Endless Knots

Studying Facebook

Seriously. At Bowdoin College, College Offers Facebook Sociology Course.

Enterprise 2.0 aftermath

Some links to what others have written about "How Twitter Changes Everything" and "Leading Collaborative Teams" sessions:

"Enterprise 2.0: Twitter Up, Facebook, MySpace Down," W. David Gardner's piece in Information Week.

And Gardner's piece in the same pub, "Enterprise 2.0: Making Virtual Collaboration Work."

Patti Anklam, who participated on the Twitter panel, provides a great summary and writes about some unspoken-at-the-time thoughts, including the red flag of security, on AppGap, "Twitter in the Enterprise."

Bill Ives, also on AppGap, publishes his insights into and experiences using Twitter, which he also shared in the session, "Twitter as a Business Application."

And finally on AppGap (thanks, AppGappers for all this attention), Jenny Ambrozek's "Enterprise 2.0 2009:Twitter’s Influence Everywhere & A New Realism."

Oh, wait. Someone hated the Twitter sesson. I responded. Twice.

Confirm or ignore? Facebook by the book

My friend Clara Shih uses this video in her Facebook Era presentation. First saw her include it at Webcom Montreal 2009 and thought it so funny that I asked her where she got it. If you're on Facebook, you want to see it. Comes from the BBC Three show "The Wall." The very first person I sent the link to instantly posted it. You might too. 

Facebook and the !Kung

Well, not exactly, but this interview ("Where Gifts and Stories Are Crucial to Survival") with Pauline Wiessner, an anthropologist at the University of Utah, is not to be missed. She talks about how the !Kung (click your tongue to say it or listen to Miriam Makeba sing "The Click Song") maintain social connections across distance and time--and how here in the non-!Kung world we imitate them via social conveniences like Facebook.

First point is that distance is no impediment to intimacy if we are willing to keep those we care about close in our hearts through gifts. Reinforces the truth that many of the most generous people are those with ostensibly the least to give.

Second point is the story-telling. By talking about those who are "away," the !Kung keep them in the conversation. Facebook, Wiessner says, is a contemporary example of how we keep those not in view front and center in a different way.

"People who use it [Facebook] say it keeps memories of distant friends alive and it sometimes brings long-lost relationships back home. We all know of people who’ve been 'friended' by old pals from college and former neighbors they’ve lost touch with. When they see pictures of them and read 'sharings' from their Facebook partners, they are reminded of their presence in their lives."

Here are the opening few paragraphs of Claudia Dreifus's enlightening interview with Wiessner. You have to read it. Make sure you go to the end too where one of the !Kung snags a satellite phone and calls Wiessner in Utah, asking her to buy some soccer shoes for their team, which an American documentary filmmaker had promised to send a few years earlier but never had.

Q. ONE OF THE GROUPS YOU STUDY, THE !KUNG PEOPLE OF SOUTHERN AFRICA’S KALAHARI DESERT, ARE NATIVE TO ONE OF THE MOST UNFORGIVING CORNERS OF THE PLANET. HOW DO THEY SURVIVE IN A PLACE OF FREQUENT DROUGHTS, FLOODS AND FAMINE?

A. They have an intricate system of banking their social relationships and calling on them when times get rough. The system is maintained through gift-giving, storytelling and visiting. It works like insurance does in our culture.

I first arrived in the Kalahari in the early 1970s, when the !Kung were still primarily hunter-gatherers. My question then was: how do people without meat on the hoof, grain in the larder and money in the bank survive hard times?

When I was there for about a year, some answers came. There was a heavy rain. The desert plants died and the wild game dispersed. As people grew hungrier, they began telling vivid stories about loved ones who lived as far as 200 kilometers away. They spoke about how they much missed them. Soon people were busily crafting beautiful objects — gifts. Finally, when push came to shove, 150 !Kung began trekking to the encampments of the people they’d been remembering. There they stayed until conditions in their home area improved.

What I’d witnessed was a structured system at play. The Bushmen used the storytelling to keep feelings for distant persons alive. The gifts are their way of telling the receiver, “I’ve held you in my heart.” Over the years, I saw this repeated many, many times. It would turn out that the !Kung spent as much as three months a year visiting “exchange partners,” and this was the key to their survival.

Were you in NETWORKING? Please pass along

In 1982, Doubleday published Networking: The First Report and Directory, Jeff's and my first book.

The story of how that book came to market someday will, or rather, should appear in the annals of publishing -- first publisher (Methuen, a British publisher aiming to break into the US market) shelved its whole list just after we'd submitted manuscript; Doubleday picked it up, offering more than twice the original advance (great agent at time, Ron Bernstein); we got the contract to do the electronic typsetting, making it the first commercial book to be electronically typeset under auspices of the authors, never having been retyped by its publisher; translated into Japanese by that country's Economic Planning Agency, and on and on -- but alas this post is about the treasure hunt that we're launching here today.

Networking was, as its subtitle says, a "report" on 1600 grassroots and nonprofit networks focused on the seven topics listed on the cover, along with a directory of those networks.

Within the book was everything from the theory and practice of networks -- with a chapter-long essay devoted to each topic -- to the directory itself, organized in various ways -- by organization name, by location, by keyword, and by title of the network's publications.

Those listed range from The Sun Magazine to World Future Society to Franz Schumacher's Intermediate Technology Group (now Practical Action) to Tilth to Aspen Institute to CoEvolution Quarterly to Dr. Dobb's Journal to the National Center for Citizen Involvement, now the Open Library (where our two earliest books, including this one are listed) and Boston Women's Health Book Collective, now Our Bodies, Ourselves, to which we devoted a chapter of its own because of its unique networking skills. The fact that it's still going after nearly forty years makes the point.

We did all the research via networking, beginning with one letter (as in type it, sign it, put it in an envelope, attach a stamp, go to the post office - remember that?) that we sent to one person whom we knew to be a richly connected networker, who suggested nine others, whom we wrote to, who in turn sent us other suggestions -- and within 18 months, we'd received the names of 50,000 "networks" around the world. We wrote to 4000 of them and got back an astonishing 40% response rate - 1600 letters, packages, publications, descriptions, many with heartfelt expressions of why their leaders networked and how they did it. Incredible experience, to say the least. No Internet. Limited email (a little because a few of us pioneers were already online). Need I say: No web, no listservs, and, of course, no Google, Wikipedia, Twitter or Facebook. Just the poor postman, who left a trail of whiskey nips along our sidewalk.

So now it's 2009, more than a quarter-century later and we're wondering how many of those networks have survived (I chose the ones above that I could google). Why now? Not just idle curiosity but intense awareness that there are similarities between the early 1980s and today. Principal among them unemployment, as per Paul O. Flaim's, "Unemployment in 1982: the cost to workers and their families:"

The economy entered 1982 in a severe recession and labor market conditions deteriorated throughout the year. The unemployment rate, already high by historical standards at the onset of the recession in mid-1981, reached 10.8 percent at the end of 1982, higher than at any time in post-World War II history.

A few other interesting stats from then: the Dow was, get ready, 776 in August of that year, down 30% from its high of 1011 five years earlier. And, the drop in exports and spending just announced is mere fractions shy of "the 6.4 percent rate drop seen in the first quarter of 1982, when the economy was in a recession that lasted 16 months," according to Lucia Mutukani's "US economy weakens," in the Feb 29, 2009, Boston Globe.

Clearly, we made it through that tough time, not purely because of networking, of course (I'm not that much of a romantic), but in part because people got together and figured out some things they could do themselves. We're interested in how those networks have survived and intend to include them in the new bit of writing we're engaged in, details to come.

So would you please pass this note along to anyone you know who might have been in the book? When we have a spare minute (ha!), we'll scan the whole list and begin publishing that. Thanks in advance! And, Networking networkers, please post comments here.

Lexulous: there is a just universe

Facebook, whose population is now nearly half the size of the US (it hit 150 million this week, according to the company's blog), is definitely different strokes for different folks. Shortly after I joined, I ran into Ruthie, an old friend from my days in England, who told me that she mainly used Facebook for Scrabulous. I looked it up and soon I was hooked too. As was my friend Judy, with whom I'm played more than one game of Scrabble "in real," both of us having been trained at our mothers' boards, she better than I. Judy is one of the truly great Scrabble players--and she's relentlessly competitive. I rarely if ever win when playing her - or nearly anyone else. For a writer, I'm really not very good at word games.

Well, that didn't last long, the Scrabulous, that is. As I reported with a long face last July, Hasbro took offense and, poof, Scrabulous was gone (see the detailed history in Wikipedia, which no doubt has inaccuracies). In its place from the same developers came Wordscraper, which for me at least didn't compare. Nor did the Hasbro's version of real-Scrabble, with a clunky interface and lacking Scrabulous's functionality.

Now today all of us Scrab-devotees received this message on Facebook from the Indian developer-brothers of this terrific time-waster.

Dear User,

Our game was disabled on Facebook for some time as we were engaged inresolving some legal matters. We are now pleased to provide you withan improved game - LEXULOUS - that you can enjoy in peace with friendsfrom ALL COUNTRIES for free!

Your games in progress, statistics, and messages have been preserved. Good luck, and here's wishing you a very happy 2009 :)

Warm Regards,
Rajat & Jayant Agarwalla

And so, with thanks to Rajat and Jayant and their crack legal team, I resume this game with Judy, who current score aside, will definitely beat me once more:

This little piggy went to market

 

Wait long enough in these interwebbed times and you'll find everyone you've ever known, including those people you really liked but fell out of touch with. Facebook brought back such a one this past week, the cartographer/artist/photographer/college-classmate Louis Jaffe. Louis was a phenome at Antioch--and remains such if his recent work is any indication. I love this image that he made for the charcuterie booth at the Slow Food 2008 extravaganza in San Francisco, 4X10 feet in the original. Wish I could see the real thing. Thanks, Louis, for allowing me to publish it here. Any time you're looking for a venue for your work, this "gallery" is open.

My 500 BFFs on Facebook

It was a very short Facebook email from my friend, D: "How do you gather up, and keep up with, 500-odd Facebook friends?" D, by the way, is a good example of a Facebook-like friend, even if we did originally meet in person. In 1993, we both attended a small invitation-only conference with one of those dreamy titles like "The Future of the Organization." (In retrospect, it seems as if we attended a lot of those in the '90s.)

I sat down at a table, next to D, though I didn't know him at the time, and the conversation progressed. At a certain point, I made a comment about the wisdom and strength of teenagers and how we should heed their opinions more (I had two at the time). D responded with a horrible look, one I couldn't understand until the meeting was over and he turned to me to say the unthinkable: "My son was killed by a teenage drunk driver five months ago."

We sat there for the next 45 minutes as he told me the story of his beautiful and talented son, Zack, who died at 23. He had the obituaries, the newspaper articles, and, even, as I recall, some of Zack's writing in a folder that he carried with him. Finally, we parted. Shortly, I learned that D had joined The Meta Network (hi, Lisa), an online discussion forum that I'd belonged to for a while by then, and, for nearly five years following, D posted about his son and the overpowering grief that his death brought. A small group of us moved into virtual position around him, responding to posts, offering advice, and soon one of the group named us "the pod," as in dolphins who swarm around one who is ill until that mammal heals.

I only saw D once or twice after that, talking on the phone perhaps once a year - until he surfaced on Facebook a few months back, a strong, healthy, and witty presence. When he sent his email a few weeks ago, I promised to respond here...but I couldn't without telling the background.

These relationships that we form online have been minced, diced, and put through the garlic press so many times that there is little new that I can contribute. Only that these thin bonds are real and have staying power, as per reconnecting with D.

I joined Facebook when someone whom I knew in person invited me to join, someone with whom I already had a stronger connection online than face-to-face  (which continues to be the case, even though we live only a few miles apart). Once I joined, I searched out people whom I thought might be on, online afficiandos, many of whom, of course, had joined before me, then friends from college, high school, and others whom I'd lost touch with, most of whom weren't members (yet). Then, to my daughters' chagrin, I "friended" some of their friends, resulting in this story much told by Daughter #1: A friend approaches her. "You'll never guess who friended me!" D#1: "Oh, yes, I can..." (Lest I be admonished for oversight, D#2 is my friend too.)

After a while, I stopped regularly searching people out and soon I started to receive "friend requests." The first and most memorable came about two months after I'd joined Facebook when, just moments after giving a speech, where I'd mentioned my early experiences, my BlackBerry (at the time) indicated a new message; someone in the audience (hello, JR) had friended me.

Over the past year, I've been "friended" (who ever thought it would be a verb?) by writers from Zoetrope.com and their friends, people who've read our books and poor students who've had them assigned, editors near and far (hi, Ian, 'lo, Eric), high school and college roommates and hallmates whom I'd lost touch with completely (hello, Sue, hello, MaryJo; hello, Alicia, hello, Pat), clients (hey, Liz, howdy, Tom), my godson (Will!), my niece (Ms. Amanda), too many Lipnacks now to list, save the famous other little cousin-JL!, and people with no connection to me that is traceable but who somehow seem to find me and ask to connect. I almost always say yes unless there is something obviously objectionable in the person's profile, which has happened once as I recall (not that I can actually recall what struck me that way at the time).

As of today, I'm up to 503 such connections, including two that came in last night - one from someone I can't remember at the moment, the other from someone whom I was on a couple of conference calls with last year (hello, Chandra). I receive all kinds of "gifts" that make no sense whatsoever, am invited to "events" that I cannot attend, and am asked to participate in groups that I stand little chance of actually being part of.

Is there a purpose to this? In the strictest sense of the word, no, but I analogize the daily "friend feed" that catalogues what people (my friends, that is) are doing to sitting on the stoop in college. There, we took our places (at least a few of us budding networkers did) and watched people coming and going from the student union, noting who was hanging out with whom, which couple was together today, which had broken up, who'd pulled up on his or her motorcyle (yes, girls in my college had bikes too), what books they were carrying, how they were dressed, whether they looked liked they'd just rolled out of bed...

So I enjoy - and learn from - this global stoop, where I can see what other bloggers are writing, what interests people are promoting, and monitor whether the wonderful game Scrabulous ever is allowed to resurface on Facebook (hello, Jude - I really miss this!). If you're not there already, come friend me so we can hang out too.