Social Media: An Ecology Of Participation

Here's the slides from my talk today at Clickability | VIP conference (click here 200704_version_2_social_media.pdf).

The final slide:

“A well-ordered humanism does not begin with itself, but puts things back in their place. It puts the world before life, life before man, and the respect of others before love of self.” - Claude Levi-Strauss

tags: clickability, claude+levi-strauss, social+media, presentation

Comments

[Ken Jones]

Stowe - wanted to say that I really enjoyed your presentation today, very refreshing. Thanks for sharing your slides.

[Chris Kenton]

Likewise. I enjoyed the presentation and discussion. Thanks for turning me on to Gregory Bateson, the "Patron Sait of Blogging." I'm looking for his book on Amazon. I'm assuming "Steps to An Ecology of Mind" is the original book--or is there an "Ecology of Mind" that's out of print?

Thanks, Stowe.

[tmandel]

Well, the Levi-Strauss quote is just *great.* That alone made the slides great, and of course there was so much more. Did someone grab the talk itself? I would love to view-listen to it.

[Derick Harris]

Social Networks? Well...Maybe! Let's keep in mind that what Bateson really is talking about is how in the natural world we will NEVER find a organism fixated on a single variable up to, and oncluding, the necessity of its own demise.

It seems to me that so-called social networking is somewhat of a misnomer. It seems to me that social networks, both in the material world of class, race, education gender and so forth, as distinct from the ethereal world of information (Information REALLY IS different!)we have clear, if understated boundaries, and we all know what they are: they are "social". In other words "social networks" is an oxymoron.

Social by its nature incorporates a variety of class distinctions that are not necessarily discernible from the outside. Telecommunication might hide those distinctions temporarily; but, they are nonetheless fixed and, sooner or later they disclose themselves in pictures, words, biographies and the like.

For those reasons, class distinctions, I believe a better way to describe so-called social networking is to use the word "peer". I say this because social networks are simply not scalable, even though ubiquitous telecommunication would have us believe that are. They are not!

Therefore, a better way in view of the scalabality variable is to use the word "peer"; and, in keeping with the requirement that unorganized information amounts to nother more than a muttering jazz, we might add the word "pod", as in the phrase "peerpod" to more inclusively define what social networking actually is about, rather than what we would like it to be.

Hence "peerpods" in place of social networks. Peerpods are accessible, doable, layered across the public Internet and cognizent of the real life separation between the social worlds of class that are fixed and self defined, and the real world requirements of information which are that in order to be useful and accessible, information requires scalability and organization.

[Noah Logan]

Stowe - thank you for presenting - nothing but great feedback from the audience. The video of your talk is now available here: http://vip.clickability.com/blogs/Stowe_Boyd_Corporate_Blogging_Ecology_Participation.html