One of the unusual things about social media in the business context is the dramatic way it impacts on business culture. Dennis Howlett wrote a long and interesting piece on his Zdnet blog about the Enterprsie 2.0 debate, or lack thereof. It is one that is intertwined with much of what I do, using blogs and wikis to build communication networks. Dennis writes:

I don’t need to recrunch the ’social’ thing but it is an important factor that in my mind amply illustrates the lack of intellectual rigor around solution creation. It is good to see that in the discourse even my sharpest critics have acknowledged the emphasis and use of ’social’ as a dreadful mistake.

I think the ‘social’ thing is such an issue because it is one that very few technologists are able to get to grips with. There are notable exceptions, Dennis and Stowe Boyd amongst others. In the business 2.0 context the word ‘social’ has become burdened with a whole set of meaning that has little to do with the ‘social’ (small ‘s’) or ‘Social‘ aspects of business, but it is still an essential part of the debate, as Dennis goes on to say:

Last Friday I met a pal of mine who is in the business of implementing change. He argued that people don’t like change. It is too disruptive for many. Think about all those contradictory stats that talk about dis-satisfaction with technology but then the same people would not change what they have. Familiarity is comforting. At a time when many people are more concerned about job security than shiny new toys, it should be no surprise that implementing an E2.0 project will have a slim chance of success without the sponsorship and active participation of top management.

Finally, and here I am putting on my social psychologist’s hat. The nature-nurture debate that has rumbled on for more than 50 years among socpsych types shows no signs of abating. These key concepts have a place in our understanding of what can work but are largely ignored in the discourse.

The traditional nature/nurture debate Dennis mentions has formed the basis of many an undergraduate essay over the years (“Are you a product of your genes, or of your environment? Discuss”). However, it has been replaced by the more careful study of epigenetics – understanding the way that the environment interacts with our genes, enabling and disabling them. Conversely, our genetic make-up also influences our environment in a transactional sequence that changes it as it changes us. An irritable baby that never sleeps is eventually going to have tired, irritable parents. And how those irritable parents interact with the baby and nurture it may shape which of its genes become activated or deactivated, shaping its development.

And so, back to social computing, Web 2.0 and social media in business. When Dennis’ friend cites the importance of “the sponsorship and active participation of top management” it is worth thinking about why that is so important. The reason usually isn’t the obvious. Management sponsorship is a form of social proof that taps into the social dimension of business – culture. Business culture can help or hinder the adoption of 2.0 technologies, but 2.0 technologies are disruptive to the traditional power-bases and communication structures within the business. The two things dance an intertwined-transactional dance. Social software changes the cutlure, but culture also changes the way that the software is used. For me  that creates a demand for careful ‘social’ design, to get the technologies adopted, and then careful change-management to pick up the pace and the full benefits in creating a more dynamic and innovative business culture. A place where ideas emerge, are captured and nurtured, and delivered to customers.

Lastly, back to a comment in Dennis’ post that caused a wry smile as I sat reading it: “cult-ure” versus “culture”. Some businesses have very, very strong cultures. They resist change because they are as much cult as company. When the cult is working, that is amazingly powerful – they preserve their culture even with rapid growth, and smash through any obstacles in their way. I think you know the kinds of business we are talking about. But, and this is a big but, when the market changes, and the cult does not, the business heads for the rocks. Traditional change programs almost inevitably fail, but even in these toughest of environments, I believe that ‘social’ tools can create change.

The traditional IT and management paradigm is that we are a collection of individuals using IT tools. That frame misses the most powerful forces that business leaders have at their finger tips. A business is a community, and sometimes multiple communities, that communicate and interact with each other (both intra- and inter-). That interaction is increasingly dominated by technology-mediated communication, and that communication (or collaboration) technology is less neutral than people think. It can be culture forming.

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I should start by explaining how I come at this problem space. By history I am a network guy. I spent most of the 90′s thinking about networks, breaking networks, building networks and alternating between creating the mess and clearing it up as the Internet grew. More recently I’ve buried myself in the human aspects of technology, leading in businesses and studying psychology. My primary interest is in perceptual psychology – how we interact with the world and how that affects cognitive functions like communication.

Social media smashes all of these worlds together in a wonderful way. It can be challenging at times, as most of the people I interact with come from that funny bit in-between the two worlds: the applications. This post draws on a talk I gave at Social Media Camp London, under the tongue-in-cheek title “six-degrees-of-separation-now-3″ – It is also a clarification of the Twitter exchange between myself @timoreilly and @monkchips and subsequent RedMonk Post: “Asymetrical Follow: A Core Web 2.0 Pattern“. Just for good measure, it also includes some thoughts from the film US Now, which I had the chance to see at the RSA this week:

I’m not going to touch on the eGov issues raised in Us Now – that’s a whole other post. I do want to share some thoughts on the way that relationships and communication are modeled in social software, and the blending of “conversational” mediums and broadcast ones.

First, let’s clarify some terms about “relationships” in social media / social software. I’m blogging, you are reading. Great. A blog with no comments is something I used to call a narrowcast model – a bit like TV (broadcast), but with less viewers. Information goes to a select bunch of subscribers. Twitter and a number of other social platforms codify this reader-driver subscription model as “following”. You follow people on twitter, or follow a blog via RSS, which means you choose to receive communication from that person.

In other platforms this type of relationship is referred to as being a ‘fan’. Whilst that term has a lot of baggage, it expresses a specific social communication desire nicely: Let’s say someone is a fan of Stephen Fry (in the traditional sense). They probably want to read all about Stephen Fry’s exploits, see photos, read stories, you get the idea. However, I’m guessing that they would be a little weirded out if Stephen Fry started asking for photos of them, etc…, etc… OK, there’s a whole bunch of issues in there, but just hold this one thought: We have a construct of a ‘fan’ relationship in society, built from the prevalence of broadcast media. It is an asymmetric relationship. Broadcast, like narrowcast, means I consume, but I can not (easily) respond. I listen, but I don’t speak. Or framed differently, you can send to me, but not receive from me. For better or for worse, it is asymmetric.

The standard relationship model in Facebook, Instant messaging systems, and pretty much every collaboration tool out there is that of a ‘friend’. I follow you and you follow me. It is a mutual agreement for bi-directional communication, a symmetric relationship. A ‘friendship’, in social media terms at least, is a mutual ‘follow’. Friends can have conversations – two way communication – in a way that fans (and broadcasters) can not. Facebook introduced fan pages to deal with ‘fans’, and create an asymmetric model. In blogs, the fan model is inherent. Unless you choose to comment on this post, I know nothing about you, aside from some aggregated behavioural data.

OK. Fans. Followers. Friends. Symmetric. Asymmetric. Broadcast. Conversation. A useful vocabulary, even if some of the terms are loaded, and you can walk around sounding like a social media ‘expert’. Let me just say something here:

Broadcast is good!

There, I said it. Depending on your background, you’ll have either shrugged your shoulders, nodded in agreement or screamed at me and immediately unfollowed me on Twitter. The wonderful thing about language: Words are more than words. They have complex mappings on to all sorts of meanings and memories in our minds. Some of those meanings are shared, and some are not. Let’s unpick ‘broadcast’.

If you want to get lots of (hopefully important) data to lots of people, then broadcast is the most efficient way of doing it. That’s why networks – from Television to computing – use broadcast. It is good and efficient. It is also one of the reasons marketers have traditionally loved broadcast. However, broadcast carries an association with asymmetric communication. Shouting as some would have it. If you have read the clue train manifesto (and you should), you’ll know that it’s all about the Conversation, not about shouting or broadcast. The difference comes in the listening – communication with symmetry.

Broadcast is bad?

So, in social media, throwing the ‘B’ word around is bad. For me, it is still just a technical term, and a very efficient form of communication. Anyway, with that, now on to that twitter exchange:

monkchips: symmetrical Follow is a core pattern in social networking, so much so it can cause Scaling Problems for networks not designed for it

timoreilly: RT @monkchips: Asymmetrical Follow is a core pattern in social networking; it can cause Scaling Problems for networks not designed 

bmje: @timoreilly @monkchips Asymmetric follow is a hack in social software to enable ‘relationships’ to scale. It is broadcast, not conversation”

timoreilly: @bmje Not so. I follow 400; am followed by 16,000. But I respond to lots of people (like you) who I didn’t know before. Not just broadcast.”

bmje: @timoreilly the wonderful power off twitter and good people – its asymmetry is only partial, due to the power of @’s 

A side note, James cites my quote saying:

There are those that would would say their is something “wrong” with Asymmetrical Follow, which I would argue is just a function of the power laws you see in any community. For example, yesterday Benjamin Ellis…

I definitely don’t think I said it was wrong – quite the opposite. It’s a very useful hack for enabling conversations to scale. I’m guessing that Tim also missed what I meant, since his tweet reads like he thought I was accusing him of the ultimate social media sin – “broadcasting” – see above – and having briefly met Tim, it isn’t the answer I’d have expected from him. Of course I could be wrong. The joys of theory of mind and the limitation of 140 characters. On the contrary, Tim is a very active listener. Asymmetric follow is a way of allowing a form of broadcast, and thus allowing scaling, but all is not what it seems.

The conversation demonstrates something quite different. It shows an unusual property of the Twitter platform:- its ‘follow’ function is not really asymmetric. Tim responded to my message, but Tim isn’t ‘following’ me on twitter – which is fine by the way – although I’m sure I’d be happy if he did, I doubt he’d find me very interesting though!

So, how did Tim get my message if he wasn’t following me? Here’s the magic: If you are on Twitter, anyone can ‘@’ you – essentially directing a message towards you, even if you aren’t following them. It is actually quite a complicated hack and in the great traditions of a good hack, you can fiddle with the settings - see this post on the twitter blog - what people see depends on how they have set up Twitter and what client they use to read messages. This partial symmetry is one of the things that causes Twitter to work so well, and it gets around one of the issues that stops conversations from scaling. Twitter has cracked the broadcast problem with a clever filter.

The Broadcast Problem.

That broadcast stuff. I said it was efficient, but that isn’t the whole picture though. Back in the early 90′s I was responsible for looking after a particularly large computer network. Over the course of a month or two, something strange started to happen. The computers got slower. And slower. And slower. It was a mystery. We hadn’t changed the applications on the computers, or done anything else we thought might slow them down.

After digging around, we found the problem. Some of the applications on the network had started to use broadcast messages rather than the usual unicast (directed) messages. This reduced the traffic on the network, since each message was only sent once, rather than individually to each machine. Very efficient. However, because it was broadcast, EVERY machine on the network had to listen to all of those messages to work out if they were relevant or not. That took a reasonable chunk of their processing power. One machine sent a message, several hundred had to receive it. A little bit of processing power consumed a lot of everyone else’s. Now that is asymmetric.

Conversations Don’t Scale (well).

Imagine if everyone you knew sent you every communication they wrote during the course of their day. Your inbox might feel like that sometimes, but it is nothing compared to what it would actually be like. Now imagine that you had to reply to every single one of those messages. I don’t know about you, but I’d break out into a sweat just thinking about it. Imagine if every viewer of a TV program wrote in with a question. Hang on a minute. You don’t have to wait, it already happened “Strictly Message Board: What Happened”. The result: communication melt down. And that wasn’t even with everyone writing in.

Conversations are tricky things. Huge chunks of our brains are dedicated to making conversations work. I’m not even talking about understanding the conversation, just the sequencing of it. Conversations involve “turn-taking“. Turn-taking is one of the basic mechanisms that enables conversations. Try talking to someone and listening to them at the same time. Oh, you know someone like that already? OK. More seriously, I hope you see the issue, our brains aren’t wired that way.

Now, think about a group conversation. That turn-taking is still going on, just like an old mainframe computer switching between multiple tasks, the listening is divided between the group members. Now think about that group getting bigger. What happens to the amount of listening time? Well, the available listening time stays the same, but the number of people who want to talk grows. Everyone has to make do with a smaller slice of the pie. Conversations don’t scale. Really. Unless some of those new members are just listeners, but then we are back to broadcast.

You’re still reading? Deepest respect! Let me stitch some of these threads back together then. Do you remember “Us Now?” – scroll back to the beginning and watch at least the first few seconds if you missed it.

“More people can say more things to more people than ever in history,” Clay Shirky.

I’d not dispute that, but we must remember that it doesn’t extrapolate to everyone can say everything to everyone. Let’s not kill ourselves trying. Technology has cracked the problem of enabling someone to say something to (almost) everyone. However, we are tired of TV and of broadcast marketing.

Now, technology must find a way for everyone to say something to someone, without breaking that ‘someone’ in the process – be they a politician in government, a genius CEO, or an ever so slightly eclectic techno-psychologist. That requires some very clever filtering.

Has social media cracked the problem? I’d say not yet, but I will exit stage left with this thought from Erica Grigg, of Carbon Outreach, who said this to me (via twitter of course):

carbonoutreach: @bmje maybe social media does goodness to scale!? 

That it does.

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Reading a recent post on David Tebbutt’s blog – You calling me a consultant? – took me to: What’s the real value of social software in enterprise from Adriana Lukas, which leads us to this post…

My longest experience with business social software has been with wikis. I first used a Wikis in a businesses about ten years ago, and have now seen a number of projects across different companies. Case studies are still hard to come by, partly because introducing wikis touches on some sensitive issues. It is not just about the technology, it is about a cultural shift. In many command-and-control cultures information is (seen as) power, but social software moves people towards sharing it. That is a big change.

Be Careful What You Measure

The major benefits of wiki technology are tangential ones. As such they present challenges for metrics, but I have seen multi-million dollar roll outs of ‘traditional’ applications hit their metrics, but be a productivity disaster. Metrics cut both ways, and there is the risk of MacNamara’s fallacy:

“The first step is to measure whatever can easily be measured. This is OK as far as it goes. The second step is to disregard that which can’t be easily measured or to give it an arbitrary quantitative value. This is artificial and misleading. The third step is to presume that what can’t be measured easily really isn’t important. This is blindness. The fourth step is to say that what can’t be easily measured really doesn’t exist. This is suicide.”

The quote is from Charles Handy, but it came via wikipedia and I’ve already said enough about wikipedia research. The Adam Curtis BBC program ‘The Trap’ explored this topic well, if you have the chance to watch it, it is well worth it.

Measuring human systems, like users with a wiki, is non-trivial. You change what you measure, simply by measuring it. This is not to say that things shouldn’t be measured, but they should be measured with caution. It might sound a little trite, but there is truth in saying that the most valuable things are invaluable (or immeasurable).

Wikis are most successful when they are introduced while the company is still small and growing. That way they become part of the culture. Not to say that big businesses can’t be successful with wikis, but it requires a good training program around them. The only wiki-failures I have found were in very large companies, where the technology was introduced with minimal training and no clear objectives, and predictable results.

What are the major benefits of a wiki to a business?

These apply just as well to any form of social workgroup, not just to businesses. They also apply for groups of two to hundreds, but the scaling of wikis is a topic for another day.

Knowledge Availability

Wikis remove much of the chance factor in finding knowledge in the business. Most intranets contain woefully out of date information, through no fault of the intranet owners. Users are left to chance upon the right person who is ‘in the know’. Wikis also reduce the dependence on key knowledge workers for answers to common questions.

Even if the answer isn’t on the wiki, at least users can glean an idea of who to ask (based on who has been adding what to the wiki). This speeds up the business and offloads the burden on senior staff. This is especially important when you are in a hiring phase. No new hire pack? Search the wiki.

Change Control

Basic, but missing from so many information systems in common use. The ability to rollback and track changes is inherent in most wiki software. This can be a life saver and is why wikis are the enterprise CMS of choice for me.

Knowledge Permanence

Wikis are the most constructive and least disruptive way of documenting projects that I have found to date. If someone leaves, at least some of their knowledge remains within the organisation, on the wiki. The same is true for extended absence due to illness, travel or long holidays.

Knowledge Creation

Sparks come from striking two things together. The same is true with knowledge. I have watched brilliant ideas emerge in real-time on a wiki page, right in front of my eyes. Something new on the wiki combined with something someone already knows leads to new knowledge in the business, across multiple people.

Geographic Freedom

Wikis work across geographic boundaries and across time zones. That supports remote offices and remote workers on a global basis. This is key to keeping a business competitive. Water cooler chat is good, but it doesn’t scale across national boundaries.

Cross Platform Portability

Because wikis are web based, the only client required is a browser. That means wikis work across different operating systems and even for mobile devices like Blackberries and smart phones.

So, hopefully now you can see why I am a wiki fan.

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There are some conversations that we are afraid of. An awkward subject raised with a boss. A difficult exchange with a close relative. Explaining bad news. These are understood.

There are also conversations that are awkward for a business. A discussion on the web about problems with a product, poor financial results, internal conflicts – all made public. I have seen all of these recently, and as a marketeer I know that they ‘damage the brand’. The conversations may or may not be factually accurate. Regardless, people still take something away from them, and a mark is made.

Most people see PR as about getting the message out. It has turned into Press Relations or Media Relations, rather than Public Relations. The new world of PR will be about engaging in conversations to persuade people, which was the very old world of Public Relations.

If you are in the business of persuading people, it is much easier if you are persuading them of something that is believable, credible. Something that is true and defensible. Thus the demand today for authentic companies, for ‘authentic brands’.

I observe, with an ironic twinge, the parallel growth of the personal branding industry. Will people and companies swap places? Will we end up with a juxtaposed world of authentic businesses, with people trying to project an image? Don’t misread me. I think that personal branding has a contribution to make, but as a marketeer I know that it also opens up Pandora’s box.

Good branding today is about being authentic, but most branding theory comes from the old ‘one way’ days of “sticking lipstick on the pig”. There is a big difference, one focusses on the message, the other on the messenger. You can fool some of the people some of the time, but you can’t fool all of the people, all of the time. With one way media and PR, the branding conversation was a tricky one to manage, but it could be managed.

With social media, some of the people are connected with some of the other people. Customers are better connected and the media doesn’t own the conversation anymore. It isn’t clear who will own it, if anyone. And, actually, it doesn’t matter. A new set of skills is required. Now we are all PR people, but we must focus on the messenger, more that the message. Who is it that you are? What’s your brand?

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I was wandering the streets of London this week, in a productive way of course, when I saw a familiar face. I nodded and he nodded back. “Are you who I think you are?” I said. “Well, that very much depends on who you think I am, doesn’t it?” he said.

As it turns out, he was the one and only Boris Johnson. As we chatted, walking together towards city hall, I have to say I was impressed. If I had a vote, I might even vote Boris for London Mayor. It must be draining having people saying, “Are you who I think you are?” all day, sorry Boris!

We are all increasingly public figures these days, with the proliferation of social networking (Facebook, LinkedIn, …), messaging (like twitter), and blogging. All of these systems create new challenges, as aspects of our identity are increasingly digitised and stored.

We aren’t that clean and distinct individuals. I’m not talking about our personal hygiene, but about us as social objects. In the words of Paul Simon, “one man’s ceiling is another man’s floor.” In the case of digital identities, one man’s sealing is another man’s flaw:

Take Robert Scoble and Facebook. Scoble used a script from Plaxo to read information from Facebook, syncing his (very large) social graph from one to the another. However, Facebook like to seal data into their systems. For Scoble this was a flaw. You can read more in the article “Facebook bans Scoble…” by the ever present Mike Butcher of Tech Crunch UK. There is also more detail on the Plaxo script in wired.: “Scoble’s Slap…” .

One of the issued this stirred up is exactly who’s data is it on Facebook anyway? And what rights do different people have over it?

• Is it yours? It is your social graph after all, which is part of your digital identity.
• Is it Facebook’s? They created the platform that crystallised and stored the data – see the Facebook terms and conditions.
• Does it belong to your friends? You are part of their social graph and identity too.

The philosophical answer is probably a resounding ‘yes’ to all three, but that doesn’t help in the real world. The portability of social data is going to be a serious issue for a while, both for businesses and for users. Social tools have some great productivity benefits, but they are raising many new challenges.

There is a reasonable desire to easily move data from one silo to another. This is being championed by the open data movement. They are driving ways to make identity data more portable, but this forces the question of data ownership. If you want to follow more on this, I recommend Jeremy Keith’s blog, starting here. The standards and technology exist to do this (APML, OPML, RDF, microformats, openID, …). It is a question of them being used. Why have a different login and profile for every supplier and system that I use? Why have to re-import all of my contacts and connections. The business world faces the same challenges of cross business identity, and also stands to benefit – one person’s CRM is another’s VRM as they say.

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The technology used in businesses is changing rapidly. The technologies we use in the office today would have been the stuff of science fiction just a few decades ago. New technologies are arriving faster than most businesses can adapt and adopt. Within this change is the potential for both increasing, and decreasing, productivity. What is around the corner?

I’m am convinced that the business technology of the future is the consumer technology of today. In past decades technology flowed from business use to consumer use. Think of things like mobile phones and email, which started off as business tools, then became affordable and accessible at home. That flow is now reversing. The productivity tools of the future are in use by the youth of today, and they will bring them into businesses as they join the workforce. It will be the consumerization of IT.

Back in December, I was at Chinwag Live, Xmas Futures, Crystal Balls, an event that gathers some of the most intelligent figures from the world of digital marketing to have a shot at predicting where the industry will be in 5 years time. Now, if property prices are anything to go by, the newspapers are having trouble agreeing on what happened last month, so predicting technology five years out is a long shot! But this is an arena that is on the cutting edge of change and gets to see just that little bit further ahead.

The event confirmed many of my current thoughts, as well as being a great chance to have some meaningful debate. Here I am with the legendary Sam Michel, CEO of Chinwag, at the end of the session as we mulled over the discussions (there is a podcast here).

Social media is becoming more and more prominent. Jon Bains – Co-Founder of Lateral – raised the issue of Facebook versus LinkedIn. For me, the two are complimentary. I use Facebook for personal friends and LinkedIn for work associates, and some people I connect to on both – you’ll find a link to my LinkedIn profile in the about page. They represent two very different faces, excuse pun, of social networking applications. The teen-laden, wild partying Facebook, and the straight-laced executive LinkedIn. Now I hear of more and more people using even Facebook for business networking.

Today’s business leaders and tomorrow’s will be very different. The fact is that social networking tools, in one form or another, are here to stay. I predict they will be standard tools for many large businesses in years to come, although run on private, secure intranets.

Today most IT managers and business leaders are missing out on the potential productivity benefits of these tools. They provide an amazing ability to create and strengthen social bonds in businesses and enable people to find the resources they need to get their job done. In years gone by, the resources we needed to get the job done were ‘things’. Where is the plough? Where is the hammer?

Today, in a knowledge-led business world, they are the people with knowledge and skills. Where is someone who understands this? Where is the person who can interpret this data? Where is someone who has done this before? In a large company, with many staff telecommuting, you can’t get those answers by shouting across the desk anymore. Something else is needed.

Microsoft sponsored some recent research on skills businesses need, which is covered in an interesting BBC article here. The modern work place demands both people skills and IT skills. These two skill sets are becoming intertwined, as computers become the medium through which we communicate. Social Networking tools are powerful at expanding our social network, both in business and at home. Used badly, they can be a massive drain in terms of time and stress (see “web 2.0 as the new master” by Maz Hardy). Used wisely, they just might be one of the productivity tools of the future.

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It has been a great week, I have done lots of things and met lots of people. However, I haven’t blogged, and I feel the poorer for it. Writing is gradually becoming a part of my identity. This post is with thanks to Ann Michael of Manage to Change and Liz Strauss of Successful Blog, who started the chain of thought when I had the pleasure of meeting them. It also relates to a couple of posts on Ann’s blog. By the way, Ann and Liz are two excellent people that I highly recommend spending time with. So, from writing to identity… Technologist or not, it is a critical issue today. It is a fascinating topic too.

Depending on your background, you might understand identity in the sense of personal identity, or in computer security or perhaps even corporate identity. What is your identity? Why is it so important?

From an IT perspective, identity is critical in making sure that the right people have access to the right information, protecting the user and the information. From a personal productivity perspective, understanding our identity helps us work with our nature, rather than against it.

The Start of Identity

When I began using computer systems, shortly after the dinosaurs roamed the earth, I had a ‘login’ and password. It was a curious set of letters and digits, dished out by some guy in a lab coat with a particularly bad haircut. It didn’t tell the computer much about me, but it kept the riff-raff out of the system and my data reasonably private. My first encounter with identity was when I started working in the security arena. There was a need for a more meaningful view of ‘who’ a user was. Identity captured additional information, such as the user’s role and their membership of various ‘groups’. This meant the system might know that the user was an administrator in the marketing department. Adding properties made life as an IT manager simpler, because the computer or the firewall had a better concept of who that user was. The users could be managed in groups, rather than as individuals.

As the Internet blossomed and more on-line services emerged, I ended up with multiple identities. Today the number of identities I manage has exploded. Thankfully things have started to converge on the email address as an identifier, although I have even built up a large collection of those. OpenID is an initiative that will simplify the management of identity on-line by pulling all of these identities together (see the article on Lifehacker here for an example). That may or may not be a good thing. If you want to understand where on-line identity is going, do check out the presentation “Identity 2.0” from OSCON2005, and also get an example of Dick Hardt using the Larry Lessig presentation method as a bonus.

Understanding Our Identity In The Real World

If you think identity is a complex issue in the computer world, just wait until you think about it in the real world of flesh. and blood If I put my psychology hat on, I get a completely different view of what identity means. Psychologists have been researching the human identity for over a hundred years, although there still isn’t a unified theory to understand it. One psychologist, Manford Kuhn, created the twenty statements test as a simple way to capturing a snapshot of our identity. Try it for yourself and see what you learn: Open up a text editor or grab a piece of paper and a pen and give yourself twelve minutes to write down answers the following question: “who are you?”, use statements starting “I am…”, you don’t need to write more than 20. That is, if you get that far in the twelve minutes. Give it a try now.

Look back at your answers and see if you can group any of them together or sort them. What do they tell you about yourself? Does it reveal what is important to you? You can use this information to inform your personal goals and to help yourself be more motivated, by connecting with who you are. Even in the real world, we have multiple identities. This is an interesting discussion tool in the business context for teams: “who are we?”, “we are…”

The psychologist Erik Erikson put forward the theory that we create our identity as we resolve various crises at different stages of life. This is the origin of the term ‘mid-life crisis‘. Well, I always wondered what that was all about. Whilst our core identity that remains fairly constant, our identity does evolve as we grow up and grow old. One of the big shaping factors is the social groups we relate to. By the way, that the twenty statements test only tells us what we bring to mind at a single moment in time. We are much more complex than that. You might write something completely different a few minutes later.

You Are Who You Are, Or Are You?

Our identity is a totally unique thing, computer IDs rely on that, but it is also true in the physical world. I can find a dozen Benjamin Ellis’ using Google. We might have DNA that is 99% identical, but we are still totally different. Actually, another 1% difference and one of us could be a chimpanzee. How unique are we? Even if you are a twin, you have a unique finger print and a unique set of experiences and values. To date computers have only just got as far as understanding fingerprints, increasingly used in computer security.

A new generation of web applications, such as Facebook, LinkedIn and Plaxo are changing this. They are enabling computers to add social information to their concept of identity. They map out our relationships or “connections”. This is sometimes referred to as social graphing, an exciting new technology with lots of possibilities. These new services aren’t a passive thing, because they feedback into those relationships and affect our identity, by changing our relationships.

Early services, such as Friends Reunited, create ‘long tail’ relationships (thanks to Jon Bains and Fred Bassett for the conversation at a recent Chinwag Live event). They have enabled us to resurrect old friendships by reconnecting us. In the case of Friends Reunited, it was friendships from school days. With services like Facebook and Linkedin, it is via friends of friends, as the social graph grows.

The services also make it easier to sustain a greater number of relationships, by narrow-casting our lives to each other, and supporting an ‘outer ring’ of friendships that would not otherwise be sustainable, using traditional communication methods. They affect the inner ring of relationships too, by increasing the volume and reach of our daily ‘chatter’; we know more of what is happening in our friends’ lives, enabling us to communicate within more of a common context.

The Social Media Social Experiment

We are all unwitting participants in a grand experiment that will profoundly affect identity in the next decade. Who we are connected with affects who we are, because it affects what we know and how we view ourselves. Change your friends, and you change who you compare yourself to.

With the advent of social media, a new set of social norms are forming. As a blogger, I am watching with interest as this new medium and its norms evolves. Ann Michael’s recent post, connections and respect raises an interesting point. Bloggers blog about each other, but they don’t blog about business associates. For people who straddle both worlds this can be a fine line. Recently I had a discussion with Sarah Blow on this, but I’m still not sure how it will all map out. I’ll have to ask Mike of Techcrunch UK next time I see him, as he runs around with his 3G connection. If my business is blogging, or I am blogging for my business, what goes and what doesn’t? What is ‘private’ and what is ‘public’. It isn’t just blogging. Another of Ann’s posts raised some of the workplace challenges of Facebook: “your boss on facebook“. Who to connect with and what to share with them on social networking sites? Facebook has some granularity with its “view limited profile” feature, but this is hardly matches the complexity of our real-world relationships. This just the tip of an iceberg. The boundary between what is private and public is increasingly fuzzy in the new world of social media and Internet search engines. Recently, the mystery of where a man that had been missing for five years had been was solved. Someone found a picture of him with his wife on the Internet: Google solves the missing man mystery.

New Rules for New Media

There is a whole new set of social rules to evolve in this complex world. If I post a comment to a friends wall on Facebook, all their friends see it, but some of them aren’t my friends, they might be people I’ve never even met. Communication is becoming increasingly asymmetric and unbalanced in nature with social media. What parts of your identity are personal, and what are ‘public’? It isn’t binary, we have different ‘roles’ and ‘groups’ to our real identity, different pieces of information that we share with different people. If there is a feint line between the persona you have at work and the one you have for your friends, it will blur – just look at Facebook’s beacon. How do you feel about your Facebook friends all knowing what you have been buying? For those that don’t blog or do facebook, you aren’t immune. Digital information is leaky (just ask HMRC, who write a rather sad letter to me about loosing my personal data). It can be copied, pasted, forwarded and it doesn’t decay. There are comments on-line that I made in email conversations two decades ago, that is another form of long-tail. We all leave digital artefacts behind us on a daily basis.

One thing is for sure, we are heading for a time of increased and extended transparency, regardless of wanting it or not. Computers and other people may end up with a better sense of what our identity is than we have ourselves: “you are a blogger, you are a fan of Snow Patrol, you are a purchaser of violent games, you are friends with…”. There is a positive side to all of this. Through social graphing, we can more easily discover new friends, reconnect with old ones and keep in touch with new ones. We can gain a greater sense of our identity and be part of a community. Without blogging, I wouldn’t have met any of the people mentioned in this post.

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Computer Weekly arrived in my inbox today, with the front page nearly all about businesses blocking access to Facebook, because of employees time-wasting. I am sure they have run this story before, but I was more provoked by it this time around.

For background, I have worked both in companies that would definitely block Facebook and I have worked in ones that would never block it, ever. I can see lots of arguments for and against, but I don’t understand the time wasting one. Wake up people! If your staff are time wasting, blocking Facebook is not going to cure the problem. What next? Remove the toilet paper and hide all the cups in the office? I can understand people blocking Facebook for security reasons, although if your network security depends on manually blocking URLs, then might I gently suggest that you keep your resume up to date. You might be needing it at short notice, besides, guess where the data leak is in your company?

If your users are spending hours on Facebook, your staff are either demotivated and missing their family and friends, or they have become addicted to it. Facebook might be good, but I’m not convinced that it is good enough to keep you from doing work that you feel is worthwhile and is paid. Face the truth that your offending staff are probably just unmotivated and perhaps poorly managed. This isn’t a technology problem, it is a management problem. Someone once said “you can’t talk your way out of a problem that you behaved your way into”, the technology manager’s version “you can’t use technology to get out of a problem you managed your way into”. It is time to take a good hard look at the management and the business culture and ask some tough questions. Start to create a culture of trust and accountability in the business, bringing social media into the business can actually help with that. Don’t go into denial and start randomly blocking social networking sites, there are lots of other distractions out there too. What should you think as a shareholder if you see a company blocking Facebook in the office?

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It was one of Seth Godin’s posts that kicked this thought chain off. I’m a regular follower of his blog, and normally I nod sagely at his wisdom, but for once I’m shaking my head furiously. Why? Because of the wikipedia gap. I’m thinking of it more as a chasm.

I have recently restarted academic studies and it has definitely been a shock to the system. The rigor and discipline required has reminded me quite how sloppy we are as a society when it comes to matters of knowledge and understanding. More simply put, we are rubbish at getting our facts straight and the writers we read are poor at acknowledging their sources.

One of the keys to effective leadership and successful living is summarised in this:”What’s the reality of the situation?” Start with this question, and work from there. It is a simple question, but often a very hard one to answer, accurately. Understanding the reality of the situation means sifting facts from opinions, truths from assertions and understanding from misunderstanding (see Understanding the reality of the situation Part I and Part II).

This is where I have a problem with wikipedia. I have expertise in a few areas and I know that the information on those areas in wikipedia is inaccurate, if not just plain wrong. While the pages sometimes note that the information is unvalidated or contentious, unfortunately that doesn’t stop people taking it as fact. Remember, when it comes to your brain, just like a computer: garbage in, garbage out. Once your put junk in there, it is very hard to get it out. Why have I not edited these inaccuracies? Because I know enough to know that I don’t know enough to fix them properly. Don’t get me wrong, I really like wikipedia, it can be a great starting point, it just isn’t an authoritative source on its own.

Back to Seth’s post, I believe we should be teaching children basic philosophy and critical thinking – and some research at least agrees (see: “a little bit of philosophy makes you smart, apparently“). Information should be multi-sourced and children should be encouraged to explore different perspectives and assess the information. We should do the same as adults too. Check the sources – too often we hear the same misinformation from multiple places, little realizing that the same inaccurate facts are being parroted or dressed up in new clothes as new information. Misunderstanding reality, be it academic or misunderstanding ourselves, stands in the way of good leadership and living. Inaccurate information means inaccurate decisions. It is worth fighting to establish the truth in your life, sadly it doesn’t just jump off of a web page. What are your real goals? What is really happening around you? What untruths have, or are, holding you back?

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