The Social Organization

Social media is something that everybody talks about but not many people can define.  A common definition would involve Facebook and Twitter, but really these are just technology platforms that allow social interactions to take place.  Mark Zuckerberg built the technology of Facebook, but he doesn't create social connections, just as Bill Gates helped to popularize what we know as Microsoft Word, but he did not write a novel that was written using it. Too often, organizations miss the social part of social media and forget what is really going on--people are connecting with other people, even though they are using technology to do it.

For some reason, we humans tend to focus on technology as a final solution rather than as a means to a solution.  When we do that, what we get is technology without a real solution, and in the process we may create more problems for ourselves and others.  Once again, there are echoes in the work of Jaron Lanier who argues against the confusing of the thing and the person in You Are Not and Gadget and Who Owns the Future?.

A practical focus on social capital rather than on technical capital is the main point of The Social Organization by Anthony J. Bradley and Mark P. McDonald.  In other words, a truly effective organization cannot just be an organization that does social media in some department or office -- it must become a social organization.

That is a hard process for several reasons.  First, dealing with change in any organization is difficult.  Compounding this challenge, many of the real changes that the organization must make are not immediately visible and may not seem like problems at all.  Why change something that has worked?  To a certain extent, this is wise advice, but it is also important to note that the world is changing, and organizations must change with it.

This change must go beyond throwing money or staff at a problem.  It is all to easy for leaders to direct subordinates to take on social media challenges; it is much more difficult to affect real change.

The authors of The Social Organization do a great job of breaking down the process of how an organization can become social.  This is crucial because the process involves all of the steps the authors outline, including the following:

1. Forming a vision for community collaboration
2. Developing a strategic approach to community collaboration
3. Refining purpose by building purpose roadmaps
4. Launching the community
5. Guiding from the middle, including the community's purpose
6. Adapting the organization

These steps are not easy in most cases because they involve diving underneath the surface and getting the individuals in the organization to engage.  But the payoff is huge, as shown in the examples the authors give, and hopefully as will be shown in the work of Isabella County Restoration House and Central Michigan Manufacturer's Association.

Literature in the Social Media Age

My professional development has followed a winding road, but I value all of the places I have been.  I started college as a mechanical engineering major because my favorite high school class was calculus. 

However, I found that my favorite classes by far my freshman year were my writing and English classes, so I decided to switch my major to English.  I was mostly glad I did -- I had great instructors, I enjoyed most of the reading, and my writing got a lot better -- but when I reached graduation, I realized that my job options were limited.  In fact, there are many careers for humanities majors, but it requires extra work to develop the skills and gain the experience needed to make yourself marketable.

Looking back, I see that the fault was mostly mine: Even though I had an excellent GPA, I was not proactive in seeking out extracurricular activities that would show initiative and develop real-world skills.

Through a series of twists and turns, I found that my abilities were valuable in the business world and, not only that, that they were not all that common.  Communication is consistently ranked as one of the top two or three skills by employers.  But what is communication? Could I have just skipped all of the literature classes and just studied grammar and read non-fiction reports?

It turns out that the answer is no.  A recent study published in the journal Science, one of the most prestigious scientific research journals in the world, says that reading short stories by Anton Chekhov (one of my favorite authors) or other fiction can increase social skills.  Here is a summary of the research:  

It found that after reading literary fiction, as opposed to popular fiction or serious nonfiction, people performed better on tests measuring empathy, social perception and emotional intelligence — skills that come in especially handy when you are trying to read someone’s body language or gauge what they might be thinking.

The researchers say the reason is that literary fiction often leaves more to the imagination, encouraging readers to make inferences about characters and be sensitive to emotional nuance and complexity.

Does it matter what kind of fiction you read?  Does it have to be snobby literature? The answer is yes:

The researchers — Emanuele Castano, a psychology professor, and David Comer Kidd, a doctoral candidate — found that people who read literary fiction scored better than those who read popular fiction. This was true even though, when asked, subjects said they did not enjoy literary fiction as much. Literary fiction readers also scored better than nonfiction readers — and popular fiction readers made as many mistakes as people who read nothing.

What does any of this have to do with social media?  Employers have often told me that one of the skills university graduates are lacking is social skills -- how to interact with colleagues in groups or as individuals.  Some people blame this lack of social skills on texting, social media, etc., although I have never seen any research conclusively proving this.  Yet perhaps universities and students should not be so quick to discount the real value of the humanities - classic literature, art, and music -- in developing the human skills that are really needed.  

Smart Phones and Humans

If you haven't seen this yet, check it out.  Louis C.K. has some hilarious but really philosophical comments about how technology can change us as people.  Some great stuff.

For Some Perspective

Mark Malkoff interviews kids about social media. 

Every organization has problems.  That is a truth that I have learned as I have gotten older.  When I was younger, I thought that when I entered the "grown-up" world, organizational problems would be fewer and easier to solve.  To the contrary, I found the problems to be more intractable, if not more common. However, once I accepted this reality, it was actually comforting because I did not expect organizational behavior to be perfect from the beginning.

One of the things I like about The Social Organization by Bradley and McDonald is that it addresses organizations as they are, not as abstract ideas.  Moving an organization towards change is not easy, but it can be done.

Chapters five and six of the book address the development of a strategic approach to community collaboration and refining purpose.  As Clay Shirky says, it's not technical capital that matters, it's social capital.  I have found this over and over in my work with clients.  How an organization functions as a whole will strongly influence the effectiveness of its social media.  If the organization is secretive, afraid of contact with the outside world, or resistant to change, then the organization's social media of the organization will reflect these characteristics.

That is not to say that an organization has to be perfect in order to have a strong social media presence; in fact, Bradly and McDonald give examples of organizations that actually used social media to drive change in the organization as a whole.

And, it must be said that some organizations that are not at all "social" at all can be very effective with social media, including political dictatorships in various countries, as Evgeny Morozov would point out. However, these organizations are usually interested in social media as a way to deceive or deflect unwanted attention, not to build community power.  

Generally, organizations that are interested in tapping the collective energy of employees, citizens, and customers will need to follow the model Bradley and McDonald lay out.  Taking the initial steps of developing a strategic approach and refining purpose are often missed because organizations want to skip to the technical application.  That is a mistake and will not be effective in the long run.  Using a piece of machinery or firing a weapon can be more exciting than planning out a purpose or sighting in a target, but it usually results in wasted energy.

Like This Decision on Facebook

Facebook likes are form of free speech.  That is the judgment of a federal appeals court.  From the Wall Street journal:

The Fourth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals sided with a former deputy sheriff in Hampton, Va., who said he was sacked for “liking” the Facebook page of a man running against his boss for city sheriff.

“Liking” the campaign page, the court said, was the “Internet equivalent of displaying a political sign in one’s front yard, which the Supreme Court has held is substantive speech.”

 Why is this ruling important?

Courts have granted First Amendment protection in the past to written posts on Facebook, Judge Jackson pointed out in his April 2012 ruling. But he put those cases in a separate category of speech, because they involved “actual statements.”

Chief Judge William B. Traxler Jr., writing for a three-judge panel of the Fourth Circuit, said no such distinction exists.

“On the most basic level, clicking on the ‘like’ button literally causes to be published the statement that the User ‘likes’ something, which is itself a substantive statement,” wrote Judge Traxler for the court, which ruled unanimously on the Facebook issue.

This seems like a small and logical judicial decision, but it has big implications for employment law and, hence, organizations of all kinds. 

I, for one, welcome our new digital overlords

Why the visual background of this blog?  I admit that I am not 100 percent sold on it, but I do like the black-and-white pictures because they are so different from current photos, mostly shared via social media, instantly available to the world on Instagram, Pinterest, and Snapchat.  Most of the images that are shared via social media are of humans, and most are initially captured through the eyes of humans.  

And yet, our concept of what it means to be human is changing, at least according to Jaron Lanier in You Are Not a Gadget.  We are subjecting ourselves to "lock-in," or at least being subjected to it, as the technology shapes us as much as -- or more than -- we shape it.  Just as computer-produced music is limited by the MIDI format, which was originally designed for keyboards and then became ubiquitous, technology can limit the way we see ourselves and, hence, what we do as individuals and as groups.  By worshiping technology, Lanier argues, we make ourselves into gadgets. 

I find myself agreeing with much of what Lanier says, and he, as a witness and participant to the early development of what we know as the computer, has a lot of street cred.  

However, I find one thought nagging at me.  Even if what Lanier says is true, what is the alternative?  Sure, I can try to resist some of the trends Lanier points out, but how much power do I really have?  I think the choice of whether to adopt technology is often like sitting at a football game when a row of people stands up to get a better view, requiring the rows behind them to stand up too or miss the game.  It's a choice, but it's not much of a choice.  Individuals, businesses, and countries who choose not to adopt technology will eventually be out-competed and overtaken.   

Lanier himself admits this conundrum.  I think the question he poses is more subtle.  Are there ways we can negotiate technology to have it still serve our ends while not being left behind?   

Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen of Google have a much more sunny view of technology, as expressed in The New Digital Age.  I agree with them that the extent to which information systems and robotics will change life is huge.  They would know -- their company is no doubt already working on many of the technologies they talk about.  And the benefits are and will be real.  Anyone like me who has a family member whose life or quality of life has been saved by medical technology is a believer. 

And yet, it feels to me like Schmidt and Cohen are a little too sunny about the future.  It is great that terrorists can be caught by digital technology, but that same technology can be used for nefarious purposes, as internet-utopia-skeptic Evgeny Morozov is constantly pointing out. It would be nice to have my hair cut by a robotic barber, but what happens to my local barber and his family?  As economic activity comes to be centered in the centralized servers of large companies, what happens to people?

It is as though Lanier and Cohen are two sides of the same coin.  They largely agree on the advances that will be made, but they take very different views of the effects and implications of these changes.

I found The New Digital Age, which made a good attempt at being broad-minded and balanced, more convincing than the authors' interview promoting it, found here.  It could have been the influence of the interviewer, Charlie Rose, but I found that the authors talked way too much about terrorism.  It's not that terrorism is not a potential threat; but I am much more worried about my private information being accessed without my consent or knowledge than I am about a terrorist attacking me or my family.  Terrorism could have a potentially big effect, but it is a very small risk; the loss of digital privacy and autonomy is something that is a virtual certainty.  The only question is how much it could affect or limit me.

While I respect the effort Schmidt and Cohen make to look at the big picture, my main objection is this: Social media does indeed have power to break down walls, but I'm not sure if it has as much power to build new structures -- bridges, roads, and buildings of all kinds, not just physical -- that are needed.  As we have seen in Egypt, governments may be toppled, but the underlying power, rivalries, and tensions will still be there.  These problems can only be solved by humans.  They cannot be solved by algorithms.  I don't think Schmidt and Cohen are really making that claim, but it is easy to get caught up in technological euphoria and gloss over some very basic, human problems. 

That's not to say technology is powerless to solve problems -- not in the least.  It is so much easier for me to live many parts of my life than it was even ten years ago.  But that is not the question. The question is how technology changes us, for good or bad, and what other problems it creates.  The design of technology must be a human endeavor, with humans in mind.  It should be created to fit people and not the other way around. 

The bed of Procrustes is a mythological story about an innkeeper who would make his guests fit the bed by cutting off their legs if they were too tall or stretching them if they were too short.  Often, this story is applied to technology that comes to dominate humans, who become slaves to it.  The movie WALL-E depicts the negative future of such a world. 

Do I want Google to direct my search terms, to "help" me as I'm searching?  Couldn't this process, while saving time, be limiting, as Lanier argues?  One of my heroes, the interculturalist Edward T. Hall, said that learning begins with the experience of being lost.  If Google never lets me get lost, how will that happen? I suppose Google can build a "getting lost" element into its algorithms, and maybe already has, but somehow that defeats the purpose.  I don't want to add "get lost" to my task list on my Google calendar.  

In the end, it is ironic that I am making these comments on a free, Google-supported blog.  Maybe I will share my blog post on my free Facebook or Twitter account.  My choices, and those of many others like me, are what makes Lanier's book an argument and not a rant.  He points out that much of what is happening is based not on the inherent evil of technology companies but on our own tendency to avoid paying for services, to get something for "free."  But, in the end, we pay, if not with money, then with information, autonomy, and the loss of local economic activity.  

In closing, if anyone at Google, Facebook, or the NSA is reading this, I just want to say that "I, for one, welcome our new digital overlords."