Author Archives: John

Putting down the masks: Facebook and the collapse of identity

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A curious thing happened a few years ago when I came back to Facebook after a break: I was afraid to post anything.

Well not afraid exactly, but confused: I couldn’t think of anything that would make equal sense to all of my Facebook friends.  If I posted about the perils of venture capital, my non-work friends wouldn’t care much about it, and if I posted about my kids, my work friends might find it strange.

It turns out this wasn’t a problem of imagination — it was a problem of identity.

Basically, I couldn’t figure out a way to post something that would fit all of my various identities — in other words, I couldn’t find any single status update that would fit all of the roles I was playing in my life.

This concerned me.

I wasn’t so worried about not finding the right words to say. mind you.  What worried me was that I was playing so many roles and that some of them seemed to run counter to others (an enterprise software company CEO who also played guitar and liked to read books on quantum physics and play Monopoly with his kids?  I wasn’t sure how to hold all of those disparate things together.)

In the end I need not have been worried: the problem is not a new one.  If we take a paleo-view on all of this we see that even in the earliest iterations of culture, individuals had to play multiple and sometimes conflicting roles (take the tribal chief, who also had a role as a mate, a hunter among hunters, a father, and a son).

The real challenge I was facing, though, was that the Facebook of a few years ago didn’t support the idea of context.  Anything I published to the site was by definition broadcast to all of my friends, regardless of the role that I played in their lives and they played in mine. Colleagues and high school friends and my family all got the same thing. This, of course, has led people to all kinds of curious decisions about using Facebook — only accepting friend requests from coworkers at or above them on the org chart for example (that is, people that fit certain contexts) or even creating multiple Facebook profiles to represent separate personae (I know many teachers that have done this).

Google was tackling precisely this problem when they launched Google+ with the concept of circles at the core — the “circle” idea in Google+ is centered around identity, and basically allows me to show different faces to different groups of people.  Facebook followed the circles experiment with its own take, allowing Facebook users to publish only “to” (or “at”) certain groups of friends, excluding others.

The reality, though, is that the process of building and maintaining theses “contexts” in Facebook and Google+ are too cumbersome to be of much use, so not many people use them.  What has resulted, though, is a little unexpected: I would argue that these technologies have caused a kind of “collapse” of multiple identities back down into a single cohesive identity for many of us.

This is a wild and unprecedented result, if its true.  I can say that for me this is exactly what has happened — I decided that the easiest thing to do was collapse all of the personae, and settle on just one: me.  The result is that what I write here, on Facebook, on Twitter, and pretty much anywhere else is written in the same voice and from the same viewpoint.  I don’t attempt much to manage this identity vs. that one anymore.  And I’m much happier for it.

It’s pretty clear to me that I’m not the only one that has made this choice and is now living this way.  I don’t have to look much further than Facebook itself to see friends of mine that are captains of industry posting pictures of themselves in shirtsleeves at the neighborhood bbq.  And while it may make PR people and image consultants squirm, I think the effect is much more trust and authenticity than could ever be effectively manufactured by marketers.  It can lead to some messiness, to be sure, but being human is a messy business, and I’ll take messy and authentic over polished and opaque any day.

Making deposits in the cultural bank account

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The news today that Marissa Mayer is considering buying iPhones for every Apple employee reminded me of an idea I’ve had for a long time about the importance of culture.

While business culture is instrumental in helping businesses not behave like sociopaths (more on this in another post), it’s also a huge intangible asset when it comes to helping a company navigate hard times.

Generally speaking, hard times bear a cost that needs to be offset.  The same group of employees in a company that is the darling of the stock market are much less happy if the same company is the dog of the industry — and the only way to prevent attrition is to offset the “cost” of negative concerns with benefits like extra pay or better hours.  This is at least one reason why garbage collectors make reasonable salaries – there has to be an offset for the perceived negatives.

There are, however, other benefits that can be put to work that don’t cost a company as much money.  My favorite by far is great culture.

It has been my experience (and surely the experience of many, many others) that its possible to navigate otherwise impossibly tough times when the culture is strong.  At Clickability we survived through two massive downturns that decimated our industry, largely because we invested heavily in culture.

I began to think about culture as an account that we paid into over time.  The more we focused on building culture, the bigger the account became.  And we were incredibly grateful we made those investments, because we actually had to draw down on them during tough times — we were able to ask employees to make some sacrifices and didn’t lose any key personnel as a result.

So how full is your cultural bank account right now?  What’s stopping you from making some more deposits?

What would Borges tweet?

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I was first exposed to Jorge Luis Borges in college, where I read most of the stories in Labyrinths instead of spending time on any of the other classwork I had that quarter. It was the first time I realized you could write fiction about ideas.  I was spellbound.

Among my favorite stories was the “The Library of Babel,” which conjures a fictional library that contains every possible permutation of a book that fits certain constraints (each and every book in the library has 410 pages, and each page has a fixed number of characters, including spaces).

Because every possible permutation of the book exists in the library, some magical things result.  As is the case when an infinity of monkeys bang away on typewriters for all eternity, most of the books are pure gibberish.  But (by definition) there also exist copies of every story ever written in every language in history; and likewise copies of this blog (come to think of it, if I could comb the library easily, it might improve my posting rate).

“The Library of Babel” relies on at least one fancy trick of language — that a finite number of symbols and ideas can be assembled to represent concepts that are infinite (any linguists in the audience care to comment?)  It works because the universe Borges crafted is finite, but the atomic units (characters) can be assembled into something that feels infinite.

But why 410 pages and (say) 25 lines per page, and (just guessing here) 80 characters per line?

Why not update the idea in modern terms and reduce the universe to just 140 characters?  In other words, what happens if we rethink Borges’ “Library” in terms of tweets?

Well, here’s what we can say more or less definitively:

  • Twitter is pretty serious about the 140 character limit.  So we have to stick with that.
  • We have a limited number of “choices” as to what character can be put into each available slot in the tweet, but its a little hard to figure out exactly how many choices we have.  Twitter says that it counts characters based after a tweet has been normalized to something called normalization form c.  That’s all fine and well, but what does it really mean? Well, it looks like there are 109,975 graphics characters defined in unicode, which is a lot.
  • The total possible number of tweets is therefore 140^109975 (easiest way to think about this is that there are 109,975 possibilities for the first slot and 109,975 for the second slot, which means 109,975 * 109,975 possibilities for the first two characters alone; add another character slot and you multiply by 109,975 again; and 109,975 * 109,975 * 109,975 is 109,975^3; that means for 140 characters, we get 109,975^140.  More on permutations here)

This turns out to be a very big number — the library of Babel, Twitter style, has 6.042X10^705 possible tweets.  For those keeping track, that’s a number that is a little more than a 6 followed by 705 zeros.

When you compare it to the number of tweets that have happened so far (a little more than 29 billion as of today, per Gigatweet’s counter) its clear we’ve got a ways to go.

But just how far do we have to go?

Well, if we exclude the fact that a lot of tweets are retweets, we discover something discouraging.  29 billion tweets can be written as 2.9×10^10.  That’s a drop in the bucket compared to 10^705.  Actually, its much less than a drop in the bucket — there is no bucket large enough nor drop small enough that would make the metaphor fit.  Even the difference between the smallest theoretical distance (the Planck length, or 1×10^-35 meters) and the estimated diameter of the universe (8.8×10^26 meters) is a mere 61 orders of magnitude, whereas the difference between tweets to date and the number of tweets we’d need for all possible tweets to be . . . er . . . tweeted is 695 orders of magnitude.

So I’m afraid that the only way that we can hope for a Twitter library of Babel is for the rate of tweets to continue to rise exponentially — maybe someone wants to take a crack at figuring out how long it would take if the tweet rate continued to grow exponentially? In the meantime, keep tweeting . . .

A (not terribly) grand statement of purpose

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I’m not much for grand statements of purpose, especially of the blogging kind. But how else to set an anchor and take a position on what will and won’t be noted? I suppose I could just start writing.

But before I do, here are the rules, faithfully committed to digital ink more for my benefit than for yours:

  • I aim for a 50-50 split between curation and original ideas.  I have no doubt that I will fail to achieve this goal almost immediately, given that there is surely some rule of the Internet or other that states “anything remotely interesting that can be thought of and committed to writing in a blog has been, at least statistically speaking.”  So, the important caveat — the original will be original to me, which is to say that its something that’s popped out of my head before I’ve been exposed to any information that it’s already popped out of someone else’s.
  • I care mostly about the ways that technology and culture intersect — it is of very little interest to me that Intel is coming out with its latest chip and has hit snags in production, but very interesting to me if the production has been snagged for uniquely human reasons.
  • This is a blog of connections.  Over time, I hope to have your help in connecting the ideas presented here with their close cousins in other corners of the web.
  • If it’s not fun, it’s not worth it.

Onward..