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The Not-so-Great Social Media Debate

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If you’re like me, you enjoyed the recent debate stimulated by Malcolm Gladwell in his New Yorker article titled Small Change: Why the Revolution Will Not be Tweeted. (You might also enjoy his follow-up interactions with readers).

In nutshell, Gladwell compared a 1960 sitdown strike in the American South with the social activist uses of social media, particularly as promoted by digiterati royalty Clay Shirky. He found it wanting. Twitter is great for promoting awareness, Gladwell says, but hardly for promoting commitment. And the civil rights movement had its own channels for promotion; word did get around even pre-twitter.

I kind of enjoy Gladwell’s contrarian, “I prefer real books.” But he hardly has the last word. For an example of a good critique, including Shirky’s reaction, read Scotnetwork’s well-covered viewpoint.

But there’s a broader perspective here that we’re all missing.

Ho Hum, Another Boring Old vs. New Debate

Gladwell went back to 1960 for his example. Fast forward two decades, to the introduction of voicemail in about 1980. You can read about the technical history of voicemail, but I want to focus on what I remember as the commercial reaction at the time.

I was working at a consulting firm, the MAC Group, at the time. (Jamie Dimon, for a few months, administratively reported to me—one of my better party trivia). Voicemail came to us as a Rolm product. At the time, three aspects of the system quickly grabbed our attention.

Implication One. Back then there was a key job—that of telephone receptionist. Like many other companies, a single person typically sat near the front door of the office, and performed two functions: greeting those who came in the door, and answering the phone. First implication: job insecurity.

Implication Two. Cost-benefit. As I recall, quite a bit of time was spent analyzing (we were, after all, a management consulting firm) the cost-benefit ratio of the new system. Was it a new item, with new value? So thought the nerds of the time. Or was it simply a new efficiency toy, to be justified by the job redundancies it made possible? So thought the hard-asses and Luddites of the time.

Implication Three. How could you make money off this thing? To be honest, I recall less of this discussion around voicemail than around the other two–but this was early in our love for things technoid. This question—how it would make money—became the obsessive question for later generations of techno-toys. Think laptops, PDAs, LANs, document management systems—and all that was before we even got the Big Deal—the Internet.

All of these waves of technology add up to one conclusion above all others: Plus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose.  The more things change, the more it’s the same thing.

The Things That Stay the Same

1.    We constantly mistake plumbing for business models. A phone is not a business model. Neither is voicemail. Neither is Twitter. They all start out as cool ideas, then get anointed as business models, then quickly move to plumbing. Nothing wrong with plumbing. Though before too long, you notice that it’s only plumbers who make money off plumbing.

2.     The real issue is not efficiency, it’s effectiveness. The importance of voicemail lay not in reducing secretarial positions, but in advancing the quality and range of communications possibilities. Voicemail didn’t ruin communication—it altered it. Ditto Twitto.

3.    The new issues get framed in the old terms. Twitter and Facebook are neither the savior of civilization, nor the antichrist. They are not good, or bad. New and old media will find their own levels. One is wide and flat; one is deep and narrow. The world has room for both. They will sort out.

 Maybe it’s me showing my age, but I find the debates interesting, yet ultimately boring. 

I prefer, of course, to think of that as wisdom, borne of perspective. 

You, of course, will think what you will. That’s what we as humans do.   

The Revolution Will Not Be Twitterized

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Arguably the inventor of rap music—and undeniably a unique voice of our time—Gil Scott-Heron is today most famous for an April 1971 track called “The Revolution Will Not be Televised.” 

“…the revolution will not be brought to you by Xerox in four parts without commercial interruption…will not give you sex appeal, nor make you look five pounds lighter…will not go better with Coke…”. 

The message—as I hear it—making change is not a casual, part-time activity. Done seriously, it can be hazardous to your being.

Here’s a short video of Scott-Heron:

The Revolution Will Not Be Televised
Uploaded by mallox. – Music videos, artist interviews, concerts and more.

Decades later, Malcolm Gladwell nods to Scott-Heron to say something similar about the television of our age—New Social Media (New Yorker, October 4, 2010: "Small Change: Why the Revolution Will Not be Tweeted.")

In his inimitable style, Gladwell first digs deep into the early days of the Civil Rights movement in the US—February 1960, to be precise—to show how a 4-person sitdown strike morphed into sitdown strikes across the south involving 70,000 students. All done, as he notes, without Twitter.

Then—as usual—Gladwell brings in the counterpoint. In this case, new social media. With an undertone of annoyance, Gladwell quotes State Department officials, old media reporters, and new media darling Clay Shirky. They all gush about the power of Twitter and Facebook to affect global political events, and to mobilize masses of people behind crucial movements.

Bahh, says Gladwell. Don’t confuse getting people to contribute thirty-five cents from the comfort of their armchair with a willingness to go get your head broken in support of a cause. And, suggests Gladwell, it is the latter—not the former—that turns out to be at the heart of social change.

Change requires risk. Serious change is done in numbers; but in small numbers, with real ‘friends’ beside you. The ‘friends’ you have on Facebook don’t deliver that kind of support.

Personal and Impersonal Trust

The debate Gladwell is raising is nominally about social media. It does raise a related trust issue, however. To what extent does our extended connectivity and interdependence increase trust?

Let me go back to the Trust Equation to suggest an answer. The Trust Equation (actually an equation for trustworthiness) is

(C + R + I)

          S

Where:

C = credibility

R = reliability

I = intimacy

S = self-orientation

 When people talk about new technologies allowing for the creation of greater trust, they are often talking about the first two elements of credibility and reliability—especially the latter.

·    We ‘trust’ that the sun will rise in the east;

·    We ‘trust’ Amazon’s suggestions for us because they are hugely data-based;

·    We ‘trust’ eBay’s ratings of sellers because they are aggregated and mediated;

At the same time, that kind of trust doesn’t mean I’d introduce my daughter to anyone at Amazon or eBay, or even lend anyone there ten dollars. Because that’s not the kind of trust you get from knowing people. 

A site like Match.com is a more interesting case, because it uses large impersonal aggregation to go after the kinds of interpersonal trust that are missing in a low-dollar commercial purchase. Scale alone is a huge attraction; but the impersonality of the medium, applied to a relationship game, means the dating sites have had to evolve various ways of mimicking the very personal process we have of getting to ‘really’ know other people. Winking, poking, are a few; they mimic the range of halting gestures people make toward each other in early stages; profiles and the ‘just lunch’ concept are others.

Gladwell’s specific point about revolutionary politics is an instance of a more general point about trust: Trust Is Personal. I’m talking about the Intimacy and the Self-Orientation kinds of trust mainly. I mean the kind of trust we need if we’re to do serious interactions, one on one, or movement-on-establishment.

If I don’t ‘trust’ my Toyota, I may go find a Ford. If I don’t ‘trust’ my ‘friend’ on Facebook, I may complain about him to my other ‘friends.’

But if I’m a civil rights activist in the 1960s, or an Iranian dissident today—I’m not going to risk my behind if the only one who’s got my back is a Twitter friend. 

Said Scott-Heron, “You will not be able to plug in, turn on and cop out…the revolution will not be on instant replay…there will be no highlights on the 11:00 news…the revolution will not be…” twitterized.

The Real Stuff is still pretty Personal.

Day Trader Management

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The NYTimes’ Joseph Nocera  wrote Saturday about the closing of Neil Barsky’s hedge fund, Alston Capital.  Barsky, it seems, is one of the good guys. (The same issue has an article titled “Hedge Fund Manager Accused of Fraud,” just so we keep things in perspective).

One of the reasons Barsky left the hedge fund biz after seven years was:

[he was] “tired of the ways the business had changed. “When I first started in 1998, we used to send out quarterly numbers. Now investors want weekly numbers. Professor Louis Lowenstein” — the iconoclastic and recently deceased Columbia University business law professor — “has a great line in one of his books: ‘You manage what you measure.’ ”

I for one wouldn’t call it a ‘great line,’ but the practice has certainly become widespread—and we are generally the worse for it. Let me explain.

If Measurement is Good, How Much More Measurement is Better?

Nocera provides another example of change, in his fascinating book Good Guys and Bad Guys.  In the mid-1970s (not that long ago for some of us) investors couldn’t be dragged out of bank savings accounts into new-fangled money market funds. Too risky, doncha know.

Fast forward to 1987, the go-go ga-ga days when everyone was focused on—daily mutual fund prices. Awfully risque.

But it’s not just finance. MBA programs and systems consulting firms have been pushing a hot product for some years now. It’s sold as efficiency, liquidity, process outsourcing–but at its heart is Lowenstein’s ubiquitous link between measurement and management.  More measures, more frequent, more detailed: equals better management.

If you can measure it, you can manage it; if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it; if you can’t manage it, it’s because you can’t measure it; and if you managed it, it’s because you measured it.

Every one of those statements is wrong. But business eats it up. And it’s easy to see why.

I just got an iPhone app that lets me check my QuickBooks account. Now, of course, I crave my receivables data updated instantly, constantly, 24-7. Because I can. And because more is better. Isn’t it?

A consultant friend was about to be hired to help improve engagement survey scores for an executive’s team.  He tells me::

“In no time, you heard middle management’s attitude evolve; ‘OK, this group is going to meet its goals; we are not going to be the ones lagging behind on these numbers. We will be able to show measurable improvement in engagement.’ And so they were about to turn ‘engagement’ into another meaningless exercise in meeting the numbers.”

The ubiquity of measurement inexorably leads people to mistake the measures themselves for the things they were intended to measure. It doesn’t have to be this way–but it too-often is.

Even Malcolm Gladwell feeds the measurement frenzy. In his current New Yorker article How David Beats Goliath, he cites Vitek Ranadive. Ranadive has made a career of turning un-integrated batch processes into aggregated real-time processes—faster, more data-rich, integrated. He suggests the problem with national economic policy is that the Fed has to wait weeks for data.  Presumably if the Fed worked with real-time data, we’d have better economic decisions. Call it day-trading national interest rate policy.

If Barsky thinks weekly investment numbers for his hedge fund are too short-term, let’s hook him up with Ranadive. Set up the databases right, and we could all be day-trading hedge funds! And of course, there’d be an app for that.

Management by Measurement Isn’t Just a Financial Disease

If MBMM—management by massive measurement—actually worked, day-traders would outperform Warren Buffett. I think they don’t.

The US mortgage industry morphed from a web of relationships (banks, bankers, home-owners) into a global impersonal market of short-term transactions. More liquid? Yes. More efficient? Yes. Lower cost of funds? Yes again.

But today’s meltdown arose precisely because replacing lengthy relationships with multiple transactions, substituting markets for relationships, and metrics for management leaves nothing but short term, impersonal money at the heart of business.  The saying on Wall Street became, "I’ll be gone, you’ll be gone–do the deal."  On Main Street, it translates as, "just tell me you’re going to meet next month’s metrics."  It’s seductive, and it’s addictive.  And not good for business.

When hooked up to its kissing cousin incentives, MBMM is a powerful drug.  As incentives critic Alfie Kohn says, "Incentives work.  They incent people to get more incentives."  Like I said, addictive.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with measuring. Or transactions. Or markets. They’re fine things.

But undiluted and without moderating influences, they become not just a bad deal; they can be a prime cause of ruining the whole deal.