Note: This is a guest blog writ­ten by Alis­tair Cock­burn 2009.07.25.

How wide­band social media is chang­ing the world’s cog­ni­tive structure

Peo­ple work­ing together is like a large brain per­form­ing a com­pu­ta­tion, but in which each neu­ron has legs and tends to wan­der off at ran­dom moments. Hutchins coined the phrase dis­trib­uted cog­ni­tion for when peo­ple work together to achieve an out­come (see the book “Cog­ni­tion in the Wild”), but for my taste, “neu­rons with legs” paints a sharper picture.

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If you can imag­ine that peo­ple work­ing toward a com­mon out­come – whether a play, a busi­ness ini­tia­tive, a soft­ware release – are like neu­rons with legs, then it is clear why work­ing in a war room with project maps on the wall has always been the pre­ferred mode of intense collaboration.

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Work­ing in dif­fer­ent loca­tions is com­par­a­tively unat­trac­tive, even if it is the “way of the world.” Com­mu­ni­ca­tion wasn’t really free to start with, and the cost shoots up dra­mat­i­cally as soon as the neu­rons can’t see or hear each other, or notice when the oth­ers have wan­dered off.

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Soft­ware teams are get­ting prac­ticed at work­ing intensely across dis­tances. The best teams use phone, voice– or video–Skype or equiv­a­lent, voice con­fer­enc­ing, online chat, online doc­u­ment col­lab­o­ra­tive and code syn­chro­niza­tion tools to keep up with each other as much as they can … and of course, plane trips when they really want to com­muncate heavily.

(Why is it busi­ness peo­ple so often set up all the con­tract details by inter­net, but then fly to be in the same room when it comes time to close the deal?)

So far, pretty standard.

How­ever, those com­mu­ni­ca­tion mech­a­nisms are delib­er­ate, oper­at­ing with the directed inten­tion of trans­fer­ring infor­ma­tion from one wan­der­ing neu­ron to another. “Directed” is the key word.

Wide­band social media adds a twist. By “wide­band” social media, I mean broad­cast media such as Twit­ter, Face­book, and geo­graphic loca­tion reveal­ing apps.

With wide­band social media, the group of wan­der­ing neu­rons con­tribute to an emerg­ing pic­ture, which none of them could paint alone. The data that arrives is spon­ta­neous, unpre­dictable, and infor­ma­tive in sur­pris­ing ways.

“I’m going to lunch at the Mac.”

What infor­ma­tion could this pos­si­bly hold? Well, if sent on Twit­ter or group-​​linked geo­praphic loca­tors, it pro­duces a spon­ta­neous get-​​together of friends and not-​​yet-​​friends, which pro­duces a con­ver­sa­tion, a com­pany, a man­i­festo or a new friend­ship, all with long-​​term unex­pected effects.

We’re only see­ing the begin­ning of the story here.

Like any new tech­nol­ogy, there is a dark side as well as a light. You can fol­low, but you can also be fol­lowed. Police can take steps to increase safety, or to oppress. The new GIS (geo­graphic infor­ma­tion sys­tems) frankly scare me. I won­der how long before we for­get who’s watch­ing our move­ments and what they’re doing with it. How­ever, that scary sce­nario is not part of this par­tic­u­lar blog entry.

What is part of this entry is the ques­tion about what this means in a com­mer­cial con­text ( benef­i­cent, let’s pre­tend, just for now .

Wide­band social media extends a company’s ears.

• A per­son doesn’t like (or does like!) your prod­uct – you get to hear about it in a casual online com­plaint. You can move to take care of it imme­di­ately, long before it would hit a cus­tomer ser­vice rep.
• You get to see trends in the mar­ket­place early, through gos­sip, long before the retail­ers pub­lish the trend in their pub­lic reports – or even before it hits their cash registers.

And get­ting back to the start of the story, how does this impact com­mer­cial cognition?

I don’t have the answer to that yet, but I see an out­line. The out­line is real and cur­rent, just not yet tagged with words. Com­pet­i­tive com­pa­nies will work it out long before we writ­ers have words around it.

What I see, though, is a cor­po­rate idea with mil­lions of remote den­dritic con­nec­tions, remote cog­n­i­tors that live inside a pic­ture that changes as rapidly as white­wa­ter rapids. The peo­ple help paint, rec­og­nize, under­stand, and fur­ther change the pic­ture, all at the same time.

(End note: Teil­hard de Chardin coined the term “noos­phere” (no-​​o-​​sphere) in “The Phe­nom­e­non of Man” in the early-​​mid 20^th cen­tury to describe what he saw as the nat­ural evo­lu­tion from atoms to multi-​​cellular organ­isms (us) to a cog­ni­tive entity in which we would be only con­trib­u­tors. Sci­en­tific meet­ings, then the www were con­sid­ered to be early ver­sions of the noos­phere, but from what I’m see­ing, both of those pale in com­par­i­son to what’s about to hap­pen with broad­band social media as enter­pris­ing groups real­ize the power of so many den­dritic con­nec­tions wan­der­ing around act­ing with wide­band social media attachments.)

Alis­tair

Short URL: http://Alistair.Cockburn.us/neurons+with+legs

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