Geek Dinner with Stowe Boyd, and a discourse on Friction in Social Nets

I first met Stowe earlier this year at the Chinwag Widget thingy, so it was good to meet him again last night and hear his thoughts on our industry. The Geek dinner format works well - a small group, Stowe discoursing - very interactively - and of course social networks run much better when lubricated.

The discourse touched on all sorts of areas, but where it gets interesting is where people put their own experiences and stories into the mix. I'd like to pull out a thread that resonated with me, and that is reducing friction in social networks. Here are 3 thoughts that came out of last night.

(i) Increasing the Dunbar number by using electronic comms to reduce networking friction. (In essence, the Dunbar number is the theoretical maximum number of connections in a network any one person can manage using our current language / physical comms etc and stands at 150 for humans). Stowe's thinking (and mine - hence resonance) is that the Dunbar number is not a capacity limit in our heads, but friction in our current methods of communication. Stowe feels that a lot of the recent RSS aggregation stuff is a great step forward, though I feel that email nailed this better 10 years ago and RSS aggregation is only now returning to that sort of time efficiency. However what is more interesting is the thoughts of where it may go, as increasingly we can winnow the comms we need (higher signal to noise), speed up the transfer (more comms/minute)

(ii) Finding the zeitgeist in the media - Stowe mentioned his theory of mainstream media "balanced reporting", ie take rabid lunatics from both fringes of an issue and call that balance, or more worryingly, present one rabid lunatic and a majority opinion and give both the same weighting. (Sort of a Conservation of Mementum* - Mv = mV where M = masses believing the meme and V = vehemence with which they do so)

Again, this causes friction because the recipient knows its wrong, and has to spend time working out how and where. I recall getting quite a few msm type people very grumpy awhile ago when I opined that the blogosphere in toto is actually closer to the truth than any msm play, and with new search tools (like our Zeitgeist-o-meter) its far less friction to find the Blogosphere's zeitgeist than it is to read enough newspapesr to get the mean view.

(This led to a chat about how editing may work - techmeme algorithms vs human editors, mass vs personal - I think it will be blended - see this in the NYT for example.)

(iii) Stowe's "Bistronomics" ie one person plays bank, others put in what they feel they ate/drank - an attempt to find a way between the horns of either everyone paying the bill separately (takes time, causes squabbles etc) or pay equal amounts (not nearly so much hassle, but the feeling that some people cheat and get a free drink, if not a free lunch). I noted that in my experience the "pay my own bill" thing had been a far larger issue in the US (I lived there for 2 years and it was a frequent issue) and wondered why. Stowe noted that it was more nuanced, in that the issue was often with people who had a "thing" going on - vegan, teetotal etc and thus felt it was imperative to Make a Point.

Whatever the cause, from my own experience I know that the "bill obsessives" and "free riders" get dropped from any social network with ongoing transactions , as both types are felt to "defect" from accepted norms of behaviour - study of defecting behaviour in human networks shows we punish it quite vigorously.

I sort of see it as a metaphor for larger social networking game theory - having been in both mobile roaming negotiations and internet peering ones, you can see who the "bill obsessives" are - and it really reduces trust, which increases friction hugely. As we move into a world where we are increasingly more electronically linked, we will increasingly find that we cannot afford either the "bill obsessed" (too complex and costly to measure and calculate every event) or the "perpetual Free riders" (get too many and the system collapses - like the broadband bandwidth hogs today) so we will need systems which are sort of right and what goes around comes around - maybe its via a movable banker, maybe other ways, but its where Bistronomics becomes Karmanomics

All in all, a thought provoking time, thanks to the ever laid back Ian Forrester for making it happen.

* Shall I patent that