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.

Winning inside! Celebrate personal design improvements

In a workplace that seems day by day to grow increasingly prescriptive, administrative and bureaucratic, how can an initiative-driven employee survive? The feeling is that the opportunities for experiencing real instances of success are becoming fewer and fewer, replaced by sporadic surprise corporate messages of abstract success from above. So how can one return to the days when it was enjoyable to get up in the morning to go to that job? You can’t just up and go to another job because that other job will be like that too by now. All jobs have become increasingly prescriptive, administrative and bureaucratic.

If you stay where you are, with your regular salary, how can you turn it back into the job that you once liked? One answer, they say, is to celebrate little wins. This is easy to misinterpret. Some see it as celebrating little tit-for-tat victories over someone else, like a constant cold-war — grind down or be ground down. This is simply not a healthy attitude — don’t engage in personal pettiness, it’s energy inefficient.

Instead, what I mean is to celebrate personal design improvements. Now, these are nothing to do with your career opportunities or your performance in your job or even the direction of the organisation itself. Well, maybe they are but in an indirect way. They’re more related to your own foundation as a credible and reputable human being. Your own design can be improved. Wait, if you’re already perfect, stop reading now — this is not for you. For the rest of us, what I mean is that we are all on a hero’s journey that involves becoming a better person than we were before. We can all do that. We can all identify problems in our own makeup and like any product, the next model or next version can feature improvements.

Think of your own phone or tablet or laptop, and compare it to the first one you ever had. You were compelled to upgrade quite readily and regularly because the design was improved. It’s the same with you and I. We can all be improved even in tiny ways. The innovation process is to identify a problem and its specification, which leads us to a solution, then we implement it. You must celebrate each little design improvement in yourself. Once you implement it, celebrate it! Let everyone else know. Tell your workgroup or social networks what the problem was, and what you did about it! Celebrate your personal design improvements. Now no matter how restrictive your job gets, at least you’re independently winning inside!

The difference between achievement and success

What is achievement?

Achievement is where you push your envelope of potential, your boundary of potential, your horizon of potential, beyond what you thought you were capable of. However, it’s not just about putting in more effort — more hours worked or units processed. What counts more is how we have recognised problems, designed a specification for a solution, identified a solution that fits, and proceeded to implement it. A hole in the ground is a problem, we need to know the shape and size of the hole (the specification) and what to fill that hole in with (the solution), and then actually fill it in (the implementation).

In that case, what is success?

Success is where you are rewarded for promoting the transactional value of the product of your achievement to the market. A product of an achievement that reaches one person and offers value that benefits them is rewarded. The same product from the same achievement reaching a hundred people and offering value that benefits those, is also rewarded. However, each of those hundred people in turn might also be connected to another hundred, and each of those to another hundred, and so on. Consequently, the transactional response for the value you offer becomes your scale-free reward of network fitness. In other words, it comes back to you multiplied — and that’s how we do that.

Be a Circus — link the networks

You cannot simply engage solely in the activity of “marketing”. There has to be something to market. You have to have a product. This has to be created or generated or grown or picked or mined or recycled or otherwise obtained somehow. It seems to me that a lot of people are quite willing to do this “marketing” thing, in favour of attending to the creation or generation step. You can’t market nothing, you have to add something of value, and no, marketing marketing doesn’t count, that adds up to nothing. How much time should we spend making and creating, and how much time for publicising that we’ve made the stuff, or have the stuff or are the stuff? I suspect those that are attracted to the perceived benefits of this “marketing” activity are precisely the sort of people who simply don’t make things or create things or even fix things.

There are people who make and create and generate, and I include the people who also repair and upgrade and maintain. However, there is certainly another type of person who shuns the innate ability we all have to produce because they offer a different value. Instead, they act as what I will term “circuses” between hubs of people in a clique, topic domain or community. In the same way, some people in those groups of people — the trades, interest groups or organisations, act as hubs by earning respect and visibility through their value and expertise. At the hub and community level, many of the highly connected and visible hubs that exhibit high network fitness within their communities, are usually also producers and consumers of the specific topic they are involved in.

The hubs are effectively people who know about other people in a domain and what they like and require. Because of this value the hubs are rewarded with connection fitness, in that domain. Everybody goes into and out of that hub, and more so because of their connectivity. They become visible and popular within a domain. They are the hubs that everyone connects to. They know their stuff, they know their people, they know their people that know their stuff. High network fitness.

The circuses are a different type of people who know about other people across various domains along with what they produce, the value they offer, and where it can fit. They probably know quite little in detail about what happens in each specific community and domain and trade, but enough to carry a surface level conversation. Enough to get the inkling about it. Enough to be able to deal with the concept abstractly, but not from the inside. What they can do is hook up one concept with another. Know which plugs and sockets on the patchboard might prove useful to hook together. In fact, they often don’t even know that, they simply connect them anyway. If nothing happens, nothing happens, but otherwise, something might happen! And because of their highly connected network fitness, hooking together the diverse hubs themselves, they get significant scale-free magnitudes of rewards.

That’s probably how things work in life, so there you are: the secret, all yours — enjoy. Tweet this around in between your pictures of kittens, and let the world know what I’ve taught you today. Become a Circus!

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.

Is Planet Earth skint?

Is Planet Earth broke? Has the world run out of money? Are we financially so overdrawn that life on Earth cannot continue because it is skint? Is this how it all ends? Not with a bang, nor a whimper, but a knock? Consider the concept of money. What is it? When was the last time you saw some? That’s probably why people have trouble defining what it is. Money is counterintuitive, it behaves as a fluid. It represents stored energy expenditure that is temporally decoupled. In other words, it’s a token of past or future stored effort that can be moved about in time and given to someone else in return for an equivalent amount of effort on their part.

Energy expenditure in the sense that we’re interested in is essentially analogous to work or effort. For the most part, to do work involves expending some energy. Yes, even bankers and estate agents. If I bake a loaf of bread, you could do the same. However, if I bake two loaves of bread and you catch two fish, I might accept a fish for a loaf, if we both agree. If you wanted today’s loaf but you didn’t manage to catch the fish today I might let you have a loaf and you owe me a fish, if I trust you. If you’re a stranger, forget it. Same as if I burned the loaves today I could still get a fish and owe an extra loaf tomorrow, if I were known and trusted. If we had some kind of agreed token instead, we could dispense with the direct barter and I get a coin for a loaf, I give a coin for a fish, and a stranger with no loaves or fish gives a coin even though we don’t trust her. It represents the effort involved in catching a fish or baking a loaf, or some equivalent effort that we’ve all agreed on. Or we could store the money for later when we might need more of it, like to buy a small twin-engine personal jet plane. Work, or effort, therefore is associated with expenditure of energy.

Think of the work you’ve done today, or this week, or last month. It’s easy to see that working self-employed seems like a linear relationship — do a lot of work and get paid for it. Put half the effort in and not get paid as much. Put no effort in at all and get nothing. But as we all know it’s not that straightforward. In a job as an employee, it’s easy to see people putting more effort in than yourself, and people putting less effort in than yourself, yet all getting paid similar amounts at similar times. It’s easy to see that the ‘free-rider’ effect limits the amount of work in a team or group to a socially normal expectation. Even though some people coast along going through the motions of holding a job down and yet getting paid, while others excel, and yet get paid, we all actually do some amount of work. Hardly anybody gets away with doing nothing. We all work, we all expend effort, and we all therefore qualify to make money.

I said that the fluid “money” is a temporally decoupled token of stored effort. This is the essential mechanism behind trade and transactions in the modern world. Fiat money is the use of something otherwise totally useless, as the thing that money is made of. We use coins, which are not much use to eat or sleep on or anything else other than buying something else with. Similarly with paper money, which I suppose you could burn if you want to keep warm. The KLF must’ve been getting pretty cold prior to that day in 1994. Money these days as we know is simply a number in a bank database, not even backed up by a Gold Standard, and this is still a fiat currency. Even with forthcoming popularity of cryptocurrencies, the most popular of which is currently Bitcoin, we still store or exchange effort in something that is otherwise totally useless in itself.

The world has a lot of people in it. Many of those people spend their day at work in a job. Many of those in jobs actually seem to do some real work — they can’t possibly spend all morning looking at Facebook. What would they do in the afternoon? We have a lot more people in circulation in the world now than we did before this recent recession. The one that frightened everyone since 2007 to about last year when Daft Punk ended it by releasing “Get Lucky” followed by Pharrell sealing global financial recovery with “Happy”. We all perform work, put in effort, and this gets stored for later or passed around as money. We have more productive capacity now than the world has ever had.

We should not and must not persist in this dismal attitude toward economics that allows falling down into austerity measures just to tighten up and restrict production. We must realise that the planet is not broke. Where did all the money go? Where was it to begin with? Is Planet Earth skint? Broke? Bankrupt? Of course not. Planet Earth should not hang up the sign saying “out of business”. We are not a broke planet. We have the work, the effort, the temporally decoupled system of representing transferrable stored energy — the money. It’s somewhere, it can’t have escaped. And if it turns out that we didn’t have as much fiat nonsense as we thought we did, we can easily make a lot more. Let’s get to work!

What is a network? Fitness, Value, Tournaments

If you search for fitness models on the Internet you’ll find an impressive range of pretty young things who don’t stray far from a gym. They’re certainly nice people to look at, but that’s not what I’m referring to here. A fitness model from the network context is a way of describing how it grew to where it is now, or how it may have failed to grow, or what it may be likely to do next. The assumption is that the nodes in the network are competitive and will seek an increase in the degree of their connections at the expense of other nodes degree connection. The Bianconi + Barabási model expresses this mathematically, which means that I won’t go into it here right now. Or anywhere. Ever.

I would suggest, however, a further parameter to this model. The existing facet of fitness could be viewed as intrinsic but let’s add another parameter that I might call ‘value’, which could be seen as an extrinsic dimension. If a node offers ‘value’ then it is given ‘fitness’ in terms of affordability of degree connections. Either way, the Barabási-Albert model of preferential attachment does give us an insight into why we have scale-free networks that can ramp up a given dimension into the stratosphere, for example when a meme goes ‘viral’ in popularity.

We are within a network of other people, perhaps in a family or friends context, and perhaps in a business context, with all of our connections. Therefore we are a vertex, surrounded by edges connected to other vertices. As a node, then, how do we consider and evaluate our ‘fitness’ within a network? And if we follow my modification of the above model and consider that there is another complementary parameter of ‘value’, how do we evaluate our value? Do you proffer value? Does your value afford the rewarding of network fitness? Does your network fitness promote visibility and popularity to attract more connectivity? Is your network fitness greedy from a competitive point of view, or generous from a collaborative point of view?

It’s my opinion that the Barabási-Albert model or the later refined Bianconi / Barabási model is missing an ingredient, because as it stands, it recognises fitness as a greedy action of competition success. However, people don’t necessarily work that way, or at least, not for very long (especially if we add the complication of the breadcrumb-path of reputation as a persistence aspect, etc. but we shouldn’t complicate it here, let’s keep it simple. Oops, too late). People in business leverage a blend of competition and collaboration — too much of one or the other and it’s not a good business success. The models require an extra thing, and I suggest that this is an outward-pushing ‘value’ aspect, that complements the inward-grabbing ‘fitness’ aspect. Being rewarded for offering value is akin to collaboration and is rewarded by fitness affordance which is of course akin to competition according to the BA and BB models above.

One more thing. The Tournament in graph theory is a directed graph, which forms the directivity progressively along a duration. In other words, there is a predetermined topology of the network but the directivity is not laid down yet. It gets laid down connection by connection. The outcome of this is that it describes a dominance model, and relates to social choice theory. The reason that people make choices is interesting, but the reasons that people within an influencing and influenceable group make their choices is even more interesting. With great power comes great scriptwriting and marketing, or something like that, and the responsibility of being a big noise in a highly connected network is possibly more paramount than many people realise. I suppose the only advice I can give is to be a valuable person for the sake of your reputation, because the reputation forms a persistent record. Whether that means being nice, or whether that means you can get away with being a bastard, that’s up to you — it’s your value, your fitness, your transactional reputation imprint.