality'.
Sometimes we need to be able to see social facts in a new light. When we can become more efficient or effective by doing so.
Sometimes we need to be able to see social facts as the agreements they are, because we'll meet people that aren't part of that agreement, or have their own agreements and we might need to understand their position.
Social media detects (emerging) social facts
By exposing yourself to the multi-subjective views of your social environment you detect patterns. What is important to them, what is irrelevant to them, what are they excited about, what binds them, what drives them apart? Or in other words: what are the existing and emerging social facts in that social environment? Social media are very good at exposing you to the views of your wider social environment, at showing you the patterns. If you treat your RSS-sources as a chorus of voices of individuals that is. I subscribe to bloggers, not to blogs, to people making pictures not to Flickr streams.
Culture is the Greatest Hits collection of social facts
Social facts I think overlap with cultural categories.
Pinker presents a culture as the sum of the individual psychologies of those in a culture. Social facts are agreements in groups of people. Cultural categories serve the same role.
Social facts remain true if it is efficient or effective to do so. When social facts change, cultural categories shift, culture changes. (My old posting on cultural monsters goes into shifting categories more)
What we call culture can be seen as a collection of old social facts we kept around. It's the greatest hits of social facts. I think it also means culture can change faster than we think.
I feel there is also a similar connection between social facts, smart mobs, and how Wikipedia works because it is statistically right. But that's something for later.
Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBack (0)Murmuratur: BlogTalk 2008, Cork, Ireland
Murmuratur, it is being whispered, that next spring will see a BlogTalk conference edition in Cork, Ireland.
Thomas Burg, Tom Raftery and John Breslin are trying to bring the next installment of the BlogTalk together. As they all three confirm on their blogs.
Early March seems to be the intendend date.
Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)Pivots, Want More Pivots
Dreaming of Tags
Shortly before waking up one morning, while camping in the Austrian Alps in the past weeks (as seen above) I had a dream about tags. Or rather I dreamt that my brother in law had created a database in which each data item was treated and useable as a tag as well. In my dream I was very enthusiastic about this idea. When I woke up Elmine asked me 'what does that mean, that everything is a tag?'. We kept coming back to the topic, and at the end of the day had a conversation around it over a couple of Weizen beers.
Tags do Double Duty
Tags serve two functions. First they are descriptors, and in that sense subservient to the piece of data they describe. But they are also pivots, i.e. turning points in your path through data. A pivot allows you to see the same set of data, or a different set of data which overlaps the current one, in a different view.
If you go to the picture above and follow the tag 'huben' on the right, you are presented with a number of pictures that are also tagged 'huben', so you can navigate to a different photo within the context of 'huben' and so on. Pivots are the forks in the road of your surfing.
When everything is a tag as in my dream, then everything is a pivot as well. This reminds me of the view on data-items the people of Mediamatic have: everything is a thing. So a thing can be a tag, but also a list of tags, or the entire Flickr-database, or any part thereof. In my dream everything was a tag, a pivot.
Pivots in Social Software Triangles
My description of social software as triangles, which got quite a good response at the time, put tags as pivots in the center view: social applications allow you to navigate from one app to another through their tags as pivot points.
From a Flickr photo to a point on a Yahoo or Google map, to a location in Plazes, or to photo's taken geographically nearby. The thing is, I cannot directly jump from a Flickr photo to the corresponding location in Plazes. I could if the Plaze itself was the tag. In my 2006 posting I already indicated that where now usually a tag is in the triangle, there basically could be anything. As long as the other two points are a person and a object of sociality. So you could theoretically jump directly from a picture to an event to a place to a review to the author back to the picture again. If tags could be more than just a descriptive word they would be better pivots.
(image from the triangle posting last year)
Need More Pivots!
Hence I concluded that my dream was basically a call for more pivot points in social media. So that we can navigate our web apps better, and build better personal information strategies.
Question remains who has the rights to the concept of a database where everything is tags: me because it was my dream, or my brother in law as he came up with it in my dream and showed me a working prototype :)
Facebook Network Visualization
In my Facebook profile I have added my 'friends wheel'.
It creates a picture of all your contacts and the links between your contacts.
There are different views to play with, so you can focus on different aspects of your circle of friends. Such as different geographic subsets (networks), the overlap between you and a contact, or a random selection of contacts from your list.
From the default result two things in my Wheel catch the eye:
One is the concentration of connections at the bottom. The names there are the people that I have been in touch with a lot in the past years in the blogosphere. No surprises there. They apparantly form the center of sorts of my on-line connections.
The other interesting part is the sparsely linked section on the right. This indeed are people I have met recently in a random fashion, or stem from entirely different contexts than the usual blogospheric circles (e.g. one is a fellow boardmember from a fraternity 16yrs ago that reappeared on my radar a month ago).
Nice visualization of contacts. Also because there is a more interactive flash version as well. The Facebook app has been created by Thomas Fletcher.
Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)Summer Evening Procrastination
While Elmine is playing tennis on the Wii, I filled out 14 questions and got this:
I guess I would have gotten the full 100% if they had also asked whether I ever dream about blogging. (Coincidentally another blogger named his blog Dreamfeed after my posting with this title.)
Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)Back from Vacation
Four weeks ago Elmine and I left for vacation. A month without electricity, and apart from the GPRS phone no connectivity.
Although we found camp grounds increasingly offer Wifi access from your tent. Also phone coverage as well as GPRS reaches high up in the mountains. Which made it possible for this guy to do a deal over the phone while looking out over the glacier capped tops of the Austrian/Italian border. And which made it possible to let Plazes know where we were.
It was fun, it was relaxing.
We hiked in the mountains, and no my fear of heights isn't gone. Bought and read a lot of books. Spent a number of days in Munich which was great, and met up with Siegfried Hirsch there. Also met up with Martin Roell on the way south, and my sister who lives in Austria.
Now we return to the regular programme.
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