Browsing blogs, I’ve often had what I call the “glittering cave moment”; when I leave the dowdy, familiar surrounds of my blog-neighbourhood and get taken by the hand (or link) by someone I trust into a new and sparkling world of scary new knowledge, opinions, thoughts and views. That bridging moment has a tangible excitement to it.
My biggest “glittering cave moment” was last year’s ETCON, when I realised the fun that was happening in the techcave, as opposed to where I was. Another huge one was when I discovered the parallel universe of LiveJournal.
Worth remembering bridges happen at divides: they are erected over chasms, canyons, torrents.
This post at greaterdemocracy.org by Adina Levin explores what happens if the systems you navigate tend to keep you in your cave.
Noted socialnetwork analyst Valdis Krebs has been discovering the lack of bubble-bridges at Amazon:
“There’s a set of books that seem to represent “left-wing” readers, with titles by Chomsky and Michael Moore and Tom Friedman. And there’s a parallel set of books that seem to represent “right-wing” interests, with books by writers including Ann Coulter and Patrick Buchanan.
The clusters of recommendations seemed to be mutually exclusive. Only one book appeared on recommendation lists in both clusters: What Went Wrong, a book by Bernard Lewis about Middle East history.”
I believe that’s what’s being illustrated in the lovely, lucid accompanying diagram [above, reminds me superficially of this by Stewart]. Mr. Krebs goes on to say:
“The challenge is to create *bridges* so that diverse information and ideas can be exchanged (not just via hollering and arguing).”
As I mentioned before, one of the things we’re finding from our ethnographic study of people working to change their civic environment, is how successful people or organisations often shift from being adversaries to allies, and how important and how delicate those bridging moments are in achieving this in real-life.
We have a “charrette” tomorrow to try and figure out some alternatives to encourage and manage this online.
Tricky.
Dumb un-thought-through ideas I have lodged in my head: I’m thinking some kind of compass of links or opinions that give you a panorama view of those associated with issues you’re concerning yourself with. In my mind it looks like the variations tool in Photoshop meets politicalcompass.org. You know, where you have your original picture in the middle and then are shown variants which are more yellow, more cyan, more magenta, etc.
Or maybe some kind of implementation of the ‘publish my friends on my page’ feature that LiveJournal has, except you publish contrarian or adversarial views – not a lot different from having comments turned-on on your blog perhaps! 😉
Some kind of functionality to facilitate “hand-shaking” and create common-ground to establish cooperation within are going to be important. Turn-taking is going to be important. Also, some kind of auto-glossary commonground, where you can discover whether you are talking about the same thing just from different view points and share/merge the langauge you’ve been using [XFML/Taxomita involved somehow?]. Tools to widen “the circle of empathy” as Steven Pinker puts it: Telempathics
Very glad we have some models from real-life research to start from. Going to dig out everything Meatball and Valdis Krebs have to offer.
Any other pointers?
» Greaterdemocracy.org: Is the “Daily Me” at the doorstep?
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Side-question to self: must read in-depth and figure how does this relate to ShellyBurningbird’s great recent run of posts on the matter of connections between one’s commonplace books and “the commons”
Petafloptimism 
Don’t forget about Ronald Burt, a big Chicago social network guru who makes your point as compellingly as anyone I’ve come across. Burt thinks specifically about people’s economic outcomes, and why certain people get ahead, but this provides a good analogy to what Krebs seems to be getting at. In short, information (like anything else, for that matter) is only economically valuable when its rare. So people who hold high value social positions are those uniquely capable of transmitting information from one social cluster to another entirely separate social cluster. To put it another way strangers have more to gain from one another (economically) than friends do, and whoever’s bringing strangers together may have most to gain of all (although don’t tell that to E-Cademy). See http://gsbwww.uchicago.edu/fac/ronald.burt/
I’m not quite sure what the big deal is with the Amazon thing… I mean, hasn’t this always been the problem with collaborative filtering type tools, that they only tend to reinforce what you already like?
I’ve never been entirely convinced that ‘show me what my enemies like’ functionality is any use, other than in an environment that’s trying to maintain some kind of PC political balance, but showing what people *just outside* your network like would be good and actually useful.
‘show me what my enemies like’ sounds like a map of a fight, to me. as does the bridging diagrams.
The map of any relationship – in any situation, whether its mapping friend or foe – is never as relevant as the quality or content of exchange at the meeting point.
There’s no point in me knowing what right wingers read if I’m only going to argue with their opinions. There’s no point in collaboratively filtering their lifestyles into mine if it’s economic, social and political factors in the real world that affect my own personal politics. There’s something to be learnt by knowing how your enemy thinks by reading their reading lists, but actually that only has real value if I’m arguing with them, as it allows me to pick apart their own ideas.
Let’s stop trying to find solutions to social problems in software and software design. Social software, the commons, the Public Sphere are spaces, vessels that we put ourselves into. Whilst these spaces can be tweaked to allow or disallow information exchange, the actual content and outcome of the information exchanged will always be a separate entity to the actual software structure itself.
Social Software needs to be simple, easy-to-use, free, democratic and distributed. It doesn’t need to social engineer.
When I was trained as a journalist I was told that newspapers aren’t designed to challenge people’s prejudices, they exist to play up to them – support them, even. I guess this is a similar situation. For many people problematising familiar problems does nothing more than leave them in a confused middle-ground unable to decide on a course of action – they get a glance into the abyss of unknowability that surround most accurate issues. Taking people to this brink is fascinating stuff and good for them generally – it’s important that people realise the limits of their understanding occasionally – but at the same time it’s difficult to motivate people to positive action through it…
So why not allow random chance, or broken things to make some of those new chasm-crossing connections? Dumb example: if Amazon, one out of ten sessions, reccommended me the books meant for another random user, perhaps I’d find something new.
I like the idea of content grouping in principle but there are practical limitations in implementation:
1) People’s views don’t just exist on one axis – they exist on several and they may not be consistent with an easily-identifiable ideology or perspective. Certainly I like to think mine are hard to classify!
2) As with any filter that requires user participation, how do you get enough people to rate their own posts to make the exercise worthwhile?
We discussed this (and other things) at the last emint meeting. You should come along to some sometime, Matt…
Charette
I first was introduced to a Charette while working with Scenic Design.
Bookmark clearage
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Bridges and Bubbles
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Bridges and Bubbles
Matt Jones has an entry today Bridging the bubbles proposing a model for how we find new vistas, and thoughts about what happens when we don’t. I’m piqued by it because it’s
Blogging network and the neuro-semantics of trust
Gary Lawrence Murphy picks up the thread about Bridges and Bubbles and asks some fundamental questions about how we should
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