Metaphors Matter: Collaborative Technology Versus Social Tools

My friend, Doc Searls, one of the visionaries behind the Cluetrain Manifesto, and an all around great mind, is fond of pointing out how important metaphors are. How we frame a discussion, or structure our terminology about something, can have much more profound impacts than we might at first imagine. For example, he recently argued (at the Les Blogs conference in Paris), that the First Amendment guarantees for freedom of the press might not be protected for bloggers, unless the bloggers wisely start to describe what they are up to as “journalism.” If we call ourselves something other than “journalists,” he points out, the Federal government may try to abridge our freedom of speech, since only the press is protected from government contols.

A similar although not so politically charged battle of words is going on in the world of collaborative and social technologies. And, like Doc’s advice regarding freedom of the press, the choice of words involves high stakes, since behind the words there are the various constituencies using them, with potentially divergent agendas.

I hope that the danger inherent in metaphors doesn’t blow up in this discipline, like we saw in the ill-fated knowledge management experiment, where the industrial and financial concept of managing and controlling assets led to a wholesale dehumanizing of knowledge and disastrous results in hundreds of knowledge strip-mining projects.

On one hand, it may seem obvious and sensible that we are talking about people collaborating: sharing information, coordinating activities, and posting messages. Working toward shared goals, in project teams, trying to get things done. All very straight forward, and, perhaps not so obviously, very corporate, very industrial.

Superficially, there is nothing wrong with a focus on collaborative technology. But I believe that this perspective, this metaphor, is flawed. It stresses the wrong side of the coin.

The collaborative technology metaphor highlights the machinery, the technology platform that underlies people collaborating, and underemphasizes what people are doing: socializing. And I don’t mean socializing, like gossiping, per se. But I do mean the creation, care, and feeding of social ties, the use of trust and reputation, and the application of digital identity.

Technologists — and I am a recovering technologist, so I know — focus on the tools, the plumbing, and information flow. Collaborative technologies are viewed as pipes that bits float through; people are sources and sinks for messages, or documents, or other artifacts through these pipes. A collaborative assemply line, where people are like Charlie Chaplin in Modern Times, struggling to keep up with the information flow.

But people focus on other people, not the infrastructure they tread upon. They don’t — in general — think about information in some disembodied way. They instead focus on their goals, their partners and clients, and when they think about getting things done, they approach it from a social perspective. “What will Jane think about working closely with Rich on this project?” or “Carlos doesn’t have great presentation skills, so who can we get to do the sales pitch for Company X?” or “What is the best group of people to pull together for this project?”

And while non-technologists are happy to adopt better communication, coordination, and collaboration tools, they seldom fall into “info-speak” about them. They don’t adopt instant messaging because it can lead to generalized performance benefits for the extended network of users (a technological/analytic viewpoint), but because it is a very natural, conversational, and effective form of communication.

And more importantly, perhaps, social tools quickly transcend their IT roots. They go beyond moving bits and bytes around the ‘net, and instead change the way in whihc we interact. As I wrote in 1999:

The big story of the transformation of business culture isn’t the props — the servers, networks, ten million websites, and all the information lying around in databases and in HTML — but what people are saying to each other and how they coordinate their actions, behavior and goals. The big story is that the global computer network is an enormous chat room, enabling us to collaborate in unexpected, complex and novel ways. We are experimenting with new social systems, systems that to an unprecedented degree involve software and hardware.

In the ’60s, it had become unthinkable to run a business without a telephone on every desk. By the late ’80s, everyone had to have e-mail. The need for cost justification of these new expenses, at first demanded by management, fell by the wayside as the second-order effects — the social impacts — became felt.

The rise of PCs has not led to increase in productivity relative to things that people formerly did without PCs, like writing letters and memos or selling widgets. PCs have decreased productivity in these areas. Why? Because people are spending their time in new activities, activities that were not possible before, and adding new value to the business. And all that comes for a price — the time spent in the care and feeding of computers, networks and software.

And at the same time, a new category of software is emerging, software intended to augment social systems. Not to change the company inadvertently, like e-mail did, when the electronic analog of interoffice mail became something else, grew into something else by changing the way people communicated and led a change in the structure of the company. No, this generation of software is intentional, designed from the start to guide human behavior into new paths and patterns, to counter prevailing ways of interaction. I call these social tools: software intended to shape culture.

I don’t believe we can cede control of these essential tools to the technologists. It’s not about information flow, or other industrial themes of efficiency. Its about human interaction and the benefits of new ways to interact. The tools are only a means to that end.

So, headed into the upcoming Collaboration Technology Conference, I maintain that we are really exploring the design, application, and benefits of the social side of these tools. We must never lose sight of that end, even when we slip into technospeak about the pipes, wiring, or plumbing below our feet.