I’ve sometimes experienced people who won’t accept invitations to connect with me on social networking sites such as LinkedIn or Facebook. Sometimes because they don’t know me or believe they don’t know me. “Knowing someone” is an extremely relative concept with the advent of the internet, though I can also see the grounds on which LinkedIn would want to hold on to this concept.
In other cases, people are afraid they may get spammed or get tricked into spending lots and lots of precious time on meaningless online jabbering and “click this to see who’s on your page” kind of stuff. Others, like my friend the science fiction writer Palle Juul Holm, simply hates what he calls the “americanized categories” of LinkedIn which doesn’t even allow “retired” or “literature” as categories.
To tell you the truth, I hate this too. I hate and dislike fixed categories, because they shape people’s minds in bad ways. In fact, I hate social networks. Social relations there are rarely true and meaningful relations, and I don’t want to waste my time installing useless applications which waste other people’s time. I hate to waste my time on useless crap. I like quality and I like meaningful conversations.
Yet I am a member of more than a handful social networks, and will add a lot more as we go along in Kaplak. Why? I’ll tell you why in a minute.
I have and have always had great contempt for people, institutions or societies which seek to enslave people. Be it slaves to certain kings or rulers, or slaves to certain ideas or modes of thought. The worst idea is probably the habit of believing that one can do no difference in one’s life, which one grows into, when one is not free. “The slave is not free, as long as he considers himself a slave”, to paraphrase one of my heroes, the German philosopher Max Stirner.
I believe people grow, create and live their lives best as free, empowered individuals, and that the world will be a greater place to be when as many people can be and can do so. I believe people who are free, and free to seek and find information, will be wiser people.
One of my greatest passions is tools and services, which empower individuals to create their own online architectures. Because using and building our own tools (i.e. free software) is what makes us free, knowledgeable and capable of change. With free software, i.e. software which can be freely distributed and tinkered with, we can modify the online as well as the offline digital architectures we use ourselves.
This is why I love wikis, why I love decentralized structures and p2p-based architectures, which empower individual members to exercise their influence, bandwidth, harddrive spaces and every bit and byte of their communicative and hacking capabilities to mold what they use so that it fits their needs.
The antithesis to this, of course is any “system”, which create architectures, that cannot be changed by it’s individual users. Systems which are the fruits of what Richard Stallman (visit Stallman’s personal website here) with disdain and contempt in his voice calls “proprietary software”. Facebook and LinkedIn are prime cases of such enormous systems, which are based on fixed categories and variables, which cannot be modified by users. Within this system, of course, there are lots of things which can be modified, but only after you accept the premises of say Facebook’s view of the world, which is “users”, “friends”, “pages”, “groups”, “walls”, “applications” and so on. One cannot break up and shape the architecture itself.
These systems are clearly bad, IMO, for our freedoms and capabilities of building our own architectures.
Why do I support and encourage the use of these systems then? Why do I invite others to take part in services such as these? One very important reason is that we can’t do anything, unless we’re connected. And as long as any platform gives me the opportunity to reach out and connect with others – most importantly those I want to know and who wants to know me, but don’t know about me – I will use it, as long as it’s free and doesn’t give me headaches. As long as it gives others an opportunity to reach out and communicate back, it’s a tool we may be able to use in our broader scope of things to come. It’s a tool for connecting, so that we may share and shape those much deeper and meaningful conversations – which will form more durable relations, which are beneficial to us in the long term. Which may help us break down the walls and empower more people to create their own architectures.
If we can, for instance, use the Facebook platform to promote Kaplak’s widgets and allow our users to sell products there, we’ll do it with this perspective in mind. We have a focus beyond the categories of “knowing someone” or being someone’s “friend” on social networks, which is crucial to what we do in Kaplak. It is not just about “selling things” and making money, when we try to expand on social networks. We do not dislike money or earning them, but as a company we want to add real value. Our primary capital for doing this is durable connections and ressourceful people, not money or “friends” on Facebook.
If this post resonates with you, we’d like to invite you to join our new Kaplak group on Linkedin, or alternatively, to ‘become a fan’ or group member of our Facebook group. Not just as a number in our friend count, but as someone capable of speaking back, here, there or in other contexts or platforms of your preference and choosing. As always, you’ll find us on Twitter and del.icio.us, among other places :-)
7 comments ↓
“This is why I love wikis, why I love decentralized structures and p2p-based architectures,”
Ditto. Going back to your science fiction writer, if there was an article about him on a wiki and he wanted to offer better category options, it becomes really easy to do. He can simply add say [[Category:Retired science fiction writers]] to the article. Then he can look at the category structure, see where that would fit in to that and add say [[Category:Science fiction writers]] or [[Category:People who have retired]] or [[Category:Professional authors]] to link it back into the categorization tree. If it doesn't look obvious, he can always use a number of talk pages or contact an admin to see how to do to better integrate that category in to the wiki.
Wikis can be amazingly flexible in that regard and there is very little overhead from a development stance for making changes such as those. The cost is at the community level and having people who have the job of interacting with people be the ones who can make that change helps to foster relationships. There aren't as many complex levels which can make communication across levels more arduous.
Re : Categories
Btw, Clay Shirky has a great talk on ontology and the clashes between fixed categories and worldviews, and the emerging world of tagging and fluid filtering methods : http://itc.conversationsnetwork.org/shows/detai...
Yeah, it is so incredibly easy to do – but leverages so great power. We need more tools like this – and we need to bridge the gaps between the forerunners of these tools, and people like Palle and others, who could easily utilize these tools to their great advantage.
I meet a lot of scepticism, ignorance and thickheadedness generally aimed at (digital) technology, and specifically at open architectures such as wikis.
Somehow though, during the last year or so, Facebook seems to have broken down some of these reservations (at least over here), so that people, who otherwise wouldn't use internet services, have now begun to do so. I hope they will also begin to ask questions and think about what the architectures they use entail. In this sense, popular services such as Facebook can be forerunners for involving users in more dedicated environments, such as wikis. And that's also why it's essential, that we are on Facebook and other such services.
I agree with almost everything, and I have one thing I'd ask you to consider.
Fixed categories provide a way to enter a community or culture. Groups share a common culture by holding some set of ideas in common. Therefore, starting with a known, fixed set of categories would help people self-select into or out of a given culture. Fluid tagging allows for increased specialization in forming bonds among people.
Thanks and have fun! – Bob
“starting with a known, fixed set of categories would help people self-select into or out of a given culture. Fluid tagging allows for increased specialization in forming bonds among people.”
Thanks for this inout, Bob :-) I hear what you say, and it's a very interesting point. I believe you are right. What's so incredibly difficult IMO, is to _not_ use fixed categories to describe what we do, because it will lock us into a position we may not want to have. We try very hard to avoid this.
Say we describe what we do as “affiliate marketing”, then we lock ourselves into a particular set of ideas, where some people feel comfortable and others definitely not. We may also lock ourselves into a blind spot, where we won't pick up on other ideas which are meaningful, and therefore prevent us from understanding the real problems we aim to understand. Same thing when we say this is for “filmmakers” or if we say we make a new way to “search” or “find information”…
So, our strategy from the beginning has been to throw this blog out here and try to make it sufficiently diverse and interesting in it's themes and capablitiies to attract readers from very different input bases, who share or somehow have an interest in our problem – and further build upon this in our wiki. We're trying to build community from the bottom up, and do that without having a product yet, to build it around. What we have is a problem and a vision, and both will take form as we unfold our online activities. The tough part is connecting and energizing our local networks, at the same time as we create a global network.
We don't know yet precisely where all this will lead, although we do have good ideas about what we want to build. We just can't build this without a broader input base. The old “build, launch and they will come” doesn't work for us.
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