It had a phone number on it. (I’ve blurred out some digits to protect the innocent.)

The conversation that went along with it went something like this:

“Mommy, can we call my friend?”

Sure, dear… what is his name?

“I forgot.”

You don’t remember his name?

“No. Can you call him, and ask him his name?”

But I don’t know who to ask for.

“Just get him on the phone, and then let me talk with him.”

Maybe my boy is destined for a career in upper management?

Rolling Over

Yesterday was eventful, as I also happened to run into a couple of friends, recently purged with the sale of the digital marketing agency where they both worked. They’re great guys, and doors are already opening for them — but I’m more intrigued by what happened as the old doors were being slammed on their fingers.

The owner sold the agency on a Friday, and never told anyone. When people showed up for work on Monday morning, they thought there had been a break-in. Their computers were gone, as were their files and project materials. They went as far as calling the police and starting a burglary report before they were told they were no longer needed.

One hell of a way to find out. Essentially, the new owner was interested in the portfolio and the clientèle – the staff supporting those projects and clients was expendable.

One of my friends told me that as bad as that was, the thing he missed the most was his Rolodex.

They took his Rolodex.

He wasn’t so torn up about losing the cards, being already connected with all of those people through Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. No, it was the actual Rolodex. It was practically an antique, a thing of beauty (and surely more presentable than the one in this picture.) An anachronism, which served as a personal reminder that communications and marketing have roots that involve handwriting and sharing the same air, or the same lousy service at a restaurant. That same Rolodex will take one final turn as an object lesson in abject obliviousness.

Forests and Trees

There’s some delicious irony at play here. A digital marketing agency will claim to be cutting edge, and serve those customers they purchased… yet their thinking is so “Old School” they believe the magic is in the Rolodex. (Suggestion: don’t sign away your LinkedIn or Facebook accounts…)

You can steal a forest’s worth of paper cards, but that won’t earn you a dollar if you don’t know the names of the trees. Those numbers in the Rolodex are about as useful as the digits on my son’s napkin. The person on the other end is just as much a stranger as someone you hit with a dart thrown blindly at the phone book.

(I don’t know… maybe they took the phone books too. I didn’t ask.)

©2010 Occam's RazR. All Rights Reserved.

Don’t worry, I won’t gross you out. There was no evidence of any major dental issues. I did have a little bit more plaque than normal, which I attribute to a change in toothpaste to a gel that doesn’t leave me feeling fresh. Also, there were a couple of spots where I had some abrasion, but nothing too serious. No additional pits or pains, and I’ll be back in six months for some annual x-rays.

Still, that was probably more detail than you wanted.

I talked with Lisa, my long-time hygienist. We were joking about the fact that the Alice In Chains song coming across the Muzak was out before some of the staff could even write their names – and that the songs now on Oldies formats are better than the crap they call music these days…

…yeah, I’m old. So what.

Conversation Interruptus

It’s not easy to have a conversation at the dentist. Bill Cosby made that point years ago, long before there was even Alice In Chains.

After all, there is poking and prodding and big metal hooks in your mouth. It’s impossible to have any real meaningful conversation. Lisa and I tried, however.

What we ended up with was a compromise. She was careful about steering her sentences into declaratives, and was deliberately avoiding the body language and angling of inflection that you’d get in a real conversation. In a conversation, there are cues when it’s time for someone else to speak, and often we elicit them without a conscious intent.

While lying on my back, I found myself choosing my sentence very carefully. Note: it was a sentence. My responses to her statements were short and direct. I found myself exercising the same mental muscle that writes a Tweet. And it’s a similar feeling one gets when one is composing a polite interruption, or an interjection.

Join the Compromise

Maybe I am just on a rant lately, but the word “conversation” has been abused to the point of losing its meaning. Particularly when people are told to “Join the Conversation!”

Do we want people to communicate? Yes, as freely as they like.

Do we want people to participate? I would say yes, to the degree they want to.

But Conversation? Really?

There are many people I don’t want to have conversations with. They are rude, or they want to sell me something. Maybe they are just boring to me. Likewise, there are quite a few people who don’t want to listen to my philosophical blather, either.

From a corporate standpoint, there are also a lot of people who want to vent, and they don’t want you jumping in when they are clearly blowing off steam.

Listening is a very important thing.

The ability to publish to a wide, online audience is world-changing. And even the people who claim to know how world-changing it is are lying to you.

The ability to remain ambiently connected to so many people at once is staggering, and it will have profound psychological and sociological implications we’re not even thinking about yet.

What is it? I don’t know. It’s really important, but it’s not a Conversation. It’s still too sterile, too measured, too impersonal. And it won’t be a conversation as long as we have all these tools sticking out of our mouths.

©2010 Occam's RazR. All Rights Reserved.

• It has feathers
• It is yellow
• It has a beak
• It has webbed feet
• It’s cute
• It’s not fully grown
• It cannot yet fly

What would you say it is? Yeah, I probably would have said “Duck” too, don’t feel bad.

The problem is that once we start assimilating descriptions and characteristics within our minds, we jump to unwarranted conclusions. Often, we end up assuming other attributes that aren’t relevant, and fail to recognize when the analogy isn’t working for us anymore.

I have the same thoughts, for similar reasons, when I hear people trumpeting the importance of “the Conversation.” I stew on those thoughts even longer when the phrase “the Conversation” is preceded by the word “Join.”

Did we make a mistake a long time ago by assuming “Conversation” where it doesn’t exist?

Filling the Echo Chamber

There are many ways to probe an analogy for its worthiness. Personally, I enjoy parody.

Last week, I embarked on a little project, just to see what would happen. “#Solochat” was born.

There are many regularly scheduled chats on Twitter. Each week at a designated time, people interested in ___________ will jump on Twitter together, and talk with each other using the #__________ identifier. That way, they can pay attention to the stream of #___________ mentions, and ignore the rest. Conversely, if you’re following people who are talking about #___________ for an hour at a time, you need technological assistance to shut down the noise that #___________ generates.

Mind you, I am not belittling the value of the discussions, and they can be a great way for people to connect. But are they a “conversation?” Well, they look like a duck, and they seem rather ducky, but in the end it might just be one guy dancing with himself.

On first glance, it sure seems like I was talking to a bunch of other people. Really, I was just talking to myself, with a bunch of other people chiming in around me, like a Greek Chorus that sings to an unaware protagonist. (Irony!)

If it’s not a Duck, what IS it?

In the real-life Twitter chats, you’ll see the same behavior, just not quite drilled down to an absurd singularity. You instead have several threads of separate interactions woven into one cloth. And in that respect, it’s not really a conversation. We’ve pretended up until now that it is, but it’s not. It’s not a conversation, it’s not cocktail-party blather, it’s not formal writing… it’s something else. And as long as we get hung up on the conventions of Conversation, we’ll keep making inaccurate assumptions about etiquette and effectiveness and impact and measurement.

I have participated in several of these chats in the past, and moderated one (#crisisdata.) I’m even considering starting up a regular online ____________ about online crisis communications and management.

Notice that I left that word blank, because I don’t rightly know exactly what it is. Whatever it is, it’s hard work, and my experience tells me that having 200 people instead of 50 is not four times better. After a certain point, the non-conversation non-chat non-interview shoutfest echoes with so many retweets that you’re really just looking for your next opportunity to chime in — and you don’t know if it was a success until you read the transcript later. How is that a “conversation”?

If I had the chance I’d ask the world to dance…
If I had the chance I’d ask the world to dance…
If I had the chance I’d ask the world to dance…

…but I was dancing with myself. (Uh oh, uh oh.)

©2010 Occam's RazR. All Rights Reserved.

What Google did was promote the idea that an unseen formula could improve your search results. Human-inspired and seeded indexes could not scale to cover the exponentially-growing feed of data – and we needed a Secret Sauce to sort it all out.

Unlike Coca-Cola, that recipe has been in a state of constant evolution. As soon as the formula for “winning” search gets gamed, it’s time to level the playing (paying?) field again, to bring users the most relevant and actionable results. We were comfortable with the Secret Sauce, and didn’t really notice a change in the flavor of the results even as the ingredients were being tweaked.

A New Menu

I’ve long contended that were are on the cusp of a new Age of Information.

The era of the simple algorithm is on the way out, as we turn to social networks to bring us relevant answers from people we trust.

As I worked on the slide outlining my theory, my wife gave me two concrete examples of questions she put to her friends instead of Google:

• “Where can I get a cute haircut and style?”
• “How can you get the smell of vomit out of the back of the car?”

Relevance used to be a universal. One Algorithm to Rule them All.

Now it’s individual. My results are going to be necessarily different from yours.

The Race Is On

Much has been made of the jockeying among Google, Facebook and Microsoft to find the sweet spot. Facebook is owning social, and is rapidly becoming a target for search optimizations. Google has tried and sputtered in efforts to compete in the social arena, because it sees that door as one that preempts the desire to go to a separate search page (like my wife did, at least twice.)

Google may be tipping its hand toward its development of the Killer Relevance Feature. In September 2010, Google will roll out a feature that allows you to create a Priority Inbox. It’s an automated feature that programs itself based on your habits.

Matthew Glotzbach, director of product management in Google’s Enterprise unit, sees Priority Inbox as a sort of inverted spam filter which, instead of blocking and setting aside unsolicited messages, prioritizes items in the inbox so that users can attend more quickly to the most important e-mails.

“If you’re in meetings and you come back to your e-mail and you have five minutes between appointments and you have 50 e-mails, which five messages do you spend your time on in that window of time?” Glotzbach said. Priority Inbox aims to automate that and simplify that decision, he said.

The more you use it, the more you are telling Google who you respond to, who you don’t, and what sorts of topics are likely to demand your immediate attention.

But what the heck does that have to do with creating a social network?

Everything. And nothing.

The key to delivering pertinent results to you is to know enough about what you’ve clicked on quickly and what you’ve deleted without looking. Knowing what you respond to, and what you let linger in the inbox. Knowing what you’ve opted into, and that conversations you initiated are likely more important to you that ones that came to you cold.

That’s something that Google can do that Facebook can’t. Facebook is tracking which people you are Liking and Clicking and Commenting, and is silently ratcheting up what it’s doing to improve “background relevance.” Yet it’s all within Facebook’s domain. Google is quietly letting its users opt-in to providing the same sort of information, but in the web as a whole. Google’s best chance at competing with Facebook for “social” is to turn the rest of the internet into its Social Hub. Compete, by not competing.

Putting the ME in GoogleMe

Whatever GoogleMe ends up resembling, it will be informed with a variety of data from the rest of the GoogleVerse, designed to make the experience less noisy than even Facebook. It will “play” with people who aren’t in that direct mutual opt-in relationship that makes Facebook work.

Think of this “Priority Inbox” as a test run of the Secret Sauce for GoogleMe. A way for Google to figure out how to tweak that algorithm, so that when the true Facebook competitor launches, it will have a better experience lined up out of the gate. The failures of Buzz and Wave were failures of network. You needed your friends there for it to mean anything — and your friends are already in your email.

©2010 Occam's RazR. All Rights Reserved.

Woman quits job via whiteboard. Allegedly.

(If you send me a url with a picture of your comment on a whiteboard, I’ll format the comment for you…)

©2010 Occam's RazR. All Rights Reserved.

Just a year ago, the Washington Post shelved an idea publisher Katharine Weymouth had floated – whereby you could essentially buy your way into a party and get access to key friends of hers in the Obama Administration, and Congress, and maybe even some of the editorial staff. All for the low, low price of $25,000 to $250,000.

If this recent email solicitation from the Birmingham Business Journal seems like three-or-four orders of magnitude less dangerous, it’s because – by definition – it is exactly three or four orders of magnitude removed!

You can click to enlarge the image, but here’s the transcript:

Biz Mix

• Mix
• Mingle
• Make business contact

The Wine Loft and the Birmingham Business Journal presents [sic] Biz Mix, an “easy-to-meet-people” networking opportunity.

Meet the publisher. Meet the editor. Meet new business prospects… meet everyone you need to know. Be sure to bring your business cards!

Date: Tuesday, August 24
Time: 5:30 p.m. – 7:30 p.m.
Cost: $25 (includes light hors d’oeuvres & 2 drinks)

Now, I can understand wanting to increase visibility and profile through hosting a meet-and-greet. That happens all the time.

I can also understand why a player in a shrinking and cash-strapped industry would want to find outside sponsorship for such an event.

I can even see where asking $25 to cover the cost of the finger foods and the drinks might make sense.

But to throw in access to the publisher and editor?

I am reminded of the classic quote, often attributed to either Winston Churchill or George Bernard Shaw, that “we’ve already established what you are; we’re merely haggling for price.”

(I wouldn’t worry about any ethical breaches just yet. The ad asks you to CLICK HERE to register, but there was no embedded hyperlink…)

©2010 Occam's RazR. All Rights Reserved.

“Social Media is a waste of time. The audience is too small.”

Maybe so. How many people are you talking with?

No, I didn’t ask how many actually talked back with you, how many people were you talking with?

You see, two people having a conversation in a closed room is two people. Two people having a conversation on stage at a conference means there are even more who are witnessing, and are influenced by what they see and hear. The first doesn’t scale – the second might, if you have the right people in the room.

For some reason though, the Powers That Be want to deride the metrics of new media as though they were fruity, and fake. Wax Apples. Yet they ignore the inherent falsehoods and assumptions that lie underneath the surface of their beloved ad equivalents.

Numbers Matter; So Do Units

In a television market with 1-million potential viewers, there’s no way to know exactly how many are consuming your message. There’s polling and surveys and boxes that give you a reasonable estimate of how many sets are on, and how many are properly tuned. But that’s hardly the same as knowing who’s paying attention.

It’s useful to compare forms of mass media against one another, because you’re looking at the same variables and vague assumptions down the chain. Advertise on a radio station in a town of 100,000 – and all things being equal you’ll probably get a tenth the audience of a transmitter in a town of 1-million. It’s that “all things being equal” that trips us up. When there were no other measurements, you’d just follow the assumption that everything scales.

So what about that person who is “only” Tweeting to 600 people, or only has 1,000 fans on Facebook? Let’s break down those numbers a little further.

Peeling the Plastic Orange

Start with that 1,000,000 figure. It sounds impressive, to be sure. A radio station these days can win a time slot with a 4.0 rating – meaning four percent of the potential audience is tuned in. Assuming that’s the case, we’ve got 40,000 people, which is nothing to sneeze at.

But, of those 40,000 how many are actively engaged with what they’re listening to at that moment? How many tuned away when content gave way to commercial interest? How many made a phone call or found something else to do? Most of them, actually.

Those ads are still, to this day an unwelcome interruption. Use fear and humor and shock and parody to make the message as entertaining as you can, and it’s still an interruption. (The only people who have figured out how to beat the system are making infomercials for television, and some are deliberately made god-awful bad to keep you from turning away…)

So now, instead of getting the attention of a city of one million, you’ve got the 40,000 who might have packed the local stadium. Only, you didn’t get all of them in the stadium, you yelled at them as they drove through your parking lot.

Now, of the people you yelled at in the parking lot, how many will actually take the step to come inside? Yes, I know that it takes several exposures to a message for it to really sink in, but let’s compare fruit to fruit. How many actually come inside? 4,000 of them? A tenth?

Conversion Aversion

Alright, now here’s the final piece. You got them inside, but how many of them were ready to act on your message? You got people salivating over the prospect of buying gold jewelry at 50 cents on the dollar, but you caught them in a week where they didn’t have the disposable cash. Somehow, the overall timing wasn’t right.

When you add up all the factors that blunt the impact, then you really weren’t talking with very many people at all. You were talking at them, but not with them.

Meanwhile, in the auditorium where you’re only counting the people who wanted to be there, you still have people who might not be able to act on your message. But they know where they can come back, and they know they’ll be recognized when they do. They weren’t talked with directly, but they know that the answers they overheard could easily apply to them; they know you might as well have been talking with them, because you knew they were listening in.

Using new media, you start with a smaller, more intimate room – but it’s often populated with the people you ended up getting through traditional means at a far greater cost in terms of money and customer interruption and irritation.

Fruit Salad

I have no idea what numbers you’ll need to compute the relative worth for your own purposes. Plug them in, the principle is the same. The dirty truth is you’ve been comparing the potential of one with the practical of the other – and that’s some expensive potential, too.

I’m not advocating the overthrow of traditional advertising and marketing. Just a rethinking of the standards that have crippled certain techniques by saddling them with irrelevant measures.

“Social Media is a waste of time. The audience is too small.”

Oh really? How many people do you have on your Media Relations staff? How many relationships do they manage? You’re talking to a very small and select number of people, but they are influencers.

Then add in these final thoughts:

• Technology has allowed some desirable demographics to slip completely outside any contact with traditional media channels. They get their news online, maybe from NPR, and they don’t watch television.
• There’s a growing group of Millennials who do watch TV, but they stream it commercial-free through Hulu or Netflix. They plug their iPod into the car stereo, and don’t listen to commercial radio. They see advertising as an anachronism to be avoided – a time-stealing product of a different time.

You’re going to need a way to cover these gaps. Fruit Salad to the rescue.

©2010 Occam's RazR. All Rights Reserved.

Scarcity breeds process.

The Glue

In my case, I developed a way of looking at the process of editing a story. You have several minutes of interviews, at least as many minutes of raw video, plus those pesky little things like statistics and facts that sometimes require other graphical treatment. How do you prioritize and get the good stuff into the piece?

I knew a reporter who had a standard operating procedure that was brutally efficient. He’d make several calls early on in the fact-gathering stage, and he’d know pretty much what his subjects would say once the camera went on. Every reporter does this, but this particular one would go ahead and write the story, leaving blanks where sound bites A, B, and C would go.

That process isn’t very organic, and it wouldn’t work for me at all. There were occasions when the reporter would start the interview, get the sound bite he needed, and conclude the interview. There was no room for follow up.

I had a process, but I couldn’t really explain it until I thought about candy.

The Retsyn Paradigm

…is not a name for a Robert Ludlum thriller.

It’s a way of thinking about one of the better marketing coups of my generation.

Remember those Certs commercials that promised how you would be kiss-ably fresh, if only you had that Glistening Drop of Retsyn?

Ever wonder why you never saw Retsyn-based breath fresheners and mouthwashes on the shelves at the drug store?

It has nothing to do with lost opportunity, and everything to do with the fact that Retsyn is not a flavoring, but is rather a vegetable oil-based coagulant.

Retsyn is the glue that holds the particles of candy together. It also has an exotic-sounding name, which made it a perfect selling point.

My goal, in writing a news story (and now in writing a blog) is to be the glue that holds the candy together.

Packing It In

Unlike candy, you can’t just grind and pour. A story, a narrative, requires a sensitivity to order, placement and ambiance.

First, you have to go through all your potential elements and strike the ones that are unnecessary. It could be a sound bite, a quote, a laugh, a smirk, a gesture, a piece of natural sound, or even a relevant observation. Identify the things that absolutely must be in the story.

Then cut the ones that you fell in love with, but really don’t belong. Tough love, tough luck.

Then start trying to lay them along the timeline of logic. Some sound bites clearly belong before others, either because of the presence of facts or assumptions that must be established first for the others to make sense. Shake everything out, and see what natural order is required for that element to make sense in context.

Be the Glue

Once everything that must be there is there, and once it’s in the right order, become the Retsyn that holds it together. Be the Glue. Look for the natural transitions between the essential elements – you might get away with butting them together, or you might have to spend a sentence or two bridging that gap.

If it takes too long to bridge the gap, then you’ve obviously fallen in love with something that doesn’t belong in the story. Cut it as well.

Once you’ve finished assembling the pieces and tying them together, go back through and look at the transitions you used. If there is a theme emerging within them, then see if you can rework the other transitions to fit the same theme. It might be natural progression, wordplay, or analogy. Work it, and make it look like you meant it to be that way the whole time.

A Sweet Process

I used the above for writing for television, but it also applies to just about every other form of presentation you can imagine. Weed out the unnecessary, and be the glue that binds those pieces. Be as spartan as you can, without showing off rough edges – and find a theme that makes your flavor uniform throughout.

Most importantly, be the glue. If you act like you are the candy instead of your content, then you’re doing it wrong.

©2010 Occam's RazR. All Rights Reserved.

• There’s nothing special about this technology, it’s just another way to communicate.
• It’s a technology that frees people to express themselves, storing their input sequentially.
• Innovators are jumping on a bandwagon, which will really be just a fad.
• There’s a limited base of research about its real effectiveness.
• Much of the evidence is anecdotal.
• It doesn’t result in as much participation as was promised.
• What if “everyone has to have one?”
• Will everyone will use it?

Yeah, I know. We’ve heard this all before. So why are so many educators slow to embrace interactive whiteboards?

Bright Shiny Objects

The above “observations and objections” were taken from a scholarly research paper about the adoption of high-tech whiteboards in classrooms. We’re talking about the really expensive ones that interact with computers (and just like the one I nearly destroyed through carelessness.) Some of my bullet points above are paraphrases from the article, some are verbatim.

Granted, there are some parallels in the technology to what we see in social media. There’s the possibility of mashing-up data from another source. There’s the sequential storage of information. There’s the ability to share over a wider space and time, and even ways to search through past interactive presentations.

Most importantly, there is a healthy skepticism before the mainstream buys in to the latest bright shiny object. Knowing the life cycle of such objections makes the concerns and cold feet more of a process, and less personal. (It’s the idea of change that’s being questioned – not your change, and certainly not you.)

The Steps of The Skeptic

With minor tweaks in the language, you will see the same general objections arise. Let’s take the bullets above and generalize them:

Photo: Dayna Smith/Washington Post

• It’s not new.
• It doesn’t do anything we can’t do already.
• It’s just a fad.
• The jury is out.
• The data is limited.
• It won’t live up to the promise.
• It creates expectations.
• The expense will be wasted when it’s not embraced.

Of the eight archetypes above, two question the revolutionary nature of the technology; two refer to future projections; two question past performance; and two fear for the effects on employees.

• It doesn’t do.
• It won’t do.
• It hasn’t done.
• We won’t do.

Now, if you can answer those four thematic objections in a convincing manner, you’ve knocked the support out from under the fear. One is past, one is present, one is future – but the trickiest one is the fourth, because it relates to organizational culture. The inclusive “we” makes it personal, and gives the speaker (the person resistant to change) a vested interest in not budging, lest he make an admission of being on the wrong end of the curve.

You need to be very careful with those who express feelings that have been projected onto others; they might just be masking their own uncertainty in a way that hedges their bets. However, those who stomp instead of tiptoe through the minefield of insecurities will find themselves not erasing objections — but erasing themselves.

©2010 Occam's RazR. All Rights Reserved.

Let’s face it. Catapults and Trebuchets are just plain cool.

There’s something visceral about launching large items great distances. That’s the easy part, though. The hard part is hitting your targets.

To better facilitate targeting, siege engines needed a way to hit the things that were “in between” the settings afforded by the ratchets and gears. Setting “A” would launch 200 yards, and the next notch at “B” will go 260. Sure, you can play with both elevation and power to find your range, but true fluid targeting couldn’t happen until there were better designs. The right range required the tools and a new kind of calculus.

It wasn’t easy, either… because greater precision was often a result of using smaller ratchets and gear teeth. And the smaller the gear, the more likely it would grind to nothing or slip completely. We’re talking about the need for better materials, better technology to help us safely reach those previously unattainable gaps.

Desire sparked innovation.

New Tools, New Rules

As communicators, we have a range of tools that were not available even just a few years ago. Deployed properly, they can help us find the gaps we used to ignore.

Take one of the oldest weapons in the PR arsenal — the news release. Sometimes it was an aimed and targeted weapon, but it was designed to have mass effect. For decades, corporations and organizations had a few notches from which to choose:

• Meet with stakeholders in person
• Direct mail
• Editorial boards
• News releases
• Letters to the editor

Yet, in each of the above, there was no way to calibrate once it was done. You launched, and you hoped. Tools that allow for feedback and conversation give you greater opportunity to course correct on the way, much like wire-guided missiles, or those with on-board navigation. They also allow you to target a more specific area-of-effect.

For example, a company might have debated whether to send a particular news release, on the grounds that it might be stirring up concern among people without an already existing interest. Today, there are other means of electronic publishing and tools for targeting that allow you to communicate in a similar fashion, without the “formal” nature of a news release.

But you can’t consider it if you’re still stuck in the Yes/No of the traditional gears.

Facebook’s Continual Continuum

If you want another example of how thinking “continuum” reaps rewards, just look at Facebook. From a critical standpoint, Facebook has grown by leveraging a couple of different human vices: Narcissism and Voyeurism. These are classes of activities that we wouldn’t like to be caught engaging, yet we do. Why? What has Facebook (and Twitter and other sticky networks) done to numb us to these behaviors.

They’ve created options, giving us a continuum of sharing.

You see, if I publish something and stick it up in everyone’s face, that’s considered more than a little gauche. (Think Advertising.) However, if I put it out only in front of those people who have “opted-in” to seeing my blatherings and updates, then it’s somehow something less than One. It’s still more than Zero, it’s on a continuum.

Now to the Voyeurism side.

There’s something inherently sneaky about stealing someone’s diary and reading their innermost thoughts. There’s something a little less sneaky about reading something that’s online, and even less subversive about seeing something you’ve been given permission to read and watch. It’s still a little voyeuristic, because the watched is never really sure they’ve been watched – but it’s closer to Zero than One.

What Facebook has done in particular is to drop the Voyeurism and Narcissism factors far closer to Zero than we might have expected. Much of that is based on illusion, such as the December “Privacy Settings” initiative that opened most status messages up to the world. Mark Zuckerberg has been pilloried for his vision about changing the standards of privacy for the world. Well, it’s too late. He’s already done it, because he’s figured out how to make the gears smaller.

The Invisible Calculus

Somewhere, there is a small room where behavioral psychologists and quantitative regression analysis geeks are downing lattes and running the numbers behind yet another iteration of experiments. In one, they’ve changed the order or definition of a privacy setting, to see if on the aggregate those who see the modified version are more prone to share. Likewise, they are making subtle changes to the presentation, to give markers or other visual cues that give the appearance of something personal without triggering our societal more about being too much of a snoop.

The illusion is that we are sharing more than we think we are, and we are looking over our neighbors’ shoulders more than we ever would have considered. We’re not at Zero or One. We’re at 0.3, but are acting as though we’re at 0.2. Who knows what the real scale or measurement is? It might be measured in “lattes” for all we know.

But it exists, because every tweak of the network will be tested for how “sticky” it makes the experience for the end user. Make us feel comfortable sharing as much as possible without triggering our fear for our privacy, and make us feel okay with seeing the minutiae of hundreds or thousands of other people, without triggering shame.

Math, The Ultimate Weapon

Now, once you see that new tools can give you options along a continuum, consider this: what happened to the armies that refused to adopt the new weapons?

©2010 Occam's RazR. All Rights Reserved.