Tuesday, April 01, 2003 | |
Source: Seb's Open Research; 4/1/2003; 4:22:31 PM David Gurteen's latest knowledge letter points to Peter Fryer's nice little site called trojanmice.com. Fryer explains what he means by the term 'trojan mouse' thus:
I think that some of the really powerful memes that end up driving change are indeed rather subtle in their ways - no loud music, no smoke, just a simple shift in how to do certain things that propagates over social networks from one person to the next. And what's interesting is that pretty much anyone can craft and disseminate them. If you've been listening to the loud music playing elsewhere, you might not notice the change until it's way too late to prevent it from taking over. Here's an earlier blog post about Dave Winer, Douglas Engelbart, and outliners as positive Trojan horses. [Seb's Open Research]8:12:48 PM trackback [] Articulate [] |
Source: Escapable Logic; 4/1/2003; 10:19:17 AMSocial IsmI'm reminded again that everyone discovers DNA at the same time. The social software meme seems to be everywhere. By software, I think everyone means web applications. Yesterday, citing an earlier Ross Mayfield post, I suggested:
And Ross Mayfield said:
This is an important entry by Ross, who posts important things several times a day. Here are some other excerpts:
Aha, the trust thing again, as Stuart Henshall urges us to focus upon. I'm a Johnny-come-lately to the social software conversation, and no match for Ross Mayfield. But I find we've been working on social software for years. I can't imagine software more social than Xpertweb which, though its purpose is unabashedly commercial, intends to socialize its users by the character of user ratings it tracks and publishes. You might say that Xpertweb is a set of values expressed through users' valuations. As Einstein is quoted, "Everything that can be counted does not necessarily count; everything that counts cannot necessarily be counted." Social software then, at a minimum, should at least make sure that things that matter are easier to count than they are without the software. Any other attributes may make the software elegant or compelling or easy to use, but the social part seems to be the trick of newly exposing communal activities or opinions that were not previously visible. So that sets the bar for social software. We recognize it because it lets us start to count things we care about, but the designer has to figure out what those things are. Presumably they're not obvious yet, or we'd already be counting them. What characteristic, theme perhaps, might indicate something needs new counting tools? Homeless to Harvard. . . is the name of a new Lifetime movie about the rise of Liz Murray, whose story was profiled on 20/20 last fall,
So Elizabeth finished High School in two years, got a job and scholarship through The New York Times and got accepted at Harvard. We will all be inspired by this movie, as we must be by Liz Murray's story. But oddly enough, it resonates with a quote from a retired Air Force General talking about the current war plan. Ordinary Need Not ApplyGeneral Merrill A. "Tony" McPeak, retired former chief of staff of the U.S. Air Force, interviewed last Wednesday by OregonLive.com, said:
McPeak's point could be applied to societies. Should it be necessary to be so above average to achieve the dreams that we tell ourselves are our birthright? Our society's accepted wisdom is that anyone can achieve their dream, yet so few even glimpse that dream that the conventional wisdom sounds like marketing. Maybe it's a lottery ad. The dominant fiction of our time is that we in the U.S. of A. don't need no stinkin' social safety nets or universal health insurance or the other attributes of the advanced European societies. We don't need them because we're in the land of unfettered opportunity. Look at the Liz Murray example. Or the late Senator Moynihan, or so many others who had what it takes to rise out of poverty. The problem is that not many people like that achieve their dream. Hell, most people can't achieve their parents' dream. The stories may support our national fiction but the facts don't. A shrinking percentage of the population has the opportunity to live as well as their parents did and work as little as their parents did and have acceptable health care, including people who go to Harvard on scholarship. If software is to be social, those attributes are reasonable design goals: to return to a pattern in which each generation's prospects are statistically better than their parents' prospects. Think of it as compassionate conservatism–advocating a return to past expectations. Those are the goals of Xpertweb. Will it work? Your guess is as good as mine. But from the nettle of depressing observations, we might pluck some positive notions that are still so hard to prove, we can't yet count on them:
If it is possible, that's the kind of software we're designing here. [Escapable Logic]10:44:39 AM trackback [] Articulate [] |