Eventually, we’re heading to a world where bound-journals sitting on musty library shelves will become an experience of the past. After all, you can access (and use) information more easily when it’s in a digital medium.

However, there’s a preservation of knowledge issue that remains unexplored. The Libary of Alexandria provided a wonderful concentration of knowledge–collected from across the Mediterranean world and beyond. However, concentration of knowledge (in any repository) makes it vulnerable. At some point in the ancient world, the Library of Alexandria was burnt down–perhaps more than once. So, we don’t even know what books were there. There’s not even a surviving catalog or index. We have lost access to the human knowledge once accreted in the library.

If all academic articles (and new research) moves online, then we run a similar accretion risk. Databases can become corrupt and replicate an error over and over again–such as a missing negative sign in a correlation matrix. But more importantly, a computer virus, hardware/software failures, or even an electro-magnetic pulse can erase data (and knowledge). We run risk of piling tinder around our own digital Libraries of Alexandria.

While I’m a huge fan of digital archives, I’m reminded of the comments that literary scholars have made about contemporary authors. Previously, it was possible to collect an major authors letters (sent and received) to put them in a library’s special collection. Now, many authors (like most people) write e-mails instead of sending physical letters. People routinely discard and delete these e-mails, without thought.

While we’re making data more accessible, we’re also changing the risk factors when there aren’t musty tomes and physical letter sitting somewhere.

I’m not a Luddite. I revel in the digital world, but I’m also not Miranda crying “O Brave New World!” Whenever we put information solely online, we should presume that at some point, much of that information will become lost.

Sic transit gloria mundi

For a long while, washing machines have required a large amount of water (measured in litres and gallons) to clean the laundry. We have come to take this process for granted. What if you could clean an entire load of clothes with just a single cup of water?

Dr. Stephen Burkinshaw at the University of Leeds has created a washing machine that defies conventional thinking and only uses a small amount of water. The technology requires a simple set of cleaning pellets that activate in the presence of moisture. These pellets can be used a hundred times before being replaced.

In order to reach an aha-moment, you have to be willing to challenge conventional assumptions and ask (with some curiosity) “why do we use this approach? Is there a better way.” Just because current washing machines require vast amounts of water doesn’t preclude other solutions.

Many years ago, Johnny Carson, the late-night talk show host would interview guest. When the guest revealed something unfamiliar, Carson would freely admit, “I did not know that.” Instead of glibly feigning familiarity with every topic, he took interest in the unfamiliar and he showed a delight in learning new ideas.

Look around you. What assumptions could be replaced with better solutions? Just because something has been one way doesn’t mean that it’s the best way.

However, as we get older, we quickly learn that we do not need to test every single possibility ourselves. We can learn from others’ successes and failures.

Well, it turns out that animals can learn in very similar ways. Discover magazine reports on research where stickleback fish have been observed to learn to locate food by observing others.

I have spent a lot of time during the past couple of weeks considering the intersection of learning and social constructivism (which essentially represents learning from others.)

We often talk about teaching “best practices.” However, in the real world, complex situations rarely align with simplified models. Instead of teaching “best practices,” there’s a strong argument for applying the principles of carefully-constructed “error-exposure” training.

We need people to learn how to think and react to complex and rapidly changing situations where they may only have a few minutes to make decisions (or may be acting on partial information). More on error-exposure learning in the next blog post.

Have a great weekend!

Think about it. Individuals can launch coordinated cyberattacks on nation-states. An American can open a web-browser and participate in an attack on the Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting (IRIB) or the sites of Iran’s Supreme Leader or its president. If the U.S. military conducted these actions, they could legitimately be considered acts of war (or interfering with another nation’s internal affairs).

But, how do we describe a volunteers who decide on their own to become involved? Unlike the Lafayette Escadrille (American aviators who went to war in France prior to America’s involvement in 1917), the people joining today’s DoS attacks do not have to travel to Iran or put themselves at risk. They’re not soldiers or traditional warfighters.

• If residents of China do not like the policies of the United States, should they launch a DoS attack on key US websites? What if these angered Chinese citizens targeted Bank of America, and Amazon’s websites?
• If a popular blogger, radio host, or television show host encourages a denial of service attack on their own government or another government–how should the sponsor’s home nation respond?

We’re looking at a form of asymemetric civil-disobediance or guerilla warfare. It’s easy enough that a ten-year-old child can participate in the DoS attack on a foreign nation. The child can open a browser before bedtime and the computer will attack while he/she sleeps.

We’re seeing a potential change within geopolitical discourse between nations. In the past, we looked to leaders to see how a nation would respond to a situation. Now, individuals can act before a leader can even formulate a response to global events. Who will lead and who will follow?

Traditional state-to-state political discourse will long endure (through embassies, treaties, and multi-national bodies). However, we’re looking at a force which wants to drive politics to a peer-to-peer level.

In my writings about social capital, I’ve often said that an individual working in Chicago may have few meaningful connections with co-workers in the same office. Their work may be more connected with folks in London, Atlanta, Singapore, and Dubai. Increasingly, Gen X and Millenials live and work with people around the world. Those bonds, over time, exert a peer-to-peer pressure.

Will it moderate actions between nations or will it provoke more extreme responses? The answer will vary from scenario to scenario. However, the nature of political discourse has clearly changed.

As my father (a reference librarian) used to say, “You don’t need to know the answer yourself. You just need to know how to find the answer you need.”

Tony essentially models LinkedIn as a cocktail mixer of people he’s met, reserving his recommendations to people he trusts. This model allows him allows him to expand his reach to locate resources within his network who can answer his question. However, number of “connections” does not confer expertise on any single person.

From a social capital perspective, he’s expanded his potential access to information–without immediately creating deeper social capital. He still must find reasons for casual acquaintances and 2nd level contacts to help him locate the answer he needs.

His approach aligns closely what I’ve described many times here. LinkedIn itself is just a network.

• Using Status Updates to Mobilize Social Capital
• LinkedIn Wants You to Learn Social Capital Theory
• Social Networks vs. Social Capital
• What Should My Network Look Like?

If you use any social network passively, you’ll see few benefits, but if you actively invest time into it, you will see a significant return.

However, today’s news focuses heavily on social capital on the macro level.

Political discourse has changed through digital social media tools, and it’s not just happening in today’s democracies. Every government and nation must accept the fact that they cannot fully control the media anymore without disabling every mobile phone, every camera, and every portal to the Internet.

Consider these two posts made from candidate MirHossein Mosavi’s Twitter account:

@Mousavi1338: We have no national press coverage in Iran, everyone should help spread Mousavi’s message. One Person = One Broadcaster.

@Mosuavi1338: @twitter Twitter is currently our ONLY way to communicate overnight news in Iran, PLEASE do not take it down

The second post refers to the fact that Twitter was scheduled for regular overnight maintenance on Monday night (US time). These posts were likely not written by the candidate, so they’re a media blast between a politician and his constituency–similar to how Obama used Twitter during the 2008 presidential election. On its own, that’s nothing new.

Social media gives a naked, almost voyeuristic look, into individual human moments. In the past 48 hours, we’ve seen many bloggers and tweeple from Iran posting by-the-minute reports. I used to wonder whether you could say anything of value within 140 characters, but many of the tweets have revealed moments of bravery, fear, and raw humanity.

• @Change_for_Iran: “it’s worth taking the risk, we’re going. I won’t be able to update until I’m back. again thanks for your kind support and wish us luck”
• @PersianKiwi “people are running in streets outside. There is panic in streets.people going ino houses to hide. #Iranelection”
• @Tehranbureau “shooting resulted in killing. at least ‘one young man’ she saw shot in the mouth. she said it was NOT police. says it was Basij.”

When we look at social transformation through the lens of social capital, we recognize two different effects:

1) an individual can communicate with more people (a broader social network) and draw them closer into the events of the moment. Videos taken at street-level by mobile phones show students being beeaten. This humanizing effect produces a peer-to-peer response (without a mediating presence through media).

2) the whole network’s capacity for communication has increased. While there’s certainly been a lot of noise in the twitterverse, more raw information has come out to an information hungry world. A government cannot just eject international reporters and assume that events will not be seen on a global stage.

So much information has been tweeted in-the-moment, that it’s likely some contains mistakes and inaccuracies. In fact, you’ll probably find many breathless accounts, overstatements, and perhaps even misinformation.

However, in the short-term, a social network can function without trust. Over time, low-quality or disreputable reports may be revealed. Trust becomes a requisite for a long-term social network’s functioning.

These ad-hoc networks are short-lived and transitory. Most people will shift their attention elsewhere before long-term factors of social capital become requisite.

Today, you don’t have to open your newspaper or watch CNN for news, you can read reports written by people who are geolocated within the situation itself. However, you may feel like you’re being hit by a deluge of often-contradictory (and confusing chatter.

There’s a tangible and real darkside to this political discourse, and I’ll explain more in my next post.

604 people were surveyed about their friends. Then, seven years later, the participants listed their friends again. According to the study, only 48% of original friends showed up on the second list.

The study was part of a dissertation, so I have not been able to put my hands on the original text. However, some questions come to mind.

• How old were the participants? (College-age students will probably have higher turnover than middle-age folks (say the seven years between 35 and 42).
• How were “friends” defined? (Are we talking about “core friends who would bail you out of jail at 3 a.m. or acquaintences on Facebook and Twitter?)
• Were the particpants chosen by random sample?
• Were there any noticeable difference between sub-groups–such as gender or age?
• Would there be differences by socio-economic status or culture?
• What patterns emerge in tight-knit communities vs. open, migratory communities?

It would be interesting to conduct longitudinal research on these factors. Research on topics, such as this one, will allow us to make insightful observations on relationship patterns. My guess is that rather than a flat percentage, you’d see some individuals retain a tight core of connections for extended periods of time, while others will constantly build ad-hoc cause-based connections.

I believe we’d see substantial variation. Not everyone will follow a seven-year half-life. I’ll see if I can locate a copy of the dissertation and then will share more when data emerges.

First, the United States ranks near the lowest # of school-days per year.

• Japan–243 days
• South Korea–220 days
• Israel–216 days

Compared to those countries, the United States’ school year of 180 days seems significantly short.

Secondly, research that schools serve as an equalizer, preventing children from lower socio-economic status (SES) families from falling further behind. When school is out, these children fall further and further behind. High SES families can offer a wealth of summertime activities and learning opportunities that lower SES families cannot easily match.

It’s worth quoting from ”Are Schools the Great Equalizer“ (Downey, von Hippel, and Broh, 2004) at length.

although schooling does not equalize high- and low-socioeconomic status children in the absolute sense, and although schooling does not necessarily ensure that they learn at the same rate when school is in session, schooling does reduce the rate at which inequality grows relative to a world without schools.
To make this result more concrete, consider two hypothetical children with standardized
SES values of -.66 and 1.67. The low-SES child has a household income of $40,000; his parents are high school graduates who work as a bartender and a garbage collector. The high-SES child has a household income of $100,000; his parents are a nurse with a B.S. degree and a lawyer with a J.D.

Using estimates from our model 3, the SES difference between these children predicts a reading gap of 6.90 points on the first day of kindergarten, which widens to 8.44 points by the start of first grade. This widening reflects 9.5 months of divergence at the kindergarten rate and 2.5 months of divergence at the summer rate. In the absence of schooling, however, these children might diverge at the summer rate for all 12 months, in which case the gap at the start of first grade would be even greater—not just 8.44 points but 11.37 points. Although the gap does not close in school, it does not widen as fast as it otherwise might.

Today’s competitive global economy requires a commitment to lifetime learning that differs significantly from past learning systems–such as the agrarian little-red schoolhouse model in the 19th century and the public-school factory model of the early 20th century.

We need to instill the values of lifetime learning within our culture. Today’s high-value jobs require a commitment to lifetime learning, and that trend will only become more common in the future. More and more jobs will require people to learn new skills and adapt.

While many of us recall lazy summers as a joy of the past, it’s worth asking whether those lazy days truly serve the next generation’s needs.

• http://www.facebook.com/bill.sherman
• http//www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1544430393&ref=nf

Now, I’ll admit, I was one of those people who logged on to acquire my custom url. My name is common enough that it’s hard to get it on social media. Mashable.com reports that 1 million user ids were claimed within the first hour and 3 million user-ids were claimed within 24 hours.

Now, the landrush wasn’t prompted by a cool new technology innovation. Other social media tools, such as livejournal have allowed custom usernames for ten years.

So, there’s a broader point here. Today, sites like Facebook and Twitter are the social media tools of the day. However, they have to constantly evolve, because there’s a low-level of brand loyalty between users and the brand. Formerly popular websites–such as Friendster and now MySpace, Twitter are the social media tools of the day. However, they have to constantly evolve, because there’s a low-level of brand loyalty between users and the brand. Formerly popular websites–such as Friendster and now MySpace, have struggled as users have abandoned their platforms.

With new applications, such as Google’s Wave, today’s platforms must continue to evolve.

Users want to communicate and stay-in-touch with their core friends as well as their remote acquintances. They want to be able to schedule parties, participate in viral memes, and scribble notes to each other. Those core desires can be met through a variety of applications.

When designers look at social network applications, they need to think about the underlying principles of social capital–does the application increase a user’s ability to locate or mobilize resources within their network? Instead of becoming charmed with the latest feature, developers should go to the core of what their users truly want to achieve.

It’s interesting to compare this past week’s events with other protests:

• Ukraine’s Orange Revolution (2004-05)
• China’s Tianamen Square Protests (1989)
• Czechosolovakia’s Velvet Revolution (1989)
• Poland’s Solidarity Movement (1980)

Would Poland’s change have occured quicker if the union members and organizers had access to today’s social media? How would Tianamen Square’s protests have changed (if any)?

Yet, the thought-experiment becomes even more striking when we move further back into history and look at popular uprisings–The French Revolution of 1789; the Revolutions of 1848; and the American Revolution of 1776. Here are a couple early-American examples:
Paul Revere
Paul Revere would could have saved himself a long midnight ride with just a few keyclicks.

• @PaulRevere. “The Redcoats are coming out. Please RT.” (RT = re-tweet/pass-it-on)

After a quick Tweet, he could have gone back to sleep. Generations of students would be spared the task of memorizing Longfellow’s poem. But, on a more significant level, more information would have passed than just that one single tweet. Bostonian Twitterers would have erupted with distributed information passed peer-to-peer rather than through a single network node. The structure (and communications) within the early days of the American Revolution would have looked very different.

Malcolm Gladwell explores the story of Paul Revere and a less-successful rival in The Tipping Point and comes to the conclusion that Revere succeeded because he was a connector with pre-established connections (essentially someone with a large social network and a high degree of social capital within that network).

Declaration of Indepndence

In the 18th century, word of the Declaration of Independence spread slowly. It took weeks to spread through te Thirteen Colonies and the announcement didn’t appear in the British Newspapers until mid-August (almost five weeks later). The Continental Congress relied on printers to distribute broadside sheets with the Declaration. They didn’t have Twitter, tinyurl, and the Internet:

• @Continental Congress Independence declared http://tinyurl.com/3k9vnc
• @John.hancock /signed. @king_george_iii do u see this?

Imagine YouTube used by both sides to show their sides of the story directly. King George appearing in a video to Loyalists, while Washington appeals for shoes for his nascent Continental Army.

What if Thomas Paine’s Common Sense appeared via a blog or The Federalist Papers were posted under pseudonym nicks on a political blogsite (such as today’s FreeRepublic or DailyKos) during the debate to ratify the U.S. Constitution?

The flow of information and social capital has changed on the macro-level in the digital age. We take digital technologies for granted these days, so it’s worth comparing today’s events vs. the pre-digitial social networks. We still need the connectors–such as Paul Revere to share information, but it operates on a very different level now.

It’s possible to build an ad-hoc social network for information on-the-fly, which is what we’re seeing now in the Twitterverse on #iranelections. New social bonds can be created quickly. However, even there, pre-established twitterers have had an advantage of established social connections through previous blogging and twittering. The network of followers has grown, surely. However, the network already had “pre-existing” structure and authority hubs–for both Farsi and English.

So, while few people were following @Change_for_Iran, @PersianKiwi, or @Tehranbureau before today, the social network has flexed and reconfigured itself to allow people to find and share information. The network reconfigured itself.

Again, I’m not equating # of followers with authenticity or reliability. Someone can become quickly popular without being authentic or reliable. And certainly some people will take advantage of a situation for their own benefit.

Yet, even despite these caveats, there’s a resonant similarity that cannot (and should not) be ignored.

Compare Revere’s “The Redcoats are coming out” with a Tweet from @PersianKiwi earlier today: “streets very dangerous now. groups of militia on motorbikes searching for protesters.”

They’re essentially the same message, two-hundred and thirty four years apart. One was delivered house-to-house by a silversmith, and the other broadcast via Twitter.

Sure, there’s a difference between secrecy and broadcast that’s worth exploring. The delivery method carries a significant change to our understanding of macro-level social networks and social capital. It’ll be the subject of my next post.

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