La vie en bleu: Life lessons from #thedress

By now we’re sick of the dress, but permit me a little late digression. At first, I had written and lengthy and quasi-academic review of the sociological ramifications of the color-based hullabaloo: some high-minded stuff about the nature of narratives and how they mess with our perception. I had a decent thesis, which I still believe is accurate and useful, and I still think this line of reasoning is interesting and worthy of exploration. But right now I think I’m much more interested in some real talk.

Like most, I started off seeing the dress as white and gold. I couldn’t fathom how it could be anything else, and I was sure the blue and black sorts were strange. It was clearly white and gold and there was nothing for it. I rejected claiming to prove blueness out of hand: the comparison photo was much too dark and saturated to be the same article as the one in the “ambiguous” pic (a belief I still hold—I think it has faded somewhat). I thought it was a prank or a hoax, because when I looked at the picture I still saw white and gold.

Then, later, it changed. It took me by surprise—I thought people were now passing around an altered image from what I had first seen. Asking Crystal to confirm, I was shocked when she said this “new” image was a white and gold dress. It was just as confusing as the Blue Team had been to me when I was looking at it the first time. I have never been able to see it as white since.

This mirrors a lot of ways my opinions have changed over the years. In 2004, I voted for George W. Bush as “the lesser of two evils”. Today, I somewhat regret my 2012 vote for Barack Obama on the grounds that he has not proven to be sufficiently liberal. I remember when my political opinions changed, but they changed like the dress did. One moment, I saw white and could not even make a clear case for blue. While not paying attention to those opinions, they changed radically, and I could no longer even remotely defend the ones I had just held.

There are plenty of other positions I have held in the past that have changed like this, completely and without warning. I can’t imagine what effect this must have on the people who love me most; I might turn out to be a different person tomorrow morning, and for good. It’s scary to me.

But then I realize that most people are equally difficult to understand for a number of other, different reasons. Crystal sees white and gold, has read the articles “proving” that the dress is blue, and will not budge. When I tell her that the owner of the dress says that it’s blue, she counters that we don’t know that that’s the real owner, or that it’s not a hoax. Yet, in the end, she reaffirms that the Blue Team has valid reasons to believe their claims and that she’s not sure her position is the only possible correct one.

And yes, of course, there are other stories. There are dozens if not hundreds of different ways to view this stupid dress, and each of them reveals a little something about us that is scary, inconsistent, or laughable. Even what might be the most straightforward possible story—someone who saw the dress blue, argued that it was blue, saw the articles, and feels vindicated—betrays something a little out of sorts. Remember that most people originally saw the dress as white. With hindsight, that looks like bold individualism and bravery. But in the first, it seems like the man who claims the earth is flat because he can’t see the curve, or at least a jaywalker crossing a busy street against the light.

So the thrust of all this jabber must be that we’re all ludicrous. Which is true. But beyond that, let’s also consider how all of this folly connects us. We may not be very logical on the whole, but when we learn to drop our “serious business” act for half a second, we might find that there are more important things in life than whatever you own individual “blue dress” may be.

Google+ and the Economy of Circles

I recently had an enlightening conversation with a brilliant friend that will remain nameless until he posts his own version of events. This friend had come across, somewhere on the internet, a page containing a list of “Twitter accounts that will follow you back, guaranteed”. As an experiment, he followed everyone on the list, and, as per the guarantee, they followed him back. Interestingly enough, however, is that he’s still racking up tons of followers, beyond those of the original list. Having more followers means you will get more followers.

Thinking about the ramifications of following what amount to dummy accounts in order to increase his follow rate, this friend pointed out that there’s no reason for him to unfollow the accounts he followed. Many of them don’t post, and those that do can be put into a list, and that list can be silenced. There’s no regulation in the Twitter TOS that says he can’t follow certain accounts (that would be counterproductive), and there’s no social stigma associated with it, as no one is likely to double-check his follow list for bots. To my friend, this seemed to be a fatal flaw in Twitter’s system—it can be easily gamed without consequence. Fortunately, Twitter is not a game. It’s a free-market economy.

In fact, Twitter is a very free economy. Because there are only the barest of regulations and developers can and do develop tools that automate and simplify actions in Twitter, users are left to rational self-interest as their only guide to navigating the economy, that is, their audience. Some, like my friend, do this, escaping from the trappings of social convention to further their clout by whatever means available. But because of this forced freedom, Twitter is a world of bubbles (as in “housing bubble”), where individual importance shifts from day to day, and where there seem to be more “experts” than regular Joes.

Compare this to Facebook—an economy with heavier restrictions, where businesses register differently than celebrities, who register differently than regular people. Where events aren’t just blipped out to the masses, they’re fully scheduled and organized. Where there’s such a thing as “like” and where it takes mutual consent to form a connection. Facebook, by its nature, abhors the expert, and embraces the commoner. Spamming is not only encouraged, but subsidized, and there’s no reason to aspire to any benchmark of social performance, unless you’re a company.

I count myself among what I imagine to be a majority of people, content with the shortcomings of both methods. We doubted the need for another major social media platform, especially after having been jilted by Diaspora. Yet there was the Goog, rolling out what at first blush was poised to be Wave 2.0. Thankfully, it wasn’t—it was an exceptionally simple design that approached the social media economy as a free market, much like Twitter. And, in fact, despite the brilliance that is the Circle system of separating one’s friends, there’s nothing yet baked into G+ that will keep it from becoming Twitter. There’s also nothing that can prevent it from becoming like Facebook. At the same time.

That’s the brilliance of Google+: giving the user the ability to change the rules. Because one can change one’s content stream like the channel on a television, users can make the service into anything they want: a Twitter clone, a Facebook clone (minus some largely unnecessary features), a mix of the two, or something else entirely. The killer app is being able to choose your audience, and thus, your economy.

A lot has been made of G+’s ability to succeed—whether it will be a functional social network on the order of Facebook and Twitter. The numerical evidence seems to indicate that that’s a big yes, but whether it will actually succeed—that is, yield an improvement for direct social media in general? That will depend on whether we, the users, learn to make it work to bridge the gaps in existing social media services. For that to happen, we need to experiment, and we need to share.

There’s a lot of upfront work that goes into building a social network, and in Facebook and Twitter, that setup seemed to be straightforward and repetitive. For Google+ users, the setup phase is ongoing, as we attempt to discover how best to format our circles and use them in a way that makes sense. Experimentation will yield functional formats on an individual level, but then each of us needs to continue to have a usability discussions with any friends willing to share, ensuring that disruptive ideas have a chance to spread through the network. I recommend a circle called “Meta” or “Google+” for that.

That’s really the unexpected joy of Google+: millions of people, working together to make something awesome.

Intersection: Trumor + The Filter Bubble

First in a series of pieces that examine the hidden links between apparently unrelated ideas.

Scientists at the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems at MIT have been working on a way to determine how far an idea will propagate via Twitter. The system, named Trumor, measures the reach and influence of individual users on Twitter, much like the commercially-available service, Klout. Trumor, however, creates a list of "superstars" in each topic (e.g. soccer, automobiles, copyright law). These users are very likely to have their comments propagated through the network.

The Filter Bubble is the title of a book and the name of an idea developed by online activist Eli Pariser. The basic premise is this: online information is being increasingly organized automatically by individual preference, and this algorithmic curation may not be to our benefit. As an example, Pariser notes the results pages for Google searches two of his friends did on "Egypt" during the revolution earlier this year. One friend received mostly news, the other received travel agencies and basic encyclopedia information, but nothing on the protests. As human beings rarely like their ideas to be challenged, the filter bubble tends toward increasing divisions between groups of people, based on ideology.

The Intersection: As people self-organize by ideology, they will likely either choose to restrict the number of information sources they rely on, or the filter bubble will do that for them. As the bubble closes in, information from outside will leak in less and less frequently, making the power of online thought leaders very strong as concerns influencing those that follow them. (Incidentally, the implications of the word "follow" in the Twitter context will become creepier.)

As this occurs, the knowledge of who influences whom (will MIT retain this information? will it be made public?) will likely fall into the hands of corporations, political parties, hackers, and activist groups. The game will become "Who influences the influencers?" as groups attempt to convince members of the superstar list they're interested in to carry their content. This structure of top-down siloed syndication would be very weak to subtle subversion and account hacking.

In sum: As the world outside our senses becomes more important, our reliance on others' perspectives increases. As our filter bubbles close in, our worldviews become less robust and more vulnerable to manipulation via the social media superstars we rely on. Reality-hacking and reality-selling are imminent, but not in a cool cyberpunk way.

Getting a Celebrity to Tweet to You

A well-timed Twitter post got Dulé Hill to send me one in return. You know that's right.

The other day I had an idea. A goal, really, albeit a small one. I had found that there were a couple of celebrities on my Twitter feed that seemed to be very interactive with their followers, and I thought, "I should get one of them to interact with me!" Now, I don't want you to take me for one of those celeb-stalker sorts...I follow one actor, one athlete, one novelist, and a handful of journalists.

The two celebs I follow that I deemed "interactive" couldn't be more dissimilar, but, strangely, both are in Vancouver. William Gibson, father of cyberpunk and author of some truly awesome books; and Dulé Hill, best known for his role as Charlie Young on The West Wing and Burton "Gus" Guster on USA's Psych, both of which are excellent television series.

Gibson, for his part, seems to like to tweet about current events, largely retweeting funny and interesting things he sees, but he responds when people ask him questions. Hill tends to converse with the crowd constantly, and posts about friends, especially West Wing and Psych castmates.

After a failed attempt to get Gibson to respond, I decided to focus on Hill. Now, when I say "focus", I mean, in the immortal words of Mr. Hill's castmate James Roday, "Wait for iiiiiiit!" And the moment arrived.

I saw that Rob Lowe, formerly of The West Wing was trending at the time, due to his appearance on Oprah. Hill had tweeted a number of times regarding his admiration for Lowe, so my tweet was simple, "@dulehill Rob Lowe is trending right now. Just thought you should know." Hill's response? "@benchatt Nice!" That was it. Mission accomplished.

Of course, I told everyone on Facebook what just happened on Twitter. Yes, that sentence is as strange to me as it is to you. The funny thing is that my one-word brush with greatness has stayed on the web—I think I've mentioned it once in real life, to my wife, who then probably saw it on Facebook anyway.

Social media may bring us into closer contact with celebrities these days, but those brushes with fame aren't nearly as cool as running into Ralph Macchio at Taco Bell.

The Electronic Middleman

Writing about social technology is something of an exercise in redundancy. Essentially every technology writer in existence has taken a turn discussing the relevance and effects of social media on social networks, culture, and individual psychology. As this post is simply an introduction to the topic, here are a few of the arguments and questions that will be plumbed in later posts.

The biggest and most easily accepted argument in any discussion on social media is that it fundamentally changes the nature of human communication and sociology. But how?

An important question here involves the size of a social network. Previously, it was taken as gospel that the human neocortex limits the size of a viable social network to somewhere around 150 people. This doesn’t appear to correspond, however, to real occurrences on social networking sites. While the average Facebook user only has 130 friends, violations of Dunbar’s number on very high orders are very easily found.

And there’s another thing: a new type of prestige appears to be forming around the friend / follower number. In fact, there’s an equation that determines your Twitter clout.

Social media tend to the making of all comment into public comment. As such, new social norms are emerging regarding tact and honesty in these spontaneous forums. Further, such forums fragment the national or world discussion of certain topics into various, generally unrepresentative sample discussions.

Social media and other communication technologies allow for an increasingly developed middle ground between synchronous and asynchronous communication. This changes the nature of conversation by messing with the time between discourse turns, allowing for more or less thought between statements than previously

This fuzzy synchronicity can lead to the loss of conversational fluidity. That change in fluidity can have a whole range of effects on discourse pragmatics in general.

Previously, human communication was either very high priority (face-to-face or telephonic) or very low (correspondence). Now, there are medium settings to that priority, allowing for reasonably important communication to be done while performing other tasks.

Further, more than one conversation can be happening at the same time, and over multiple media. That simultaneity can lead to an increase in conversational density—and we may not be able to predict what that means for the brain.

For certain, some of the effects of social media, and the internet in general, are perceived under an umbrella category of “loss of focus”. But, is that loss of focus real? And is it such a bad thing?

Social media certainly affects the importance of distance in maintaining a social network. Friends can be kept, on some level, despite vast physical distances. But, what is the importance of “meatspace”, and what role will physical closeness play in the future of social networks?