I’ve written recently about the change from analogue to digital thinking (June 29th 2010 -An Analogue Brain in a digital world >) which prompted me to think about how our memories also work and  how Analogue Memory and  Digital Memory interact and affect community in a digital world.

Human Memory

Human memory is reconstructive, incomplete, selective, regenerative and interpretative.

It’s reconstructive in that we relive the experiences temporally (i.e. in time order) reconstructing events as we go. When we sing songs we often use the last line to trigger the memory of the next line. That suggests that we store some things in a strict order with the need for entry points to get the memory to flow.

It’s incomplete because just as we have the capacity to rememebr we also have  the capacity to forget.  We tend to forget the negative and reinforce the positive, Generally none of us recall pain with the same vivid agony as when we suffer it, and from an evolutionary point of view you can see why.

It’s selective  because if we remembered every detail even the human brain would run out of space. Most things don’t matter, (No they really don’t – stop worrying so much!) so we can forget them.

It’s regenerative  because when we know we have forgotten something we can often regenerate the memory – although we may be remembering a pastiche of similar things that seem to fit. Often these regenerative memories are so real that we’l defend them as a truth when they are totally fabrications.

It’s interpretative  because we apply our emotional and environmental filters to it as we recall it. Someone we know slightly as an caring, intelligent, expert, will have those labels  because or al of our experiences of them and what others say. When they do something out of character, our memories adapt that recollection and interpret the behaviour we see in our model of them.

Machine Memory

Machine Memory is complete or corrupted, absent, never reconstructed, never interpreted.

It’s complete because it is stored in files which have a start and an end, when something goes wrong with the file, in most situations it’s lost completely (although some data may be recovered later the normal approach just says ‘error’, something our brains don’t do).

Machines  can’t easily interpret a memory in a different situation to the exact circumstances to which the data refers. Computers can be programmed to appear to interpret some similar situations we haven’t yet built interpretative routines that cope with any environment and situation and allow interpretation of the new data from a context that’s in files on hard disks so as to cope and react to new situations in a millisecond.

Outsourcing Memory

In Three degrees of Separation (Jan 7th 2009) I talked of how we are increasingly outsourcing our memories to social networks. I think the trend to doing this has accelerated since then. How does that trend affect community?

In Connectors: the power behind the power (Dec 8th 2009) I commented that:

we need a consistency and persistency of message as people get to know us, to like us, and to follow us.

To do that we need an outstanding memory and having a body of reference knowledge to our prior conversations that’s unfailing and complete is an exceptional resource. Connectors bind community, so all in all I think this is a benefit of machine memory over human memory. I rely on it.

In Social Media – Disaggregation (April 21st 2009) I recognised that the growth in the numbers of Social Networks was fragmenting the conversation across many platforms. There’s been a trend to linking through streams and feeds but those only work in the moment. The water in a stream moves on, get’s mixed, and evaporated and precipitated, quickly you can’t find the water you saw, just more of similar water. So it is with our outsourced memories, they are spread out, and hard to retrieve, increasingly we need an index or retrieval system that is as complicated as the messages it seeks to retrieve. In that context the social cohesion created by a few Social Networks can quickly break down for those working across many.

The final comment I’d make about committing our human memories to machine when we outsource them is that the negative never fades, our mistakes are  always available on instant recall, complete an unadulterated. For those seeking to disturb community that creates an opportunity. Communities that don’t learn to tolerate and accommodate the unchanging nature of machine memory will be ripped apart in time by those who seek to use the past to change the present, through consistently returning to infallible recall of fallibilities.

Communities gain strength when they choose to ignore the machine memory that they intrinsically know would have been collectively forgotten.

That’s the sign of a strong community in a digital world.

What is Analogue and What is digital

Analogue signals vary infinitely (well in theory) and digital signals use discrete states (usually 1 or 0) to transmit information.

Increasingly the world is becoming digital, Radio (DAB) TV (DVB) and the internet are all manifestations of the digital world. Yet our minds are analogue, and the interface is complicated.

For television the digital signal transmits first broad sector information and then narrow sector changes, the signals been squeezed down to minimise the amount of data that needs to be transmitted and band width and conversion rates have been increased to the point where digital transmission was possible. The best is via fibre optic cable to minimise signal noise and over the air and via an aerial the worst. We’ve all seen the impact of a pixellated screen when the signal has degraded.

Our memories don’t do that -They degrade in different ways, and the recombine to reconstruct history – Digital recall is perfect recall, but analogue, human, recall is subjective and selective.

The challenge is that humans are (self)selective. That means that we overlook trivial things our friends and contacts say and do that hurt us, pretty quickly usually. Digitally though those things are fixed. When we cause pain in the analogue brain through a digital medium we also create an endurance that doesn’t match the evolutionary path that we have taken as a species

Are communities digital or analogue?

Communities are groups of people with shared methods, shared beliefs and shared support and shared place (read more here >). When that place is on-line there is an element of digital involved yet at the heart of it are people with an analogue approach.

So, what is the impact? Well according to this article > Facebook is now a key witness in divorce proceedings. Digital evidence of an analogue affair. Not just the analogue affairs either – The article highlights :-

Consider, for example, the mom who lost custody of her kids because she was playing FarmVille or World of Warcraft when she claimed to be spending time with them, or the husband who denied anger management issues but flamed like a true troll, complete with violent threats, on his Facebook profile.

Digital evidence that never lies, never goes away, never reflects the context, and is ever present, causes analogue impacts that are complex and far reaching.

Whilst togetherness on-line can help provide a glue for community, there are risks that the digital/analogue interface of on-line to real world could also damage the heart of community too.

What does your analogue brain make of it?

We’ve all seen Foursquare and Gowalla grow and gather a following, they are building their own communities. But, like Marmite though they also have some very vociferous and noisy critics talking of these services being used to track each of us in real time, or to tell when to visit our ‘apparently’ empty houses for reasons best left to the imagination, but probably not legal. The upside is that with location based services you can get real time appropriate data pushed to your data aware device.

Now some of that might be inappropriate advertising, but that just means they haven’t got sophisticated enough – yet.

The trends point towards these services becoming more embedded in our lives not less, and like all tools there is a possibility that the information could be misused. Should we run with that negative view or take the positive approach that the benefits outweigh the possible risks. Time will tell on that.

There’s lots more to come and Marshall Kirkpatrick talks of some of this in this blog>

Data about the geographic locations of people and things will in the near-term future become a massive flow of sensor, satellite and citizen input made freely available to developers through government and other collaboration programs. It will be available in real time, to and from mobile devices, and be machine processed to pick out objects and patterns that can be used as hooks for mashups.

Increasingly location based services help us to build and maintain community, by giving the community a clues to our presence and our network of friends enables random meetings to take place. That drives strength into existing relationships, and creates new ones. We already have ways we probably couldn’t facilitate without the technology.

Often we think the technology just makes things easier, this time it makes them possible.

NIKE is already mapping your workouts and it already has build the network to allow others to compete with you on routes you have run even when you aren’t there. Automation of that mapping can only be a matter of time. Competition becomes enabled even when disconnected from a common time – that leads to a whole new activity set I expect. You could, for example, run the London Marathon, and have your actual path validated by the race controllers, the week before the race and still compete, or tomorrow.  There’s community as well as competition hidden in latitude and longitude.

Where would you like to see this location based technology go, and where would you really like it to stay well away?

In this recorded webcast you’ll learn about the key features of, and the key steps in, building your community around you.

More Societal Web Webcasts here >

Introduction

There’s a lot of talk on many social media platforms and throughout the Societal Web on the importance of building community. We thought it would be useful to discuss how it’s created and the key features that make up a strong and vibrant collaborative group. One example of small local communities are those created in The BlackStar Boardrooms run by Business Social Network Ecademy

The 4 Key Elements

There are 4 key requirements for community to form as shown. These are:

My background comes from the insurance arena where I did a lot of risk management.

One of the things that I did was run a lot of projects. The thing with projects is it allows you to time-box things. It allows you to say “I’m going to get to this objective and it’ll take me this long and I’ll spend this much money doing it” and you can measure against that all the way through the journey.

The problem is that when we start on something new, (for many people here for example the Societal Web is new), we don’t know the roadmap so it’s hard to view it isa a project. Projects need clear end goals. Working out how to integrate new tools into old methods is tough, especially if you don’t even know what all the tools are.

Yet, If you treat this Societal Web stuff as a project and put project disciplines around it then that will help you to get the results you want. First establish your baseline and measure it. Identify your core outputs and requirements, for example, brand presence, being found in the search engines, Conversation and connection, cooperation and support, business referrals etc. then that’s what this (project) work will give you.

Projects deliver change, and change means you never really know the things you need to know when you start, but a good strategy, a good plan and a budget, plus measurement and course correction on the way, will give you the results you need.

UK May 6th – A Collaborative Hung Parliament?

Image via Wikipedia

Image via Wikipedia

The UK General Election due to be held on 6th May has created a lot of speculation that the outcome could result in the situation of a ‘hung’ Parliament. A hung Parliament occurs when no individual party has overall control and is therefore in a situation where, in order to govern, one party needs to collaborate with one or more other parties. Depending on the final outcome, the number of votes required for to reach overall control (326) can vary and therefore it’s difficult to predict in advance which parties will need to collaborate. If the result is particularly close with two large parties and a number of smaller groups then the decisions about who will lead the main coalition groups can alternate rapidly as deals are discussed, agreed, accepted and broken.

The challenge that the parties face is that for the next four weeks of campaigning they will spend their time arguing and attacking the policies of each other. These activities, without doubt, are as far away from collaborative approaches as they can be and act directly against the journey through the changes needed to form a collaborative arrangement.

What does Collaborating mean?

Collaboration is more than just agreeing to work together, in business relationships tend to start transactionally and through the transaction trust is built, Co-operating businesses helping each other to achieve each others goals, perhaps sharing aspects of what they do to help customers but remaining focused on their own goals and visions. Collaborating businesses share a common goal and both change their stance and operating models in order to work closely ad effectively to deliver. It’s much more than a ‘pact’ or written agreement, and needs deep trust and tolerance.

So, seeking collaboration with others starts with a recognition, by both, of the need to change, Consciousness of what is needed. If Parliament is indeed ‘hung’ then that consciousness will hit home very rapidly on the evening and early morning of 6th / 7th May. Immediately the parties will move into a conversational mode, discussing possibilities and options. They’ll express lines in the sand; things which cannot be given away and things which must change for the other party in the conversation, there are multiple conversations and individuals seeking to get to know each other better quickly. Relationships will be broken and formed in the blink of an eye. All of this will take place, at least superficially, in the public gaze.

As the parties move towards agreement quick agreement to co-operate on some areas will be found. It’s unlikely that they’ll get beyond this before a deal is actually struck, the press and the people won’t stand for the months off negotiation than can take place. The 2007 – 2008 Belgian Government formation was a 156 day negotiation in this phase with constitutional reform as a key sticking point, some saw the split of the French Speaking and Dutch speaking regions of the country. Trust was hard to find in those negotiations which were often bitter and acrimonious.

Even if agreement is reached, at this stage whatever arrangements are reached won’t be collaborative, they’ll be indicative, and the parties will feel, in the true art of British compromise, that neither side is content with the outcome. Increased or decreased taxation; different forms of taxation; Power for the regions; Independence for Scotland and Wales; the opportunity to change the emphasis in education or healthcare; the approach in Iraq, Iran and Afghanistan; the differences in importance of child poverty against cancer care; all these are likely to figure in any agreement. They will be battered out in agreements between groups where one or other side agrees that in order for the bigger picture (“to get me into No.10”) people will be prepared to forego key elements on which they have campaigned.

There’s the important point, key elements on which they have campaigned, on which their votes were cast and won, foregone for the sake of power. That’s the area where people fear a hung Parliament in that it leads to the end result being different from the promises made beforehand, yet surveys repeatedly show that none of us believe those promises anyway.

If a hung Parliament is to succeed, the parties have to build stronger relationship, to understand each other’s needs and desires, and both need to change their goals and aims to a new, shared common goal where collaboration can really and truly take effect. In fact the people, overall, are likely to be better served by a collaborative hung parliament where the majority of views for a majority of voters can, must, be taken into account. When businesses collaborate they do so, often, only to achieve this.

When that happens, the Government starts working efficiently and effectively, delivering its shared promise and getting the results that it sought. If that shared promise is aligned to the views that were expressed in the ballot box, then it’s possible that a shared, common collaborative Government becomes Cohesive and works effectively for the British people. My estimate is that with the best will in the world that can take between 18 months and 2 years to fully realise; almost 40% of the next Parliament, if it were to survive to a full term.

Some of the key things that you can see appearing in a coalition, collaborative, arrangement that probably would never happen were there a clear one party overall majority include:

• Taxation changes.
• Electoral reform.
• Constitutional change.
• Reform of the legislative and executive branches of Government.

These are already being mooted, but not championed, and that’s something I interpret as a recognition in the largest parties not to burn all the bridges just n case.

Some things, however, are unlikely to change regardless of the party in power, at the overall level at least (although the detail is inevitably going to be different) and those include for example, protecting the service provision in health and education.

If the collaborative parliament, a true coalition, works, if the relationships blossom and bloom and collaboration delivers a result, the end change may be that the coalition parties agree that they would be better placed to enter the next election as one party rather than two, and it’s possible to see mergers taking place between parties of similar views in order to achieve a more rounded presentation to the people of Britain in a future election.

Can’t happen?

When the Social Democrats split from the Labour Party the Liberals immediately became concious of the voice they were not serving in their political territory, over a few years they conversed and then co-operated in constituencies and on policy development. IN one election after another at local and national level they increasingly stopped competing and started collaborating. ultimately they achieved a truly cohesive union in the merger that formed the Liberal Democrats.

Conclusion?

It is possible that we may have to find ways to support our MP’s working collaboratively with parties of a different political hue, they’ll find it very hard after weeks of negative campaigning to build trust and find the common ground. For us, the people they serve, they need to.

Related articles by Zemanta

• It’s an open race in GB – but open and shut in NI? (sluggerotoole.com)
• Election fever brings hope, change … and a whole host of other cliches, too | Simon Hoggart’s election (guardian.co.uk)
• Gordon Brown offers reform of Lords and overhaul of voting system (guardian.co.uk)
• Scotland, general election battleground again | Gerry Hassan (guardian.co.uk)

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Has your personal brand been created by accident? William has blogged here before about the importance of social consistency when seeking to influence. He makes some good points about the perils of inconsistency online. This made me think about personal brand image and how it is more important than ever to manage it.

We know that the impression given by an individual or company is wider than their physical appearance, shop front and portfolio. In the societal web, online impressions are given every time a company or individual is mentioned; they are also highly visible and long lasting – this might be your website, blog, comments posted on forums, Facebook pages, Tweets, LinkedIn profile and so on.

Your personal ‘brand’, the image you portray, is being created whether you deliberately manage it or not.

Consistency means that those who run across you know what to expect when they meet you. Consistency means that our likely response can be anticipated, consistency means that we influence others’ behaviour as they think through the issues that affect both of us.

Social Consistency – An Influencing Minefield

The benefits of brand management include increasing your product’s perceived value to your customer, and in this case the product is you. By presenting a consistent image to your target audience, you facilitate a clear understanding of who you are and what you are about. This is as important for an individual trying to market themselves, as an expert in their field or as a credible candidate for a job, as it is for an established brand. Don’t leave your personal brand to chance.

Google yourself

Development of your brand image is a journey which starts with understanding what it is today. I would recommend starting with a Google search – are you visible at all? If you are, what impression is being created and is this the image you want to present? How do you come across in forums and in your web comments? How are others talking about you? Do these visual elements portray your values and create the image you would like?

If you have a website it might be a good idea to look again and think specifically about the tone of your content – is it positive or negative? Does it present your values? A good tool that gives a quick impression is a word cloud.  This turns any piece of text into a visual image of keywords with more frequently used words appearing in a larger size. These free tools are widely available on the web, including at www.wordle.net, www.tagcrowd.com, www.worditout.com. Try inputting your website URL to any of these sites and see what your word cloud tells you – as a visual representation of your website does it give the impression you would like?

The next step is to think about how you want to be seen. Can you describe who you are? What you’re good at? What you’re passionate about? The trick to achieving consistency is to be honest, appropriately of course.

Get Busy

How and where you present this information will depend on who your target audience is. You may want to promote yourself as an expert, or to make yourself visible to prospective employers or clients. Consider where you want to be visible.

Write your personal profile – tell others who you are and what you have achieved. Don’t assume they already know. By the way this is not just your title and company name!

This is sometimes referred to as the elevator statement – imagine you find yourself in the lift with the one person you need to impress, you have the length of the journey to catch their attention, what would you say? You should end up with a short, concise statement containing relevant, specific and unique things about you. Many of you will already have a profile

There are a lot of places to find help with this online, not least Dan Schwabel’s Personal Branding blog.

Finally you need to make sure that your new profile is reflected online whether in business networking sites, social networking sites, forum comments and so on, so that in combination they present a clear, consistent picture of you.

Get some pictures taken and attach your image to your online profiles. This is a good way of bringing your online personal profiles to life.

Share your expertise and opinions by blogging or tweeting about things of interest to you – in other words, start conversations and get yourself known.

And finally…

I’ve said it before but it’s worth saying it again – be consistent!

In this webcast you’ll learn about moving from conversations on the Societal Web to results.

More Societal Web Webcasts here >