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October 25, 2007
Social systems need antibodies
Social media needs antibodies: I'd like to bump up these few paragraphs from Stan Schroeder discussing how counterproductive it is that the distributed Techmeme editorial board is publicizing an unsubstantiated rumor about Podtech. Memeorandum, and later Techmeme, were initially very successful at quickly highlighting stories than the slower and older media channels did not address. They still are, in fact... Gabe Rivera's work is still very useful to me, day in and day out. But the fatal flaw in the approach is due to treating news as a mechanical system, with fixed inputs and processes, rather than a learning, organic system which will evolve with time. When there's a multitude of decisionmakers in a system, they'll react to the system itself, and the nature of the system will change over time. Henry Ford was successful in making an automation system for mechanical processes; Karl Marx failed utterly when he tried to apply the same planning style to economic processes. A sheet metal crimper can't change its mind with time, but each individual worker certainy can. When Techmeme started becoming influential it naturally became the target of PR campaigns and opaque lobbying. Memeorandum was even more swift in becoming coopted by non-transparent political campaigns. Once Google became important it became the target of hidden motives too... most searches today reveal commercial endeavors rather than actual knowledge. Going back even further, email was quite a bit more useful before it became universal and the target of spammers. Decentralized decisionmakers will react to changing conditions, and so social systems need built-in evolution mechanisms so the process can evolve as the participants varied motivations evolve. Organic design is a much harder problem than static design. I don't have the answer, unfortunately, but I do agree with Stan that we need some way to weed the unsubstantiated rumormongering out of Techmeme, or whatever will succeed it as the best current news-harvesting system.
Posted by JohnDowdell at October 25, 2007 7:38 AM