Myths and Misconceptions of Technology

Oh well, now here’s the rage going down on Andrew Keen from the anonymous blogheads from across the swamp of evil in the form of a narcissist hydra he set off to decapitate. I swear not to be single-sided in my selection, but that’s just what it is so far:

Here is a book review, here’s an opinion about professionalism and gatekeepers (by the way, I never was aware that people depend so much on movie reviews, which says a lot of the “democracy” created by mainstream media and the media literacy of its audience) and here is something about journalism. Markos Z?niga claims Keen has got it completely wrong with his research concerning the credentials of the creator of dailykos.com.

Update:

Now wait, here is one in favor of Keen though it is not exactly clear why, but let a sublime like-minded spirit convince you about the sorrow he feels for a loss of intellectual edge that comes with the Internet. And here is another book review from one of his hailed gatekeepers, very British indeed.

And finally, here is what David Weinberger and Clay Shirky say.

Andrew Keen, author of The Cult of the Amateur, has been repeatedly criticized for his fervent stance against the consequences of Web 2.0 as he perceives them. Much of the criticism turns against his apparently unbalanced arguments and inconsistent examples, which mistakes most of the apparent objectives of the book. As Keen explains himself the book is “unashamedly biased” and you have to take it from there. His admittedly subjective view is that of a flat Anglican parish in a loophole of time. There is no real cultural, social, economic or historic relevance there. He takes a snapshot of his personal status quo and defies any change. All this gets him enough media (mainstream and other) attention that he can easily shrug off any criticism.

Royalty not quality

Assuming these premises of good old marketing mechanisms one can find some valuable points in Keen’s musings. However, anybody who is not flat out to embrace Web 2.0 no matter what and is concerned about the downsides may regret that there is no solid argumentative basis in the book. More regrettably still, this attitude undermines one of the major issues concerning quality of published content. But then again, would Keen go more for the subtlety and balance he might not be as ubiquitous in the media as he currently is and we all know the squitty arse never lacks for shit…

I am peculiar about the things I like and I know I am peculiar in some other ways, too, but I might talk about that at another time. The former peculiarity has it that I keep things as long as I can and then run constantly into trouble replacing them appropriately. Hence I fear the day when my thirty-year old road bike (which is now the merger of three bikes) will finally quit its services. But this is also not what I want to talk about today.

Brand loyalty is not for the meek

What I want to talk about was the recent loss of my 25-year old sunglasses and the ordeal and redemption that followed. Okay, so here is what happened: On a turbulent trail ride I managed to hold on to a bucking horse by sheer luck rather than any riding skills and in the process the glasses came off which I was not aware of at the time because I had other things on my mind, of course. Home we go and the damage becomes apparent. A search attempt the other day in the thick underweed proved futile. When I turned to the Internet to look for a replacement I knew I was in trouble. Although these were branded icon glasses and there were umpteen similar glasses available it seemed that the specific combination of frame, lenses and temples was not. What to do? I thought, I might ask an expert and go to an optician in the nearest mall. I entered the shop hoping they could at least give me advice on what to do. Before seeing any staff my eyes fell on a shelf full of xy glasses and soon I found one I liked, even if it was not quite the one I had lost. Up came an apprentice and I thought I was done soon. So I told him I would like to buy what I had found, only that I wanted different temples. He turned around without a word and headed to some of the senior staff at the opposite end of the shop. After a while he came back. “There is no such thing!” Nothing else. It sounded like a verdict. So I walked away with low spirits and as I passed another optician I decided only faintheartedly to try my luck again. The same procedure there: I found the shelf but I didn’t have time to look around much before a young lady came up to ask me what I wanted. As she received the answer “sunglasses” she asked me what I needed them for, leisure or sports or whatever, I couldn’t believe what I heard. Obviously she had good training and was really making an effort to get me what I could really use. But as my mind was set on that particular model I just told her the story of my loss and that I wanted an exact replacement. Again, I could barely believe what happened: She asked me to sit down at a table in a kind of department with two chairs and a little later she came back with the complete xy catalog. Then she explained to me that temples a came only with model b, instead of model c, which combination was the one I’ve had. But no problem, she said, they could order both models and change the temples, just as easy as that!

To cut it short right here: I found my glasses again, canceled the order (no problem, of course!) and lived on happily ever thereafter as I need no longer theorize about quality of service, customer experience and loyalty and such stuff for weirdos only.

Oh boy, so much fuzz about the term and the underlying concepts that it is hard to get ground under the feet in the swell of arguments going back and forth.
Here is one view from Hal Varian, which is - small wonder - pro. Indeed he is right when he says that IT has allowed users access to data in a way that was not thought possible or affordable not so long ago. What he doesn’t say is that mom’s and pop’s data are just crumbs from the Google data monopoly pie.

Here’s another opinion that runs more in the vein of Andrew Keen, famed for The Cult of the Amateur. Although slightly more balanced the interest is clear in this case, too.

Any preliminary conclusion is that we have entered the age of random proliferation of data and what we need more than ever are sharp senses for the cui bono and sound judgement. So what’s new?

In a recent post Chris Anderson, editor of Wired magazine and author of The Long Tail, discusses amateurism vs. professionalism. He maintains that amateurs are more passionate about what they do than professionals. According to Anderson they are merely driven by intrinsic motivation, else they stop doing what they just do. His key argument runs like that:

Amateurs self-select for the job. Professionals are selected. For most jobs, volunteers beat draftees.

I think this a rather short-sighted view. Indeed, most amateurs volunteer for what they do in the first place but they don’t do it always for mere enthusiasm. Most of the time they form part of a group of like-minded people so there is a kind of “social factor” involved. But these social incentives are not for granted and they aren’t delivered on a regular basis. Yet, when the enthusiasm is gone and the social rewards are missing many may still hang on, not because a nasty boss tells them to do so but because of the awareness of imminent “social punishment”.
On the other hand, dedicated professionals may suffer periods of fatigue but through the continuity of rewards and the consciousness of being selected for what they do over others with similar skills and ambitions they still manage to produce value.
Oh, and I’m not belittling the ones over the others, I just think not everything that is created as free self-exploit can be rated higher than paid exploit by others.

I’m still trying to figure out how the financial crisis of late relates to the brave new world of the ever so social web. Have the financial markets gone Web 2.0 before everybody else did including the geekiest of tech hacks? Or quite the contrary? What went wrong? Did anything go wrong at all?
One thing seems for certain: when your house or your pension is on stake you don’t give a shit about the gibberish of some lofty ideamongers. But before jumping to some more elusive conclusions I’ll put up some links to voices of people whose business is the economy in the first place in the hope that they have a clue from where I might continue. First is Freakonomics co-author Steven Levitt who himself graciously passed the search for authoritative answers on.

More to follow soon.

In her landmark book Plans and Situated Actions, Lucy Suchman remarks on an article by Thomas Gladwin, an anthropologist, contrasting the different approaches of navigating small boats around tiny islands in the Pacific Ocean between a Trukese (Oceanic) and a European sailor.

Before setting sail, the European begins with a plan ? a course - that can be written in terms of directions, degrees of longitude and latitude, estimated time of arrival at separate points on the journey. Once the plan is conceived and completed, the sailor has only to carry out each step consecutively, one after another, to be assured of arriving on time at the planned destination. The sailor uses all available tools, such as a compass, a sextant, a map, etc., and his main objective is sticking to the plan and remaining ?on course?. If unexpected events occur, he must first alter the plan to respond accordingly.

In contrast, the native Trukese sailor starts his voyage by imaging the position of his destination relative to the position of the other islands. As he sails along, he constantly adjusts his direction according to his awareness of the position thus far. His decisions are improvized continually by checking relative positions of landmarks, sun, wind direction, etc. He navigates with reference to where he started, where he is going, and the space between his destination and the point where he is at the moment. His effort is directed to doing whatever is necessary to reach the objective. If asked, he can point to his objective at any moment but he cannot describe his course.

Although this contrast in behavior is commonly viewed as an example of Cartesian dichotomy, left/right hemisphere issue or the Venus/Mars opposition, Suchman?s research led her conclude that the European culture prefers plans more than anything else, while they are indeed only a weak resource for human activity. She regards human behavior in general being determined ad hoc by the context of specific circumstances, no matter how much planning is applied. In other words, people are driven in their activities basically by accomplishing a certain goal which is paramount to whatever structure you build around it before or after. It does not mean that there is no instrumental or systematic action but it means there is no linear progression from outset to target.

Like the Trukese modern business users struggle mostly with reaching their goals amidst constantly changing requirements and shifting environmental conditions. And if we want to stop widening the widely perceived gap between business and IT, IT has to come to understand that their plans (or models, or flowcharts, etc.) and tools would be of little help to the Trukese sailor holding out his nose in a stiff breeze.

lucy suchman

What exactly is Web 2.0? Is it the interactive Internet with user-generated content? Is it a never-ending source of priceless personal data promising so immense profits that it has become the battleground of the likes of Google, Microsoft and Rupert Murdoch? Is it the final undermining and democratization of the information monopolies? Is it the next giant bubble to burst?

We all know that Web 2.0 was just a random tag and lacks a proper definition and if it had a valid one any marketing hack would still promise you to deliver just the Web 2.0 you want even if it were far off the shot. And as Peter Fingar has pointed out there is a lot of similar and even more fatuous tagging going on. And while it is obvious that blogs and Wikis are fancy tools they do indeed create an information overload and have therefore little value for business.

But witty as Fingar’s remarks are, the offered solutions seem to be like jumping a bandwagon that has gained substantial momentum. What people really need is not ever more refined processes but more control over how they organize their work. They need no control from IT, they just need advice.

So Web 2.0 is surely not a remedy to all problems businesses face in organizing collaborative work and it is not the continuation of KM with proper tools. It is, however, a fascinating experiment and if someone can make money out of it, why not. But please leave the tagging to those specialized platforms.

peter fingar

These are two much-used and often abused terms in IT. Moreover, they are frequently used as synomymous and randomly interchanged which helps little to come to grips with all the smart marketing gibberish that accompanies most IT-related matters. But as Carl Mitcham points out in Thinking through Technology efficiency in technological terms relates to a ratio of input/output, whereas effectiveness has to do with the desired outcome. This means that efficiency is strictly measurable and can be best applied to assembly-line and similar straightforward operations. Effectiveness, on the other hand, can also be measured by given parameters but as we deal with desirable results it is highly probable that we choose desired and known parameters which tell little to nothing about the unknowns of a certain action nor its immediate or long-term undesired effects. Therefore any claim of the effectiveness of IT should be taken with a grain of salt.

carl mitcham