Social communities

Communities are real, not virtual.
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The title says it all. To add on to that: Community sites are tools for communities not the other way around. These are probably the biggest misconceptions I face when discussing social media, and community building. The later the paradox in itself as the community is formed by the community not by persons. A community is a collection of individuals, that can be guided by individuals but only with the consent of the community.

You can trigger community by pushing it along but you as a person, company cannot per se build it. Yeah I know it is a pretty bad deal. :-) “Igniting” an unstable community usually creates a really poor community if any, and most likely chaos will appear. This chaos can be pretty unpredictable and the community takes all possible twists and turns.

For instance look at dictatorships, even though they might not be considered as true communities as they are artificially created. What happens when the control over these are lost? Look at what happened to Balkan, the former Soviet Union and other examples throughout the world. The moment the stronghold dictators started to erode the community exploded. However in the vacuum of leadership and any kind of structure (which should not be mistaken for strict hierarchies) the chaos began, bad elements took the opportunity and it is only now when we see something good is happening.

I wrote 2005 a piece based on the blog “The Group is Its Own Worst Enemy” by Clay Shirky. I will take a quote from the blog to exemplify:

“Someone built the [social software] system, they assumed certain user behaviours. The users came on and exhibited different behaviours. And the people running the system discovered to their horror that the technological and social issues could not in fact be decoupled…. As a group commits to its existence as a group, and begins to think that the group is good or important, the chance that they will begin to call for additional structure, in order to defend themselves from themselves, gets very, very high.”

Even for the artificially created communities you will see this. The group accepts the boundaries, it forms from it but however tries to change and push them. (Some very funky, funny yet graspable analogies can be made with the entropy concept in chemistry and physics, but I will leave those out.) The change of the boundaries is the tricky part here. The community is constantly evolving, and is very fluid in its nature. Try to control it and you will most likely create a chain of reactions that you didn’t have the slightest clue could happen.

Maybe the best analogy here is to consider the power of the ocean. You can as a sailor only embrace the power of the ocean. You can sail the ocean but you can never control it. The sea is in command and you can but only just adapt to it. Still you will be able to take out a bearing and after you have accepted the power of the ocean you will be able to navigate over the ocean. Not always is the straight course the best way to go here. :-)

What can we learn from this?
A community site is driven by the community but the actual site is but yet only a way for the community to express itself. For the social media company, the site becomes what the ship is for the sailor/captain. A tool and only a tool. The ship can only be prepared for the ocean. Do not in your wildest imagine try to shape the ocean after the ship you built or the community after the site for that matter.

Remember that communities are built up by the dinner conversations. The disagreements The agreements. The issues. All emotions – happiness, sadness, anger, frustration, apathy. Every emotion out there. This is what the true citizen media should be about. It is the personal accounts. It is the mosaic of personal views. It is the emotional content. It is the view into the life of people, but not in the silly reality shows we see on TV but real life. It is the instant capture of emotions. The capture of the personal views in context is the key. Technology have now made it possible to capture this in real time and organize it. That is what is so cool.

For instance. I got an email as part of an email group by a person. (I will not go into the content of the email as it is not important. Basically it was a personal account of friend disappointed in one of his friends. Also I will not go into whether he should or shouldn’t have sent it as I do not think it is important and not a matter for me comment on.) Nevertheless I was struck by the personal nature of the note as so was I struck by the discussion that followed. The amazing part is that he by that email created a sub-community around that email which spread out throughout the relevant resources online. He for a brief moment of time built a content-based community around that particular topic or an event. The cool thing is that this can be replicated over and over again… I will soon tell you how.

These are the conversations and personal reflections that are completely lost in traditional media which still struggles to adapt to the new distributions channels we have at hand not to mention the mechanisms to cover events around the world. The moment they have bubbled up into the news story they have been filtered by a selected set of eyes (often too influenced by their biasses and backgrounds as so am I) and too often the context is totally lost.

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To listen
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(Also as a blog entry at http://www.sundelof.net)

A good friend gave me a book with a collection of chronicles of Hans Bergstrom, the former editor-in-chief at Dagens Nyheter – one of the biggest daily morning news papers in Sweden. I read several of the chronicles and one struck me as very on point about where the web, media and the world is heading. He wrote it around 99’ and mentioned that it is as important to write as it is to read.

I started to write this blog Sunday evening, but didn’t get far as things got in the middle. I am however glad they did as it will now get I a slightly different touch.

Hans Bergstrom is right in a way, and wrong in another. What he is right about is that we all have a right to speak our mind and opinion. (User generated media is giving a majority of the internet population the right tools to express themselves, yet we have a long way to go when it comes to organizing this material.) Back to the points by Hans Bergstrom. However I would still claim that the most important thing is to listen, rather than to express your opinion or proclaim your excellence. Some of my Swedish friends will now say. “Erik, you are talking about the law of Jante, and that is something we all are not that fond of.” I am not sure though that it is purely a bad thing. I do think it is over-exaggerated in Sweden though.

The same good friend and also mentor who gave me the book said the very obvious to me last year when we worked together: “The most difficult thing is to listen.” It may seem like a very trivial task but most people only hear or read what they want to. The importance of this becomes more important as your responsibility and need for leadership grow.

I usually recall that moment often these days mainly as part of my work.

The hardest thing is to listen. To really listen. Wise words.

In a way I wonder why, and in a way I understand completely why. What amazes me is that it seems to me that people who claim to feel for others and would like to get their voices heard have a hard time to really listen. Or maybe it is me who is not really listening here. I guess it is as simple as the more you care about something, the harder it is to really see that thing in different lights, in the “true” lights, whatever “true” lights means.

The most important thing is to learn to listen and probably also when not to listen. Interesting enough this is a very important element in all stages of creating social media.

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Always On vs Sometimes off… again.
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I met Marko Ahtisaari, former manager for Design Strategy at Nokia but now part of Blyk, in early October 2005 as he was a guest speaker at my fellowship at Stanford. He had written a blog about Blogging over Las Vegas which brings up the future challenges for the next generation of cellphone technology. The blog is still very much well-worth reading. Interesting enough I stumbled upon a blog entry by Justin Oberman. The blog entry points to a Forbes article “Can you hear me now?”.

My personal opinion is torn here. I do believe technology can solve a lot of issues and be an incredible tool when executed well. I however do believe that we sometimes rush into the solutions and do not well enough specify the problem we aim to solve. I daily see a lot of startups here in the valley with solutions that I cannot imagine we need. I see people who get almost obsessed by Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn and the very much over-hyped Twitter. In Sweden, there has been reports of teenagers showing signs of depression and stress symptoms because of social communities.

Is this really sane? Not at all. Who is to blame? We all are. We let the technology control our lives. I can just look at myself. I spend way too much time in front of the computer (even though there are obvious reasons for it). I have begun to more frequently call the person up rather than to email or IM him or her. I very early wrote two longer pieces on the subject in October 2005  – Going offline with future cellphones and Romeo and Juliet – the virtual version :).

I think we all should try our best to take the control back from our technology intense society.

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Is all technology socially disruptive in a bad way?
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Ken Banks, an old friend, send me a Skype message tonight that he had mentioned me in his blog. Thanks Ken! You can read his entry here.

It got my mind starting to think about technology and the impacts of technology on communities. Is all technology socially disruptive in a bad way?

The importance of interfaces between humans and technology has grown tremendously lately and, regardless how strange it might sound, in some ways too much. Everyone is talking about the user centric design. Companies are popping up all around the globe specializing in this very mysterious design. As with Web 2.0 I think this is hyped and the term is overused, but maybe there is a need for this hype. I don’t know. What I do know is that very few really fully grasp what it is all about. Drawing cool diagrams on a whiteboard and using hyped language don’t count, nor does only talking about it. It is simply to provide a solution that makes sense to a human being and not the technologist solely.

Yee, wiz. Not that chocking right?

Anyhow…

For me the more important aspect is that the (technology) society is starting to realize that the any technology introduction into any community is disruptive to the social pattern in whatever shape or form you introduce it. Here the community aspects of the social web has had good impact and accelerated this discussion. To make a very long story short: We should always try to foresee parts of the disruptive behavior or make the technology as adaptive as possible for the end user (community). The importance of this only becomes more important when talking about introducing technology in the less fortunate societies of this world.

I am always extremely chocked when I hear people talk about the mobile web in the developing world. Of many reasons of course but two main ones can be identified: first there is no mobile web (yet), and secondly people discussing the mobile web don’t talk nor invite people from those regions to seminars and conferences on the same. I have written about the first aspect before and please read my friend Ken Banks reflection on the absence of a whole continent in the discussions on the mobile web.

The people I have met so far who grasp the social disruptiveness of technology the best have all done something in the real world whether that is built houses in their spare time, taken care of real animals on there own 24/7 365 days per year, or lived in a developing country. Pick your flavor there. Just do something that is real. Be a farmer for one day and learn from the experience. The importance is that they have experienced the reality, not read about it in a book…

It shouldn’t be a surprise… It just shouldn’t. 

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