Thoughts on Kuznicki’s “Birth of Swarm Intelligence”
January 12th, 2009 • Communities, Toronto Social Media
Mark Kuznicki has written a fantastic post regarding Twitter, its ability as a platform to allow us to work together, and the problems faced from that sort of scenario. At the time, I somewhat facetiously told him that I thought it was the best post of ‘09 thus far (when it was posted at Jan 5th); upon further reflection and seeing discussion on it, both on Twitter and his blog, I still feel quite strongly about it. Read his post, and then come back for my thoughts below.
Twitter as a platform, for any of you who haven’t used it, carries many different possibilities for usage. When it was first introduced, it was pitched as a micro-blogging platform, and as a way for you to let your friends and colleagues know what you were doing. (In fact, that’s still what Twitter promotes as their model; witness their catchphrase still being “What are you doing?”) However, in certain geographic areas, Twitter is becoming more of a tool for conversations, and from these conversations become action. Mark talks about a few Toronto-centric examples, and I’ve had discussions with a few people on the difference between using it to update versus to converse. I think that both the ability to reach a large network instantaneously but be forced to be clear and eloquent as you are confined to 140 characters has contributed greatly to the sense that anyone can collaborate without it seeming like too much of a timesink. In essence, because it doesn’t seem like you’re spending time doing work, and because you’re working together to co-create things, you’re able to be far more efficient and get far more done.
Mark raises a few different questions that the advent of this going forward would raise, mainly in the split between the connected and the non-connected:
To realize the potential of this collective intelligence, we have problems to solve:
- How do we involve, include and reflect the values of the non-connected periphery in our hyper-connected core?
- How do the myriad fleeting ideas that emerge find stable structures to see them through to execution?
- How will existing structures have to adapt in order to allow this new potential to be realized and harnessed?
- Whose interests are served by the new emergent order and whose interests are harmed? How will those conflicting interests be negotiated?
Out of these four questions, I find the fourth the most interesting, and tied in directly with the previous three. When looking at the conversational elements of these networks, tied in with the ability to move things forward through virtual communication, you do end up leaving a lot of people by the wayside. At present moment, who you end up serving are those in the tech community, and whatever interests they may have and share. There is some pushback on whether you will need to adapt these methods to ensure inclusion.
However, I’m going to take the approach maybe expected of a tech-savvy 20-something, and say that those of us currently using this tool to accomplish these goals shouldn’t have to change anything. Should we continue to prove its effectiveness in getting things done and providing meaningful change, the world will learn to adapt to us. Twitter is not a difficult tool to use by any means; if it continues to be successful, people will educate themselves on how to use it. In the meantime, in order to get some of those voices we may desire on certain projects, it falls upon the community to reach out to convince these voices of the necessity of their inclusion, and of the benefits that being included may provide to them. That’s not an unrealistic proposition. Shall they not want to be included, both we and they will have to find alternate means to accomplish the goals we all set forward. I’m not approaching this with a “my-way-or-the-highway” mindset; merely demonstrating that outreach can occur in both ways, but if swarm intelligence proves to be the way to go and you aren’t responding to it, there shouldn’t be an expectation of the community to have to bring you into the fold.
In case it isn’t obvious, both Kuznicki’s post and my commentary should be propelling you towards using Twitter; if you currently aren’t using it, and have no desire to do so, I’d be curious to hear your reasoning behind it.
