The Mystery of Attraction on the web - Luis Suarez

What do you need to know about how to reach people on the web? Really reach them?

Earlier this week Luis Suarez and I started to chat on Skype. Luis works for IBM Netherlands and telecommutes form the Canary Islands. I telecommute everywhere and I live on Prince Edward Island. We had never "met" and had never talked with each other before. But as we both anticipated - we both hit it off in a big way. I felt immediately that Luis was someone who could become important for me and I sensed that he did too.

We both cared a lot about the other. Somehow out of the millions on the web - we had found a match!

What had happened and what does this mean? How is it that the social web not only loosely connects us with ideas, music, issues and people who share these BUT ALSO connects us with people that we have a heart connection with as well?

I am going to explore this process in more detail in my upcoming interview with Susan Meyer at WOSU who is exploring how WOSU can learn from the Columbus Blogging Community how to get connected better in Columbus. But as a taste, here are some answers that Luis and I discovered for ourselves.

We both live in human scaled communities and have a vivid daily experience of what it is like to be in a space where you have to behave well.

Both of us live in small communities where when we pass people on the street, we tend to make eye contact. Often stop and say hello. Whatever you do or say in the Canaries or on PEI - people will know. So we have to govern what we do by the social rules of our society. There is no anonymity! This feels comfortable for us. There is also a human pace to what we do. We work at home and hence we have a lot of time that is ours. We spend a lot of time outside and we are affected by the weather. Work fits easily inside our day. We are rarely rushed.

But when we go to the big city - Luis Madrid me Toronto - we tend to be overwhelmed a bit. We note that most people have a lot of social armour on to protect themselves from all the social noise. With so much anonymity, people can can be rude and inconsiderate and don't even know that they are. People also seem to be very time stretched and in a rush.

We felt that this armor plating was a product not of poor character but of the scale itself and all the noise. We felt that no one would be immune. At a certain scale it was essential to have a full suit of armour on. Eyes down in the subway or elevator. iPods on as we walked in the street.

Our aha was that this natural social gradient also held up on the social web. What people really want, we think is to be back in the tribe/village that all primates feel best in. What we find is that we live in a huge mega city called the web. A place so big that most have a lot of armour on and can behave badly as if there were no consequences to being inconsiderate.

So here we are. Tribal Primates in a vast metropolis. A place were many think that they can reach us by using the same techniques as are used in the real big city.

Our aha is that if you want to reach us - find a way into my village.

Both of us have large web circles. Luis has a huge one. BUT we both noted that we both really paid attention to about 20 -30 at the most. If one person in this little village said "Hey look at this" we would. But we would rarely take the rest too seriously, especially if there was no context provided as well.

If you want to reach us, it is best to reach us by one of the village.

So how did we find each other in this huge mega city that is now the social web? A joint member of our two villages was the broker. Euan, a common friend introduced us.  He told us both that we might enjoy each other's company.

This did not mean that we became friends. It meant that we began to pay attention to each other.

The earth did not move. There was no flash of lightening. What then happened was that we observed the other form a distance. We saw how we acted on the web. We discovered that we shared other friends. We saw glimpses of the other's private lives and struggles. Over time an accurate assessment of what the other might be like as a person emerged for both of us.

Having feeds from our blogs and most importantly having a Twitter feed enabled a granular appreciation to develop. An affection grew even without any direct contact. So, when we finally spoke, it was as if we had been old friends who had been separated for a long time.

This experience is rare but not unique for Luis and I.

I am sure that many of you have had this happen. My life has been enriched beyond measure by the handful of close friends that I have made this way. An introduction by a trusted member of my village has been the starting point.

I am nearly 60. Before I ventured into the 'sphere, I had really stopped making friends as I had at university. New friends were largely situational. We were co workers. Our kids were friends. Neighbours. As I got older it got harder. This though is like being back at university. There is this huge pool and there is the time to let the frindship grow naturally. We hang out a lot as we did when we were 20.

Luis and I agreed that what we wanted more than anything was the joy of being back home in the village again. The social web seesm to be able to enable this to happen. Our bet is that learning more about how this process works will unlock the real potential of the new web.

The bottom line for Luis and I is that the social rules of tribal/village seem to apply to the social web.

We most of all wish to live in a village - in a tribe - the web enables us to find the best village and tribe possible as it offers us the choice of the whole world to find the best matches rather than having to make the best of our blood and local pool.

It means that the social gradients of real life apply. We treat strangers with caution and we treat strangers who presume with even more caution. Some chap came onto Luis' site and said that it was the ugliest that he had ever seen. Imagine if I came into your house and said that?

It means that we can be proud to have say 1,000 followers on Twitter but that the risk is that you will have so much noise as to miss your real friends.

It means that we have to rethink the whole idea of "local". My village is made up of people who live all over the world. I have closer ties to them than to most that live 10 miles away from me.

It means that community as far as My Community cannot scale beyond a small town. Otherwise there is too much noise.

It means that those who wish to design for community would be advised to follow the rules of community in real life - In real life, we scale out from those that mean the most to us to the noise.

The harsh truth of "Friends" is that we can have only a few of them. Between 8 - 35? Then up to about 80. All the rest are outside the zone where we care a lot. So again all the vanity about how many FB "Friends" we have is just that - Vanity.

So if you worked for a TV or radio station and you accepted this realty - how would you approach connecting to your city?

Nest week Susan Meyer will offer up her opinion - I think you will find her views engrossing and very helpful.

Comments

[David Tebbutt]

Nice piece.

Euan was one of the people who introduced me to the nature of social computing in the first place. A great mentor and, I hope, friend.

I met Luis online, as you did, and, like you, just *knew* that we'd get on when we eventually met. This was put to the test in Orlando earlier this year and the experience was terrific (for both of us, I think). As a bonus, I discovered he's huge fun to be with.

I have another friend, Toby Moores, who calls himself sleepydog on Twitter. He has been talking a lot about tribes recently. I think you and he would get on great too.

Again, we met through mutual interest in social computing/networking/media (take your pick). Except, in this case, it was at the Office 2.0 conference in 2006 and we've sustained the conversation both on- and off- line ever since.

I'm a little bit older than you and I love the expression 'situational friends'. Until I got involved in blogging and the like in 2004, my friends were mostly that type. Family, ex-neighbours and ex-work colleagues form the core of my (few) friendships. Since going online, I would say that my genuine friendships have increased by a few more and my circle of very friendly acquaintances (village-type) has increased dramatically.

We're bonded by common interest and shared values but, I can tell you now - we're not an echo chamber, we disagree and debate furiously as we try to understand the dynamics of social networking.

Everything you wrote resonated with my experiences. And I thank you for articulating it so well.

[vanderwal]

This is a fantastic post. It is a wonderful fleshing out of how people connect and come to an understanding of who another person is and what our relationship/connection to them will be.

I really like the analogy of the web is like being at university, as it really does bring those near in thought together, but with out the complication of distance.

This really echoes the elements of social software and their build order (in a human way so to better understand the tools and services we are building) I have been working through the last many months.

[Toby Moores]

David Tebbutt and I ware talking about this the other day. It is interesting how in some ways we appear to have come full circle. The tribe gave way to the state and then the individual. Now we appear ready to return to the scale and conventions of the tribe.

At risk of spoiling your beautifully written post with some rough science, the tribal limit of approximately 150 people has been well documented elsewhere. It also crops up in effective business and military units. It is also supported by Zipf's law (our 2nd strongest relationship is 1/2 as strong as our 1st and our 3rd strongest is 1/3 as strong etc) I guess this just codifies what we know - that we get on better when we get on.

I wonder if there is any significance in the fact that both of you, David, Euan and I all live in villages or at least far from the madding crowd. I don't know Thomas well enough to speak for him, we are just starting a circling of our own.

Thank you for your thoughts gentlemen (makes eye contact, smiles and strolls on)

[Rob Paterson]

Toby - I wonder if most who live in big cities are so cut off from the deeper reality of human organization that they are socially "Autistic"? All their human social radar has been atrophied by social stress?

I left out what I call "Magic Numbers" but will return to them next week. Yes the science is clear on these - 8 - 15 - 35 - 80 & 150 "The Dunbar Number"

But most organizational theory and all of HR ignores them.

A great joy to me is to be working with Dalhousie on introducing these natural principles into Residence Life - I have not heard of anyone else doing this - have you?

[Paula Thornton]

Another artifact. You mentioned 'brokering'. It's a critical element. I backed into it as part of the model when I wrote about brokering replacing advertising as a means to connect people to products/services: http://www.fastforwardblog.com/2008/02/18/advertising-relic-of-inefficiency/

Thanks for reinforcing the pattern with yet another example.

[John Proffitt]

Fantastic post and great comments. I've now lived in Alaska for 7 years. I only planned to live here for 2 or 3, just for the adventure. And I do think I'd like to live elsewhere at some point (I like learning about new places and parts of the country in general).

But every time I travel now I find the world to be bigger, noisier and nastier than I remember. Anchorage is no tiny town, but even with 300,000 some residents you actually have a chance of meeting people you know at the grocery store or the movies or elsewhere. Throw in some natural social stratification and your odds improve.

This creates all the stuff you're talking about -- a kind of social friction (good friction, not bad friction) that alters your thinking, your behavior. I think it's a really positive thing and perhaps one of the reasons I haven't left is because of the "noise" in other larger cities and a loss of that social contact.

This also plays into how I'm approaching social media ideas at work, as we look at transforming our public media company into something much more personal, direct and "real" for the people of our community. We're having a devil of a time sorting through the differences in approach between mass media (impersonal) and social media (personal) and how to do the latter on a larger scale and the former on a smaller scale.

Anyway, thanks for this post. I'm going to share this with folks at work. And I'm going to keep thinking about this for myself.

Plus, now I'm thinking a vacation on PEI sounds pretty cool!

[Dan Smith]

I thank Luis Suarez for the link here to the great post and discussion. The social goal I think is to have the closeness of the village but always remain open to visitors to that village, real or virtual.

[Toby Moores]

Rob - just wrote you a long and eloquent comment in response to yours, only to lose it to a duff battery! Will gather my thoughts and repost!

[Rob Paterson]

Toby
Many of my best posts have ended that way too - so annoying!

[Toby Moores]

Thanks Rob - I think 'broken window' autism is suffered by many that can't easily form a community, or have one formed for them.

I have not heard of any one else doing this, although it is not my area of expertise. Howard Rheingold talks about the evolution from Sarnoff (broadcast) through Maxwell (networks) to Reed (group-forming networks) in his book Smartmobs. Kevin Kelly, oft cited by Rheingold, is also a commentator.

Hobby tribes, smart mobs or social networks, call them what you will, they are all group-forming networks. It seems to me that this is what we are talking about, although I don’t agree with Reed’s maths for human networks (see below). The biggest win personally, socially and commercially is the ability to find small communities that share your less than mainstream passions.

I think society, the media, industry and in particular the military are aware of the evolution. Some have adapted more easily to the change but it is fairly pervasive.

However, apart from ignoring the power of the networked community, the biggest problem that I see is this. It is assumed that for a sufficiently large population, people behave like nodes in a network. This may be true of hits or links but posts, comments, and replies have an emotional dimension that increase the importance and limit the size of communities. Dunbar and Zipf are reintroduced, I think this is the point that organizational theory and possibly HR misses.

Once again I fear I may have spent too long on the rough science rather than the narrative but I am enjoying the conversation!

On a final note I wonder if the vanity FB or Twitter numbers are an indication that some are returning to a traditional network or even broadcast mentality.

[Rob Paterson]

Thanks Toby - I am going to post my Dunbar HR series later today that I presented to reboot last year - The premise follows Good to Great by Jim Collins.

He starts by looking for companies that performed greatly for a long time - say 20 years and finds common attributes.

I asked what kind of organization performed greatly for hundreds, and in one case nearly 1,000 years.

My bet is that we can learn from this too