Your morsels of value

What do I mean by network value? In a network, the popular nodes become even more popular, according to a “rich get richer” fashion known as “Preferential Attachment”. Previously I have used the example of the London Underground, although that is not a particularly good example in terms of dynamics, because the popular stations are interchanges. There is very little occasion for a new interchange to suddenly pop up at a station that hitherto was not an interchange. New stations don’t materialise that often, so the whole analogy proves a bit slow to visualise in action.

The network value of a vertex in a network, which is rewarded by affordability of opportunity to increase connections in a scale-free manner, is itself a complex parameter. What do I mean by value? Up to now, we’ve just been assuming we mean that we offer something, perhaps something unique or perhaps something appreciated or liked or funny or thoughtful or provoking or some other appealing lure. If a node in a network produces something no other node does, and if as coincidence would have it, other nodes in a network actually appreciate that product, then that’s what we’ve been imagining what I mean by “value” within a network. But this is quite subjective.

Lots of nodes, sorry, people, produce and present to the network more or less nothing. When they do, it might be of low importance such as mentioning that their cat rolled over. Or it might be something derived that they are simply passing on, like a retweet or a pasted-in motivational quote. Motivational quotes are a freely utilised currency. As far as I’m aware, Henry Ford, Bob Marley and Thomas Edison don’t actually have twitter or facebook accounts, what with the inconvenience of being dead and all that. Yet much of what they ever said in their lives is passed around freely. Not only as a way of cheering people up (or ‘motivating’ them), but packaging it as a kind of “you got that good feeling from me” emotional transaction.

As I say, a node that produces is not always offering value to the network. In a work environment, if someone farts, the value of their unique production is generally not appreciated or liked, nor does it give everyone else a good feeling. So you see, it’s subjective. What we consider value is often measured and quantified in terms of a qualitative effect on us. The more happy it makes us, the more value we assign to that direct contact on the network that packaged their output into tiny little morsels, nibble after nibble. We afford network fitness to them as a reward. But only if we calculate that they offer value to us, and this is purely in terms of how good it makes us feel at the time. It’s all very much instant gratification, there’s almost nothing long-term about this, and it doesn’t correlate with any true usefulness of the information, just how sweet it tastes to us.

Drowning in social networking

Who are all these people subscribing me or following me or whatever? I don’t know them and they don’t know me. The most they can possibly know about me is from my picture, profile and a quick look at the latest stuff I posted or tweeted or the videos on youtube that I make. None of those followers know what kind of a person I really am, nobody knows anything much about me unless you’re a long-term friend. However we all need to expand our connections, but the vast majority of those we connect to will turn out to be passively useless. Of course, you have no idea which ones those are, because someone connected to you may seem to be contributing nothing but they in turn may connect to someone else who connects to someone else, who, well, you get the idea. Distant and weak links are often valuable. Not all the time, but it happens.

The point is, these social networks are actually directed graphs, even though it doesn’t seem like it. There are people who tweet out or post out. There are people who don’t, or hardly ever, or when they do it’s about something mundane in their life such as their cat looking cute again. There are people who read these messages and people who ignore most of them. When you have a lot of followers and in turn you follow a lot, you can’t possibly spend all day reading it all, you’d get nothing done. Some people produce content on the social networks, some people consume content, some redirect, retweet or repost and act as hubs within their own networks. Some even act as circuses linking the hubs that they pay attention to, at the expense of discrete islands of nodes.

Therefore some information is going out from many nodes, some information is coming in to many nodes, and not all nodes balance this equally. The network value of a node is related to how actively it will process from input to output usefully to others (either reading it, or retweeting it, etc). If it does nothing, or just occasionally posts about the cat, it’s effectively just noise. However, as I stated, you can’t just remove all the first degree connections that seem useless, they may be connected further away to someone more useful —you simply never know.

A lot of this chasing followers in the hope of a sudden viral success of whatever it is we’re all about, reminds me of something. It reminds me of the last years of the 20th century when everyone was swapping banner ads on their web rings. It’s not actual productive work. Yes, it gets the word out there and an amount of that kind of promotion is a good ingredient, but it can’t take your whole day, day after day. If everyone did that, nothing would get made, grown, produced or fixed. My advice therefore is to concentrate far more on what it is that you produce that is of value, and less so on publicising it, otherwise you’ll get nearly nothing done in life. Turn your back, get on with whatever it is you actually do and make some more of it. Be productive. You can market it afterwards. Unless, that is, your whole productive output is structured only around social media “marketing”, in which case you’re effectively useless. But that can’t be the case, I’m sure you can actually do something that people are interested in experiencing.

People are our product

I can see why social media is so compelling for most. We have a kind of herd instinct — well, it’s certainly not a true herd instinct in the sense of cattle, but we are fairly gregarious, us humans. It’s almost like our instinct to return to a group for security is being triggered all the time. It rewards us in the same way each time we are exposed to it, and when we aren’t we are reminded of the feeling. We have a kind of itch inside that prompts us, whenever there isn’t any overtly engaging conscious stimulation, to turn around and catch up with what the herd is doing. In past times, this may have involved going down the pub or similar venue. Going to a church or something like that. Going to the beach or a park or somewhere that affords “promenading”. The phone or tablet we carry is a constantly alluring gateway to get back to the crowd again for our regular hit of validation.

Even in shopping centres and tube stations, people standing on the right on the up escalator will simply look at the people standing on the right riding the down escalator, and vice versa. We like to look at each other, be with each other and discern differences in each other. We get a lot of pleasure from just looking at another human being — it’s obviously of value. There are even entire magazines devoted to looking at people. And television programmes. And films in the cinema. We value other people, their presence and existence makes us feel good.

In fact, that is precisely the point we should be taking to heart and embodying as the core of our businesses and products and endeavours — that people are effectively the product. People are our product. All of us. We are our product. We make stuff, for other people. We do stuff, for other people. We fix stuff and say stuff and squeeze stuff and show stuff — all for other people. People are who we connect to in our social networks, people are our societies. Our product is effectively nothing but people.

We offer value to each other — or at least, we should if we want to be successful, and we can measure our success by the connections we are rewarded with, and how influential we become within our networks. Maybe in addition there’s some kind of transactional reward involved, featuring temporally decoupled representational stored effort tokens, or maybe not. But that isn’t the main point. The value we gain is that of connectivity and agency within the network. If we offer value we may be rewarded with connectivity that affords network  fitness. One person connects to us, if they like what we offer, good, but if they don't they can pass the connection on to another and if they pass the connection on and so on, this builds our influence and allows our reach to extend. One person passing the good word on to another is how reputations are built, and the reputation stays or persists much longer than any set of connections in your network. We’re not really building networks, then. We’re really building reputations, and the way that we do this is by using the network as a substrate upon which our reputation grows.