I’m a firm believer in a society founded on a results-based economy. Now that may be a term used by financial whizzkids out there in the real world, but what I mean here is that in your interactions with people daily, you should be considering the end result – what you want to get out of it.
Now, that sounds terribly cynical in black and white and I must stress that I’m not advocating that we start categorising our friends and acquaintances on what we can get out of them because that would be a horrific application of the idea, but rather that we judge our own actions on the results that may occur. If I do this, what will happen?.
It’s this philosophy that gets you out of arguments by just apologising rather than scoring points. When I argue, I like to sulk for a little – just a few minutes of self-indulgence when all the witty and cutting remarks I didn’t say in the argument swim around my head. The result is the same – with these remarks I would have completely won that argument, but what would I have lost? Having won this argument, will I congratulate myself in my ivory tower, alone and proud?
Aldous Huxley, my flavour of the month, wrote:
And the prevailing philosophy of life would be a kind of Higher Utilitarianism, in which the Greatest Happiness principle would be secondary to the Final End principle–the first question to be asked and answered in every contingency of life being: “How will this thought or action contribute to, or interfere with, the achievement, by me and the greatest possible number of other individuals, of man’s Final End?”
Seeing as Social Networks are now the bubble rage, how do you apply a social results-based economy to social networking? We see a little of it in social networks at the moment with the granting of “friend” status though some, like Robert Scoble, have popularised the friend status to the point that it becomes worthless. How can you complain about a limit of 5000 friends? Get over yourself. LinkedIn does a little better but is such a narrow niche and the recommendation system becomes reciprocal. You’re more likely to recommend someone who has recommended you, but who takes that first step?
With the Identity Crisis looming (and yes, it’s a crap name for my theory but you try churning out good names. We need Tim O’Reilly to popularise it and make a book!), we have to consider the consolidation of our various online identities into one semantic entity so that “the system” knows who we are but only provides that information to those we permit, to those who have some relevance to us. I don’t relish the idea of OpenSocial being the panacea there because it’s an advertising engine and I don’t see any of our governments stepping in to create something that they, by default, cannot control and mis-use.
The Jabber model works for me. I have the passwords which link my various online identities into one Island (server, service, online shopping portal). Other people verify this online identity is “me”. They have tenuous virtual connections to me through these other services which may or may not include an entry on my “Island”, we just may be strangers in strange lands elsewhere.
This post has rambled on long enough but the gist is: making your choices carefully and not based on reaction is what separates us from the animals. Being able to build social networks beyond the immediate family (or the Dunbar number) is a quality unique to humans as a consequence of our technology. The actions we take identify us as a person – they give us character. Through this display of character, we may be able to make connections to other people and have other people make connections to us on a basis of recommendation.
It would be nice to know that the people I associate myself with online all display good character. But in truth, I have no way of knowing and some of the people you’d expect to be fine, upstanding citizens simply are not.