Musings & Meanderings

There’ve been many rounds of conversation in recent years about the term users. Many dislike it intensely. I’ve always had a ‘…just don’t call me late for dinner’ attitude to this term, finding it perfectly appropriate in some circumstances and less so in others. Instead of looking for an alternative generic term that encompasses every single person using a computer for any reason, I usually try to make the terminology congruent with the activity. Sort of an ‘it is what it does’ approach.

Here are some examples of terms I use:

1. audience
2. citizen
3. constituent
4. contributor
5. customer
6. member
7. participant
8. service provider
9. user
10. vendor
11. viewer
12. visitor

Last week’s conversation about Glam, on Michael Arrington’s and Jeff Jarvis’s blogs (here and here), got me thinking about this again, and realizing just how overly broad the definitions of our different roles here is. In many ways, those of us who’ve been around for some time still tend to think of geeks vs non-techs in terms of both support and business, of active users vs lurkers (and worse) in terms of forums and communities, and so on. These two-sided definitions make sense when observing and comprehending online activity from the perspective of personal experience. The more you broaden that perspective, however, the more variant roles and activities become, begging further definition. Beyond a core group, whether it’s social or special interest or a dev team, are far more complex communities and, further, entire societies.

Glam, for example, illustrates how increasingly professional bloggers and web publishers have become sub-contractors for advertisers. This may be a fairly traditional media model, but the old publishing definitions of writer and reader don’t fit the same way here. Whether we’re offering opinion, analysis, or entertainment online, the moment we start selling advertising we become a vendor of space in a way closer to a landlord model than to any other. The advertiser isn’t paying us for our attention, but for the numbers of other ‘eyeballs’ we can attract. So Glam and similar sites are, in effect, supporting a range of commercial activity that spans the entire marketing and media gamut from product to customer. Glam has users and its users have users, and so on.

The media model is one of the more complex ones, especially where it overlaps with pure free speech, but there are many other ecosystems developing in which one of the activities only is the exchange of goods and/or services. The difficulty with new role definitions here is that we each can play far more of them, and in more ways, than ever before. User, whether you love, hate, or are indifferent to the term, doesn’t come close to recognizing the range of multiple roles of a billion people beginning to create new ecocosms. There are hundreds of categories and thousands of definitions of hardware and software. There are endless business and job categories. Shouldn’t we have at least as many for the users? There are more of us, doing more various things, than in either of the first 2 groups, which some of us are also part of.

Me Tarzan …you Jane. See Spot run …to get online and click here? Machines are awesome, something I’ve believed in since I discovering Lotus 123 and DBase II about 25 years ago. Free societies, with free speech and free enterprise, are pretty awesome too. Advancing our comprehension of, and communication about, the latter up to the level of the former, is a goal worth pursuing, imo. What do you think?

The more active relationships we maintain, the more we are asked for our opinion. If they’re mostly social relationships, the questions range from ‘which restaurant for dinner’ and ‘what’s our take on the new guy in our crowd’ to requests for common interest commentary on sports, film, books, whatever. In active, successful business relationships, we’re constantly asked about anything from deal points to personal reputation ratings to predicting the future.

The people closest to you ‘know what you think’, and can probably also describe your official position on most important things, from politics to marriage to sex. Eventually your persona can get developed to the point where there are multiple versions of the same package tailored to levels of familiarity and interaction (enter FaceBook). The full story is for those closest to you, then there’s a summary version, the short version, the sanitized short version, …the Twitter version.

When was the last time someone asked you a question that made you not only stop and think about the answer, but perhaps even examine some of your beliefs? The sort of question that couldn’t be answered instantly, that couldn’t be answered fully within the confines of chat or forums, email or a blog post, that couldn’t be answered without some serious thought and exchange of views?

When was the last time you asked someone a question that startled them, made them look at you intently wondering if you really wanted to know, or elicited a surprised, “No one’s ever asked me that before!”.

Some of us have a best friend or three, maybe a business partner, maybe a spouse, who sometimes knows us better than we know ourselves, and with whom we can really share ‘thinking out loud’. Those who do often have an air of being grounded, of being at home wherever they are. Whether that’s a result of finding someone to trust enough, or a measure of ability to trust, isn’t relevant for this post. What matters is that the trust, in ourselves and each other, creates strength and vitality and a sense of being intensely alive in our interactions which spills over and transcends private relationships.

Our world moves ever faster and keeps getting more crowded. We live in ever more transient societies. The sound bytes keep multiplying and getting shorter because, like a long url, longer messages can get truncated, or simply drown in traffic and competing noise. Sometimes it’s noisy enough to convince you that no one is actually listening to anyone else. Please don’t buy into it. Some of us are listening, and often wishing that more speakers recognized this.

There’s a lot of awesome potential in the explosion of population and sound. Potential for connection and communication. Every voice, your voice, can be heard. Identifying correctly what people ‘want to hear’ is the standard method of being heard by many. If, however, your goal is to engage and to interact, then deeper listening for things that matter to many is the way forward.

What are the important things that you wish someone would ask you about? Why? Do you wish someone would listen to your thought and ideas? Will you listen to theirs?

In a NYT article titled Questions You Should Never Ask A Writer, Doris Lessing writes of political correctness, legacies of communism, and the “demand that stories must be “about” something”.

This one phrase speaks volumes to me, of people who shun fiction entirely, of others who spend an academic career studying but one or a few works of literature, of people’s fear of human imagination, of how many millions of times someone asked what Seinfeld was about, feeling so wickedly delighted to know that the clever answer was ‘nothing’. Meanwhile, emotions, passions, spirituality, the wondrous mystery of life itself, overflow beyond hope of classification and micro-management, gloriously incomprehensible through logical deduction.

Why, indeed, must everything be ‘about something’? What is this almost compulsive need many people have to identify and explain everything in so minimalist a manner that it can be safely enclosed and, then, put away?

This compulsion applies to much more than just literature. Any artist’s life’s work should be describable in one term or phrase. Any new business idea should be reduced to an ‘elevator pitch’. Many community projects are most likely to gain backing when the answer to what goal is to be achieved can be stated in one sentence. Politicians actually get elected based on a statement of intention to ‘fix’ something with little or no explanation as to how they will do so. This list goes on and on.

Every one of these ‘abouts’, these simplified and symbolic reasons people seem to crave, only has meaning within the full context of a human story, a multi-faceted and dynamic panorama of intertwined moments and lives, about many things simultaneously.

We can be without being about something.
We cannot be about something without being.

Dan writes on being a student again, a change which has granted him access to academic libraries, saying,

As an independent researcher, I simply could not keep on top of my subject properly.

We complain about the quality of education without thinking twice about the lack of resources available to anyone with a spark of interest or an iota of motivation. Any of us who choose to pursue an interest can easily summon the sense of attraction and challenge that emanates from a newly discovered and available body of knowledge. Most of us have looked for information in vain on many occasions.

Almost everyone I know who has any sort of specialized knowledge outside of technology and computers has commented to me on doors closing on the availability of learning resources over the internet for a number of years now. This continuing construction of barriers to learning is destructive to our society. It is rationalized on an economic basis, yet it shares characteristics with the economics of free enterprise. Lower taxes and the result will be economic growth. Open libraries and the result will be a higher level of public education and a greater demand for learning materials.

The more we limit access to literature of every sort the less knowledge we all have.

Some percentage of bloggers are also academicians. Those who are typically have access to far more online resources than the rest of us, but usually do not consciously recognize their participation in creating what is effectively a class distinction. The class divides are expanding. Schools increasingly ban access to online publications of the less educated while restricting access to tools of self education. Elite online publishers shun the masses, yet there are many weblogs written by informed and well-educated citizens who take greater care with facts than some professional journalists, with access to expensive resources, do.

My own subscriptions over the years, represented a huge outlay of dollars. Where those subscriptions were used to inform business activities they represented an investment. This thinking is sound as far as economics are concerned, but our lives and our society are about more than just economics. We don’t expect a direct financial return from teaching our children to read, nor from much of the reading and learning we do ourselves. My personal interests are wide ranging and cross disciplinary, so I have constant cause to compare the enormous gap in quality and depth of information available to the public on different topics. On this issue, I envy Dan his official student status. There is much online information that I would be willing to pay for access to which is not available at all, for love or money, to non-members, be they professionals or laypersons. Being limited physically, I don’t have regular access to various libraries, so am perhaps more aware than most of just how empty the electronic public library is.

The expectation that the internet could and would make more substantive information available to all of us has not been fulfilled. Whatever your views on the wisdom of crowds versus the madness of mobs, each is composed of a collection of individuals. Those individuals are either informed and educated, or not, and often those levels are determined by accessibility to learning resources. Formal education isn’t free, but access to educational materials and other publicly published information shouldn’t be limited only to those who can afford an expensive education. People who have a higher level of education read more. They read more for the rest of their lives, not just while they are in school. Not everyone who wants a higher education gets one. Sometimes life interferes.

If you’ve read this far, and are new to Open Access, try reading these
11 (mis)Leading Open Access Myths.
Peter Suber offers a page titled
What You Can Do To Promote the Open Access Movement.

Open Access does not make education, or books, free. Teachers and authors both require stuff such as food and heat in winter just like the rest of us do. The internet, though, offers us a different world with its own unique characteristics. In a bookstore or a public library, we can browse hundreds of publications on a topic we’re interested in. A majority of the billion people with internet connections, though, never even see the wealth of potential information and learning tools that already exist electronically. Much of it languishes, rarely read and ‘gathering dust’ in walled gardens while people of all ages, eager to learn something, wade through ad-laden Google search results.

One oft cited frustration by institutions which offer some open access is that we use the information without linking to the source or crediting the author. Perhaps some of us use information irresponsibly, and perhaps there are enough of us who have the opposite intention to make a difference. If you care, teach someone else about this.

Writing yesterday’s post was fun, as was writing it from the non-tech perspective. I considered making the last two categories Platform and OS, except that this change might have effectively reversed the view to that of a developer, and I might have ended up writing ‘how computers are different from people’ in terms of compile time, garbage collection, etc.

Machines are built from the OS up. In a way, so are people, but we also start with a cornucopia of possibilities hardwired into us that couldn’t fit into an elevator pitch even if the elevator went all the way to Pluto, and, we learn as adults to investigate and discover from the top down. The typical user viewpoint is possibly closer to that of a hacker than of a programmer, and more relevant to a marketer or interface developer than a coder.

This reversed view interferes with the opposite question of how computers are like people. In our efforts to bring the two together, have they become smarter and more relevant today than in the vision leading to the development of multi paradigm languages in the 1950s? Are we closer now to delivering what we think we need, or further away?

We aren’t all the same, and neither is what we think we need. Even those whose ‘needs’ are specific and limited, though, media and marketers for example, are stymied by the lack of connection between a billion users and the trillion pieces of miscellaneous data we collect and scatter. The more we break down the users into niches, and the uses into horizontals or verticals, the bigger the gap between any given application and what an individual or community could ideally do with it. If web 3.0 is only about connecting all the applications of 2.0, then it isn’t going to be much more successful, and we seriously hamper real progress with these bubbles.

Can disconnects such as this be addressed via endless scripts or more agile languages and databases, or semantic search? Can they be addressed solely by programmers and coders at all? An OS takes a long time to build. There aren’t enough lifetimes, I believe, to create information architectures that could house and manage all possible uses, not the way we’ve been doing it so far. Trying to do so is almost like trying to design a building that covers the entire world and addresses appropriate uses for the entire population. The entire population, though, could build what it needs.

I don’t believe that the future is in the ether, but rather in the hands and minds of the people, whose activities and uses should determine what lives where and for how long. I believe that can be created through structuring qualitative modules that can be adopted by individuals and groups. Blogs and communities are a limited preview of this, allowing us to manipulate our own data and create meaning. Concepts I mentioned in the opening paragraph, such as memory management, and relationship creation that goes beyond information tagging, are the key to moving beyond creating meaning into collating it.

The things we actually do here are limited greatly by our lack of relationship to the paradigms and structure of the tools, and my post yesterday could be read as a preface to exploring the human capacity for high level languages. After all, if there weren’t any humans, there wouldn’t be any computers.

Could a big company create a structure based on individual modules of human depth and breadth? They could, but it’s highly unlikely, just as traditional media aren’t about to invite bloggers into their midst. The free speech enabled by blogs, though, is far more threatening to the hand maiden of politics and big government, than individual consumers are to big private companies, which are increasing putting a toe into open source waters. The barrier, of course, is in the lack of economic models. We have (mostly huge) enterprise business models, some (mostly rickety) small business models, and two mass consumer models (delivery systems and advertising) that are sound. Big companies don’t exist to enable anyone’s business models but their own and the occasional partner’s, so building the true community model is up to us.

Community building requires leaders. For all the talk of entrepreneurship in web development, the true entrepreneurs, those who would conceive and develop new models, are a rare breed, and they also aren’t typically community leaders. The space that is wide open is in real community creation models (not simply peer to peer interaction which we have had since the internet began), and the time to start developing them is always here, yesterday, today and tomorrow, just as individual voices embracing free speech are always here and increasingly flourishing.