Robert Scoble has a bit of a rant today about the open web being dead and does a bit of trolling against Dave Winer and others who fight for open standards. He may be right. “Most people” may experience the web through closed systems like Facebook and Google+ rather than directly through blogs and RSS. Part of me feels that this is like AOL in the old days and that however attractive walled gardens may be in the short term the open web wins out in the long term. The other part of me wonders if it matters.

What is powerful about the web is our ability to find things and then indicate our feelings about them by linking to them. As David Weinberger says every link is an act of generosity. This may be a direct link from or blog or it may be a “like” in Facebook or a “plus” in Google+ – does it matter?

It matters when people start telling us what we can and can’t link to and that is the risk of proprietary systems. Much of the web is now “owned” by corporate interests and these, while they may provide most people with most of their experience of the web, will ultimately be eroded and replaced by the evolution of the web itself. I am reminded – yet again – of Bob Khan’s point that the hacker mentality will always stay ahead of those attracted to corporate or institutional thinking. Whatever the mass may do most of the time there will always be edglings and to claim that Facebook or Google have killed off the open web is naive.

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Banning social sites at work is for wimps – real managers have conversations with their time wasters about wasting time.

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Looks like Amazon now have my book Organizations Don’t Tweet, People Do on their “shelves”!

Something I hadn’t realised previously was that my publisher John Wiley & Sons is able to do special runs of the book with individualised company inserts such as a frontispiece or introduction. They are also able to publish individual chapters, or selections of chapters bound in special editions. A number of clients are also buying in bulk which is great as the book was primarily written as an influencing tool for those trying to get traction with the social web in big organisations. Do get in touch if you would like to find out more about this by emailing me at euan [at] euansemple [dot] com

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Andrew McAfee has an interesting post about The Surprising Benefits Of Solitude in HBR. In it he questions some of the assumptions of collaborative working in “the real” world that tend to be taken for granted. He also suggests that people working together online can avoid some of the dysfunction and group think that sharing the same space can lead to. I recently wrote an article for a corporate real estate newsletter about the changing needs for space that we can expect to see over the next few years. In it I suggest that people will become increasingly aware of where they work better and for which activities. Some will be better at working in the same space and some will be better done online. It will be the transitions that will be interesting.

Spookily, shortly before I read Andrew’s article, I ordered Solitude from Amazon. Its description includes: “In a series of biographical sketches it demonstrates how many of the creative geniuses of our civilization have been solitary, by temperament or circumstance, and how the capacity to be alone is, even for those who are not creative, a sign of maturity.”

What do you reckon. Is our need to work together in the same space over rated?

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There is something testing about putting your thoughts in writing, especially in public. The discipline of being forced to consider “Is this really what I think?. What will people’s response be when they see what I think? What will the consequences be when they see what I think? Will I be OK with that?” This self scrutiny is a good thing.

I was asked recently to sign an NDA (non disclosure agreement) and as usual responded that, to me, being asked to sign such a piece of paper indicates a lack of trust. It is hardly worth the paper it is written on in terms of regulating my behaviour. However the social web does. Particularly for those of us who live much of our lives online. We are very accountable. If we mess up, or do something reprehensible, any criticism of us will be immediately visible online and will therefore have an immediate effect on our reputation. I believe that, over time, this accountability brings with it an increased integrity. Sunlight is the best disinfectant.

This is true not just of individuals but of groups, organizations and society itself. This is the end game for me, seeing an increase in people’s visible and public engagement with life and a consequent improvement in our collective accountability. If we all have our thoughts out there, in writing for all to see, then we will have to think harder about what we are doing and why. This has to be a good thing.

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From our earliest days at school we are trained to think that if we don’t have order of a particular sort then we have chaos – and chaos is a bad thing. If we don’t have the grown ups in the centre of our society, maintaining order, then it falls apart. Those in power in companies, institutions or nations all have a vested interest in perpetrating powerful myths that keep the rest of us in check. In fact the degree to which they have power is determined by their success in convincing us that without them looking after us we would get in a mess. As a result We have a consistent and pretty fixed sense of what organised means, what organisations look like, and how unattractive the alternatives are. We cling to this sense of order like a lifeboat in the stormy seas of life.

Being part of this myth generating group has a strange effect on its members. It makes the grown ups start to think and act funny. They react differently because they are in charge, because they are responsible. They stop reacting to things in spontaneous and natural ways. Instead they start to filter and calculate their responses based on their roles. This screws things. They realise this is happening and feel uneasy about it. They know it is wrong and start to hide these feelings from themselves. They hide them from others. They see people in the same situation as themselves and start to gravitate towards them because it feels more comfortable to be with people who understand. Next thing you know they are starting to see the world in terms of us and them, black and white. They need to defend something they are part of from people who are not.

Look at the way that in the second world war  the Germans managed to maintain administrative control over such vast numbers of people and at such a speed when they invaded most of Europe in a couple of years. A friend of mine put his finger on how this could happen. People like order. Those in charge of maintaining order particularly like it. Up to a point they don’t care what kind of order it is so long as it is order. So if you invade a country you only need to take out a few of the top people and most of the rest will meekly line up in an orderly fashion and those charged with maintaining order, the police force, the judiciary, educators etc., will continue to do what they do.

Does it have to be this way? If not how do we stop this pull to an artificially created centre? Is it an inevitable part of human nature? Might we avoid it if we have such decentralised systems that there is no longer a centre to aspire to and defend?

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The olympic games communications team have rightly been being criticised for imposing constraints on the use of social media by volunteers for the duration of the games. This is naïve on so many levels.

It is a missed opportunity. Allowing volunteers to be part of communication about the event could have generated so much genuine involvement and enthusiasm. Any official use of the tools is likely to be stilted and ineffective in comparison. Trying to control use of the social web in this way in this day and age is impractical. It makes the organisers look stupid.

They are not alone. Most people running our institutions don’t understand what is happening and don’t know what to do about it. They pay agencies to do it for them and the agencies themselves don’t understand what is going on, or find it challenging and try to retain their own form of control.

It doesn’t have to be this way. This is not rocket science.

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I just tweeted about the odd feeling of cramming ideas into my head as fast as I can when eventually my head will no longer exist. This wasn’t necessarily as gloomy a thought as some may have assumed.

I have often thought that writing a blog post is like lobbing a pebble into a pond. You are not sure where the ripples will end up but you aspire to getting better at lobbing them and making bigger ripples.

A while back I was chatting with a friend about recent discoveries in neuroscience and got on to the way significant or repeated thoughts have a physical and persistent effect on our synapses. We reckoned that one way to achieve physical immortality would be to make sufficiently significant and replicable dents in enough people’s heads – literally!

As we parted he said that my pebbles were rippling in his pond. I reckon this is as much as we can hope for …

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Rob Paterson blogged recently about feeling scared and lost. I made an off the cuff comment about the time when you are not scared and lost being the time you really have to worry.

Today in a Twitter DM Thomas Power said “Values and beliefs are tested everyday online”.

I never underestimate what I am asking people to do when I advocate saying what they think on a blog. Especially in the world of business this takes real courage. Not everyone will agree with you, some may think you are mad, and sometimes you will regret saying what you did. Sometime the response you get will shake your confidence and make you challenge your assumptions.

Someone remarked to me the other day how brave they thought I was saying what I do in public. I don’t feel brave, I feel scared a lot of the time, I feel scared posting this blog post. Publishing my book may be the scariest thing I have ever done.

But if your not scared  maybe you are  not pushing yourself hard enough …?

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“he who should inspire and lead his race must be defended from travelling with the souls of other men, from living, breathing, reading, and writing in the daily, time-worn yoke of their opinions.”  - Emerson

This quote is taken from an excellent article on leadership and solitude by William Deresiewicz. The article was particularly  interesting to me as it referenced my favourite book Heart Of Darkness extensively. I agreed with much in the article but the reason I wanted to write about it here is the way Deresiewicz criticises social tools as being mere distractions from real relationships.

I agree that we need to hear Emerson’s warning about drowning in other people’s opinions but I get really frustrated by an increasingly common victim mentality to tools. In fact I just gave up on reading Is This All There Is by Julia Neuberger because of her knee jerk “young folks nowadays” attitude to the web and modern culture. It is almost fashionable to make yourself appear more serious and worthy of attention by claiming to be above the noise on the web.

These folks need to get over themselves. Twitter and Facebook are just tools. If we allow them to be shallow distractions they can be. If we want them to enrich our lives and help us understand the human condition better they can do that too – it is up to us!

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