Monday Feb 25, 2008
In
the original Tower
of Babel story, all the humans on earth spoke a single language
and lived in a single place. They decided to build a structure that
would reach into the heavens and implicitly show that humans were as
powerful as God. Well, God had other plans. He invented a multitude
of languages and scattered the people across the world. The Tower of
Babel project was abandoned.
In the 21st century remake of
this story, humans accidentally invented social network sites.
Millions of people, primarily college-aged adults, join the
communities. They start engaging in the communities in an attempt to
build as large a “Friends” list as possible. Well, it's hard to
interact with millions of people, so members create groups within
these larger communities. (Facebook
now hosts thousands of groups
appealing to every interest conceivable, from Burritos
in Oxford to Friends
of the Sun Microsystems Foundation.) Sometimes they create
separate communities altogether, such as LinkedIn
(for professional networking). In fact, many people lose confidence
in these new "Towers of Babel" and try to leave them, only
to discover that leaving
isn't as easy as joining.
Yet social networking as a
technology is a powerful extension of the quintessential human
strategy of banding together for a common interest. Think of the
cavemen, who had to work as a team to take down the larger and more
powerful wooly mammoths. How can organizations—be they corporate or
academic—use this technology without losing the trust of their
members? As Facebook and MySpace attempt to become a platform upon
which others build their communities, what assurances do we need that
our members won't be exploited beyond their willingness to be
exploited? Should we instead build our own communities on stand-alone
technology platforms where we can assure our members are protected?
Answering these questions is one of the key objects of our
annual Worldwide Education & Research Conference this week in San
Francisco . We've got an incredible array
of speakers on the power and limits of communities. We're
streaming the main
presentations over the Web if you want to watch in real time (the
link will be live on February 27), and we'll make them available
asynchronously for later playback as well.
The first Tower of
Babel didn't work out so well because of divine intervention. Perhaps
these modern-day Towers can be effectively harnessed for productive
use, but not without changing the fundamental compact that exists
between a community and its members. Because unlike the real world,
it's much easier to scatter on the Web if the Tower starts to
crumble.
By the way, here's the original story from the Book
of Genesis:
And the whole earth was of one language, and of
one speech. And it came to pass, as they journeyed from the east,
that they found a plain in the land of Shinar; and they dwelt there.
And they said one to another, Come, let us make brick, and burn them
thoroughly. And they had brick for stone, and slime had they for
mortar. And they said, Come, let us build us a city and a tower,
whose top may reach unto heaven; and let us make us a name, lest we
be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth. And the Lord
came down to see the city and the tower, which the children builded.
And the Lord said, "If as one people speaking the same language
they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan to do will be
impossible for them." Come, let us go down, and there confound
their language, that they may not understand one another's
speech. So the Lord scattered them abroad from thence upon the face
of all the earth: and they left off to build the city. Therefore is
the name of it called Babel; because the Lord did there
confound the language of all the earth: and from thence did the Lord
scatter them abroad upon the face of all the earth.
(Image: The Tower of Babel by Pieter Brueghel the Elder (1563), courtesy of Wikipedia.)
Wednesday Sep 12, 2007
I'm simultaneously excited and
perplexed by the social phenomena of Web 2.0. I'm excited because
through these new technologies, people have a way to stay connected
throughout their lifetimes in a way they've never been able to
before. I graduated from college in the early 1980s -- before cell
phones, email or the public Internet. Since that time, I've had 10 different physical home addresses and phone numbers. The same
holds true for most of my friends. I know it's cliché, but
one way I've stayed connected with those friends over the years is
through the annual Christmas card. (We publish a brief poem with a
picture every year and send it to our friends.) Inevitably, people
move and their change of address cards never arrive or the US Postal
Service forwarding orders expire, so the cards are “returned to
sender” and we lose touch.
In contrast, people graduating from
college today can have the same phone number, email address and Web
site their entire life. I'm excited by the benefits that we as a
species will accrue as that ability to stay connected and transfer
life experience will improve our lives much the same that the elders
helped our ancestors survive in prehistoric times. (Does anyone know
if there's been any research on how these technologies are affecting
people and their social connectedness?)
The social networking phenomenon also
perplexes me because I didn't grow up with some of these
technologies, so I'm trying to figure out what some of these social
networks are and which I should belong to. I joined Facebook,
and I'm encouraging other executives at Sun to do so as well because
it seems that Facebook is the best way to connect the college you
attended with Sun (which is very important to Sun). To my dismay,
very few of my “Class of '83” classmates have joined Facebook,
so it may not be the best way to connect to my friends whose
connections I've lost over the years of Christmas card exchanges.
Hopefully that will be rectified with time as Facebook use expands to
the “older” generations.
But what about MySpace?
or LinkedIn? Should I belong
to all of them? There's even some controversy
out there about which network has which demographics or appeals to
which social class. At what point does all this social networking
reach a point of diminishing returns? I'm also trying to figure out
the utility of Digg, del.ic.ous,
and StumbleUpon (which is
one way I'm discovering some of the creative things people are
inventing).
Human beings are social animals. We
like to get together with other human beings to do things.
Evolutionarily speaking, it's how humans have survived. We got
together and learned what foods to eat (or not). We banded together
to hunt down prey much bigger and stronger than us. We shared ideas
about tools to make life easier.
I think tech companies and the press
often forget this fact. We have a tendency to overstate the impact
of technology on human beings. We miss some things altogether:
YouTube was a social phenomena as much as it was about technology.
It was started by a couple of guys who wanted to share home movies
with their extended families. They certainly didn't set out to
create a revolution in the entertainment industry, but that's what
they did by creating a way for people to share similar videos in a
community. We overstate others, such as “distance education.” In
many ways, “distance education” or “elearning” has been
around since at least the early days of television (especially
outside the US). This technology didn't put universities out of
business, as many predicted. Just the opposite has happened. It's
giving universities new revenue streams and enabling students from
all over the world to connect with each other around academic
disciplines.
Remember Web 1.0 or the Internet
bubble? Many people actually thought that the Internet was going to
put brick-and-mortar stores out of business. Someone thought that
receiving dog food by mail was going to be more successful than
conventional pet stores. They were wrong. Going to the pet store is
not just getting pet supplies. It's about connecting with other
humans who share similar interests. It's about learning what works
or doesn't for your pet. It's about connecting with other people who
share your love of dogs, cats, rats -- or even iguanas, for that
matter. A sock puppet dog can't compete with that.
One of my favorite books on this
subject is Guns,
Germs & Steel: The Fates of Human Societies by
Jared Diamond. If you want an approachable and thought-provoking
history of the world in 300 pages, get this book. I think he does
one of the best jobs I have ever seen of describing the benefits of
these social capabilities in making humans survive and thrive. For
example, compared to most animals, we have one of the longest
development periods before being able to take care of ourselves (16
to 20 years, or longer for some people I know.) One way we've
survived, given this developmental time span, is that elders have
lived long enough to pass on important learning to the youth. (What
foods to eat. Where or how to hunt, etc.)
So we're social animals, and now the
Web is expanding our ways to stay connected with people we care about
as well as to connect with new people who share similar interests.
It's going to transform us in ways we are only beginning to imagine.
(Photo courtesy of Wikipedia.)
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