Herd - the hidden truth about who we are

E-addicted?

Courtesy of New Scientist technology blog, heres's a rather odd piece aboutinternet addiction, the latest excessive behaviour folk like you and I have to worry about.

Lots of readers here will fall into the "e-addict" category, I reckon. ;-)

Try the checklist from NS blog to see if you qualify:

1. Excessive use, often associated with a loss of sense of time or a neglect of basic drives
2. Withdrawal, including feelings of anger, tension, and/or depression when the computer is inaccessible
3. Tolerance, including the need for better computer equipment, more software, or more hours of use
4. Negative repercussions, including arguments, lying, poor achievement, social isolation, and fatigue

Now I'm sure at the extreme end there are a minority of individuals whose behavioural patterns are such that the diagnosis is useful and each of us knows that there are times when we too behave as if we were e-addicts and we need to get a grip. But I also suspect that the majority of folk will find the notion of e-addiction overblown and not relevant to them. And they're not wrong.

That said, it seems to me that this paper represents an interesting bit of cultural border skirmishing: an interesting collision between an opportunist attempt at a new diagnostic frame (doctors do like to medicalise things, don't they? Like all good "medical landgrabs", it gives them a sense of power and control) and the emerging social trend of the age (in which you - by dint of reading this - are probably participating).

But also by virtue of the nature of the landgrab (and the resistance you see for example in the NS blog comments), isn't it also a collision between a fearful and moralising view of human nature and a rather more optimistic or at least one? Two big views of human nature, head to head.

That said, maybe the doctor has a point worth making here: perhaps we should all get out a bit more - even into the sleet and the wild winds this Easter weekend... I'm off to see Chris and Cranach. Have fun everyone!

Hugh and that ol' Social Object thing again

Nice piece from Hugh here on Fastcompany.tv about the social object thing.

2 quotes to cut out and keep:

"Not so much how you make the wine...more how you relate to people"

"I'm trying to get away from messages...being bombarded by messages..."

Touch me

Pic c/o Jane Goodall

Great impromptu podcast today around touch and humanity in business. Thanks to the ever-stimulating Johnnie (for hosting and inviting) and Patrick (for stimulating with this piece with a post here) go listen.

Few random thoughts that stay with me:

1. Curious how it's become that "professional" = not human in any normal way
2. How strong the comments on Patrick's post polarise
3. How good Dad's Army-based management training would be...

For those who don't know, here's the Mainwaring backstory and here's some classic scenes

Read me

I'm fed up of simplistic explanations: this caused that. Or this will fix that. In business, in politics, in life.

It's now a well-documented that we in the West have a strong cognitive bias> to simplistic explanations. And thus simple solutions.

This last week I've been thinking about the financial markets in this light, revisiting Hume's old adage again and again: "When we look about us towards external objects, and consider the operation of causes, we are never able, in a single instance, to discover any power or necessary connexion; any quality, which binds the effect to the cause, and renders the one an infallible consequence of the other. We only find, that the one does actually, in fact, follow the other"

As ever the Economist gets it right. Read their 12 pager on why it's a "series of risks" built by the US financial community over time plus changes in the outside world that have created the current problems. And how it's going to take quite a while to unpick the current situation.

Sorry - I know we'd all have prefered something more headline grabbing - like it was "Bush what done it". Truth is the world ain't like that. Note to managers everywhere. Note to marketers. Note to myself (cause I'm just as prone as anyone else to trace simplistic cause and effect relationships

More Hugh and the Rabbi

Hugh's posted the latest chat between himself, Pinny, Johnnie and me.

Top stuff. So many ideas in here, it's like a rich and fragrant fruit cake (the others' ideas are rather better than mine, I think). Hugh's minute-by-minute is here.

Must try to meet Pinny in realworld when I'm next in the US. He just seems such an ace fella! And keen to catch up with Hugh's Texan adventures, also!

Oh and I really want to do that playday with Johnnie. After Easter, now I think.

H

No more image

It still seems a fresh and shocking thing to say that image is very unimportant in shaping behaviour through e.g. marketing.

Too much marketing, communications and research is built round our obsession with image.
Tom says it nice and crunchy:

Remember, it doesn’t matter what people think about you or your brand. What matters is how you
make them feel about themselves and their decisions in your presence. And that’s what’s really important when marketing a brand today.

Regular readers will know how much I concur: that's what the Obama phenomenon is shaped by - what he allows us to feel about ourselves and each other. Who he is, what his image is, is neither here nor there...

Here's an entertaining post from the Washington Post you might not have seen which deals with (hurrah!) candidates copying and here's why that's more important than influence (actually got a big post brewing on this subject so standby...)

Flashmobs in China

pic c/o Helen Wang

Hat tip to Charles @Punkplanning who tweet'd this today.

More here. Here's the Grand Central Station one again..

Goodbye to two men I never met

I've got to confess that I've never really got in to gaming - neither the off- or online version. I know, I know...still sad to read this week then that Gary Gygax, computer gaming pioneer and co-creater of D&D has died. Nice obit here and here. Gaming has already shaped a lot of the technology platform which will dominate our futures and few have done more to engage folk with it...or give those thus recruited to Orc armies various so much fun.

To be honest I was more touched by the death of the great carver Ralph Beyer - a one time student of Eric Gill. Not that I know much about type; it's just while other boys were off playing the early fantasy games I was singing in cathedrals various as a peripatetic choirboy.

I was particularly affected by the interior of the modernist Coventry cathedral which bears a huge volume of religious texts carved by Beyer. It now seems mighty ironic that this jewish refugee should be decorating one of the great Christian buildings of the postwar period, specifically one built to replace the damage done in the Baedeker raids.

Looking now again at his stylings, I now realise quite how formative of my tastes those singing trips and the long hours sitting gazing at the walls amid hallowed silences really were.

I like letters. I like sans fonts. I like writing on walls*. And on stones.

And I still like sitting and thinking.

*just realised that this maybe where my habit of wanting to have work on walls arises from...I can't think quite so well unless I can read it on a wall....

A thought on what happens after...

Obama has undoubtedly built a social movement - a coalition for change - a community of support around something like a purpose idea (yes, I know I owe Hugh a definitive explanation post of this idea, but most readers will know what I mean by this term, I think).

Let's imagine that Obama wins the Democratic nomination and then goes on to the White House (of course, I could be wrong about either of these but WTF...).

What then?

What happens next? What happens when the keys to the Oval office are on Mr Obama's own keychain?

The trouble is that any community built around purpose will soon unravel unless you're able to create feedback to show how the purpose is being achieved.

Here's one man's thoughts. Not far off, I reckon.

Machine thinking

Been struck recently how common it is to find our thinking about humans and human behaviour (and all the stuff this involves like brands, marketing & organisations) to be distorted by the machine metaphors and similes we use.

Of course, our choice of metaphor is largely determined by what we perceive folk around us are doing and it's undoubtedly true that a lot of folk that I'm surrounded by are particular interested in what technology can do and the machine metaphor world is naturally a rich source of metaphor to them. Management science is rooted in the Taylorian notions of the machine as the perfectible and Man its lazy and imperfectible untrustworthy servant so a lot of our management ideas are also steeped in the sump of machine metaphor.

A prime example of this is the "social network" stuff we've been debating recently (we tend to talk as if human networks were relatively stable and information-based as machine networks commonly are). All kinds of inaccuracies in our thinking and our attempts to do things arise from us mistaking the world of our metaphor for the world the metaphor seeks to describe...

The litany of machine words in this neat little David McKie piece in today's Guardian makes the same point.

Given how such ideas and language practices spread, it's really hard not to fall in line with what surrounds us. I don't have a simple solution (but am open to suggestions).

Meanwhile I'm just going to try to keep in mind the difference between the people I'm trying to describe and the automaton mirror-image humans that Dr Who has been known to rumble with. A machine man is very different from a real one; the latter is much harder than the former to get to grips with but the former is what our machine thinking is all about...