Class on Wednesday began with tangents - which is awesome.
From Post Secret we moved directly onto the illustrious acting careers of classmates and were treated to a special viewing of Doug's Dark Past, complete with ghost girls on buses. That's hott.
Early in class, Paul also referenced his all powerful Facebook Zombie and talked about how his knowledge of social networks has allowed him to reach his mogul status. Little did we know, he was perfectly seguing into a discussion of Granovetter's "Strength of Weak Ties".
One of the points we discussed was how the more tightly bound a community is, the faster info travels through it, and that there's greater trust. Of course there's an opposite view -- information from the outside is less trusted. Here, Paul very quickly mentioned Vannever Bush and memex and a 1945 article in The Atlantic Monthly called "As We May Think".
He went on to discuss the English longbow vs. the Turkish composite bow and the rigging of Arabic ships. Basically, throughout history groups have resisted new information and innovations (More on this in the Innovator's Dilemma by Clayton Christensen. Also, disruptive technologies in general.).
So how does new info get in?
Grannoveter thinks he knows a way - through people who are respected. Here we mention Malcolm Gladwell. You could read The Tipping Point but this New Yorker article has the gist: "Six Degrees of Lois Weisberg".
Mavens, connectors, whatever. Paul says it all boils down to the age-old storytelling device: A stranger comes to town and something happens. Otherwise there's no story -- people stay in town. The end.
So, we move later in class to a discussion of Pew Internet and this somehow transitions into Fred Stutzman's Facebook research. Paul makes a comment about how would you feel if everyone came up to you and told you all of their personal preferences -- my hobbies are this and I like these movies and I listen to x... reminding me of this comic from XKCD. (Sorry, that tangent is completely mine).
Finally, class ended with a discussion about how hard it is to get information that's unframed by some source -- and basically, would you want it? Information like so many people yelling at you unfiltered? Paul compared this to Vernor Vinge's A Fire Upon the Deep, a gripping tale of galactic war told on a cosmic scale.
And so class went from ghosts to zombies to mavens to aliens, oh my.
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2 comments:
I'm glad you've started leaving the "Tangents" posts of our class time. Good stuff. But the crucial question that I'm burning to know the answer to (no pun intended) is, "What is the retrograde wheelbarrow?"
Google will guide you to some interesting results, as well as some forum posts about people now using the term for SEO. My favorite thing I found about it though were the precautions:
- As always, be aware of your surroundings. Make sure that there is enough room to execute the Retrograde Wheelbarrow.
- As with all Positions of the Inner Circle and Second Circle, you should not attempt this position if you have a history of heart conditions, or have any muscular or lung complications.
Ah, XKCD, my favorite intarwebcomicevah.
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