Whoah. Philosophy alert. I just want to warn you. I get this way from time to time.
Janet Fouts, who is a fellow panel member on our Game Changers podcast/internet radio show, raised the issue of Google’s Social Search. As I dug more and more into it, I was struck by the brilliance of Google’s strategy. I could also see how this idea of Social Search fit within the larger meta trends percolating through the web discussions lately. Two of those are the Semantic Web and the idea of Vendor Relationship Management as a continuation of the customer/individual focus of the web.
There are two ways that you can look at the internet. You can see it as an engineered network – clever, but well conceived and well planned. Engineered behaviour is there. It sets the standards, regulates the technology and regulates all of those things that allow the internet to function. In large part it was the brilliance of the intial technical design that allowed the internet to emerge from ARPAnet as the dominant form of communication in our time.
But you don’t have to have an avatar in Second Life to realize that there is more to the web than simply an engineered structure. When you stand back and look at it, you see an emergent behaviour. It truly is more than the sum of it’s technical parts.
There’s always been a little bit of a war between the engineered and the emergent. The internet is just one place where that war erupts. Who is right? Both.
Before you start trotting me off to the “home for the new aged” let me tell you, you young whipersnapper, that this is not as idiotic or wish-washy as it sounds. Believe it or not, it was proven long ago that something could indeed exist in two states at the same time.
Take light for example. Is it a particle? Or is it a wave? If you know the answer, get ready to yawn. If you don’t, get ready for me to blow your little mind. It is both. That’s right — it can be proven in the realm of physics that light is both a wave and a particle. What makes the difference? It turns out (mind blowing time again) that what makes the difference is in what you are measuring or observing. If you measure for waves, it’s a wave. If you set up instruments to measure particles, it will be a particle.
The observer and what they are looking for determines what fundamental property light has. If you took high school physics, you probably have encountered this idea that the observer affects the experiment – you probably just treated it like many do – a theoretical exercise.
In fact, that’s where it’s lived for many years. In what is called a thought experiment, the most famous of which is Schrodinger’s Cat. I’m not going to repeat the whole thing, you can use Wikipedia the same as I can. The essence is that the famous cat exists in two states – living and dead. The event is only crystalized when the observer looks into the box.
What’s the point in all this? Well, everyone is trying to label the next big theory in the development of the internet, but the one that makes the most sense to me is David Berner-Lee’s idea that our next move is to the semantic internet. In a nut shell, the semantic internet stores data in the classic fashion, but it labels it with highly symbolic identifiers in addition to the regular characteristics that drive storage and search. The semantic internet, taken to it’s extreme, allows us to have a structure to information that is based not on a top down hierarchical structure (the data model) but on the emergent properties of the various semantic links and webs as seen through the eyes and ears of the observer.
It’s a beautiful balance of engineered and emergent. On one hand, we have the standards and protocol structures necessary for storage and retrieval. Within that, there is the capacity to engage at the symbolic or semantic level. You invent your own internet by your observations and your collaborations with others.
At this point, the semantic web is still in its infancy, but with Berners-Lee and others of his ilk embracing it, we can be certain that its at least a possibility, if not an inevitability.
Why does it even matter? As I point out to those who question new developments like social media, what we are doing today is still rather primitive and doesn’t even scratch the surface of what the real time collaborative internet will be in the future. Outside of a few visionaries, I’m not sure that many of us can even envision that future. We are, after all, as I have said earlier, “immigrants on the internet” and like earlier waves of immigrants, we have hopes and dreams, but our vision of the future is limited by our current experience. Could my ancestors have imagined what we have become? I doubt it. The future, as Yogi Berra said, “ain’t what it used to be.”
For those who do see the patterns emerging in those swirling images out there, the potential is enormous. The semantic web will help us tame the information tsunami by allowing us different ways to associate with the information, extending our reach more along the lines of how we understand knowledge.
There is an emerging theoretical base which claims that our brains actually remember things on two levels. We have episodic memory and semantic memory. Episodic memory is history, dates, time and even based. Semantic memory is about learning and associating. We really do need both. One gives us the immediacy to remember what we did today. The other allows us to generalize and imagine new concepts.
The current web caters to our episodic memory. It’s facts, info, time etc. What I call the information tsunami swamps that episodic memory. Which is okay, because the facts are out there and you can google them when you need it. The internet extends our episodic memory.
The semantic web offers us another potential — it might extend our semantic memory. That allows us to not just retrieve and filter, but to combine and imagine — collectively.
Suddenly the tables are turned and the cat is looking out at us. Are we there? Or not?
February 4, 2010
Uncommon Sense
“It don’t make no sense that common sense don’t make no sense no more.” John Prine, one of my favourite song-writers used this as a line in one of his songs. It’s a classic for Prine.
I love Prine’s work. Why? Because, especially as I get older, at least part of me becomes more an more like his characters. I look back nostalgically at a past where things were simpler, more understandable. I think to some extent, most of us do.
That idea of a time when things made “common sense” is one those archetypal memories. You find it throughout history – a yearning for that simpler time.
So it has a seductive appeal.
So why isn’t it more prevalent?
You have to know what I mean. All of us use the phrase at one time or another – usually to describe the behaviour of someone — or more often — something else. Because in many cases, the people who don’t have it — or don’t get it are part of large organizations. Big companies. Big beauracracies. Big government – especially big government. These are the usual suspects, the groups that prove that common sense isn’t – if you know what I mean.
And it frustrates us. It frustrates me, anyway. Even though I know it’s not true.
Little known fact – I’m also a song writer. It was once part of my livelihood. I actually have a gold record hanging on my wall. But that was, like my longing for common sense, a time long ago. Now music is more of a hobby.
But I did write a song that responded to John Prine’s melancholy appeal to the days of yesteryear. My song started like this:
“Things ain’t like they used to be, in fact they never were…”
And it’s true. There was no halcyon days when common sense reigned supreme. It’s a fiction. Think about it. When was this golden time. Let’s go back. Was it the 1980’s – the disco era? I’m not even going there. Sorry.
Was it the 1960’s? Peace, love and all that? Well, no. The 60’s were chaotic. Nothing made sense. Trust me. I was there.
Was it the 50’s? I don’t think so. You might believe it — if all you knew about the 50’s was from “Leave it to Beaver”. The 50’s was a tremendously uptight time, with McCarthism, ideas that you could win a nuclear war and a type of civil repression that Martin Luther King would fight against a decade later. I could go back. Hitler. The Depression. World War I and on and on.
There was no great time when common sense made sense. The world has always been chaotic and often troubling.
So why the appeal of “common sense”. Why do we yearn nostalgically for it? Well for one reason, it does take us back to a time when we were more certain. For many of us, that represents a time in our youth.
“Common sense” is just all the predjudices that you accumulate by the age of 18.” Albert Einstein said that.
Yet, if you have children who are around the age of 18 — or even if you are just honest about how “right” you were at that age, you have to be a little aghast. If you have an 18 year old you’ll shake your head at how “black and white” the world seems to them.
Now that’s okay — if you are 18. You have an excuse. You don’t have the benefit of experience to teach you that things are not always as simple as they seem. As a part time university prof, I spend a fair bit of time trying to convey this to my students. Things are not always simple — or black and white.
Some of them get it. Some don’t.
Even with the benefit of years of experience some don’t get it. They somehow go through life and never appreciate the real complexities. It’s as if some people reaching my age have 30 years of experience and others have 1 year of experience repeated 30 times.
Again – what is the harm? Well, if it makes you nostalgic, there’s probably not much harm. I no longer believe that the solution to global military conflict is to simply “give peace a chance” — but I do appreciate the sincerity of those views and I respect them to this day. But I realize that thigs are more complex than that. But even if you don’t get it. Even if you sit at the dinner table and rant about how things used to be — if your delusions are your own, there’s probably not that much harm.
Where the harm comes is if you have those views and you are in a position to influence an organization, a company or god forbid — a country. That’s where the harm comes in.
I could bring up a ton of examples of why common sense just doesn’t work in complex situations. But I saw a great example this week on the TED talks.
I’ve kept a link to the video here. You can watch it for yourself. For those who want the bluffer’s guide, the presenter beautifully shows how our common sense approach to motivation flies in the face of scientific evidence. He shows, quite conclusively, that when creative approaches to a solution or task are required, external rewards or bonuses are not effective motivation. In fact, he presents pretty clear evidence that this type of reward system actually decreases effectiveness.
The science is not new. The experiments that Dan Pink refers to in the video date back to 1945 and as he rightly points out, form the basis of most modern behavioural theory. Most but not all. Why hasn’t it made it’s way into management science and compensation theory? Can in be that those who are engaged in compensation are untrained? Could it be that they have not studied behavioural science? It’s possible but not likely. Are they recommending the right solutions but being ignored? Possibly.
For whatever reason, flying in the face of good science we continue to see the one trick pony of compensation being used where it is proven to be least effective — with creative jobs and knowledge workers. Want performance? Offer a bonus. The fact that the science doesn’t support this? Nonsense! Common sense will tell you…
And off we go. Back to a world, as Peter Senge once described it, where a group of people with IQs over 130 go into a room and make decisions that you would expect with an IQ of 80. Even confronted with the facts, people will go back to what they term common sense, which is, as Einstein so aptly described, merely their own prejudices and sometimes their own agenda. Denial, as my friend John Thorp says, “is not a river in Egypt” – it’s a fact of modern corporate life.
That’s why we still claim that salaries and bonuses are so important in attracting and motivating senior employees and knowledge workers. After all, that’s common sense, isn’t it? Unfortunately, it may make good sense but it doesn’t make good science.
We aren’t going to change the game using “common sense” – however seductive that idea is. “Common science” might do the trick. We’d be better off paying more attention to that – even when it tells us things that we don’t want to hear.
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