Scott Berkun's Blog, page 28

(Book Review) The Upside of Down: Why Failing Well Is the Key to Success

I read a prerelease copy of The Up Side of Down: Why Failing Well Is the Key to Success from Viking Adult.

McArdle writes well but the structure and pacing of this book was uneven. Twice during reading I double checked the title of the book to make sure I hadn’t made some mistake about what the book’s title was. Some chapters go too deep into singular, and not quite interesting enough, examples in a style that had a certain self-centeredness about them, as if they thought they were the star of their own show. I simply asked myself as a reader “where is this going and why are we still talking about this 10 pages later?” too often.

I wasn’t surprised to learn in the acknowledgements that the balance of the book was based on writings previously published for The Atlantic and other magazines. This is not a ding about reusing work, as I don’t care where the pages are born from provided the book works as a coherent whole, or is described as a collection, and neither was the case. There are also many political (Russia, America) and economic failure examples (debt, taxation, regulation, conservatives/liberals), which in retrospect fits McArdles wheelhouse as a journalist, but not my interests as a general audience reader interested in failure (which is what the title suggests is who the book is for).

On the positive side there are pockets of solid storytelling and useful commentary on rethinking failure here, it’s just not consistently delivered and compared to the many excellent books for the general reader already published on rethinking our assumptions about failure (see list below) I can’t justify recommending this book and its narrative wanderings, unless you’re a fan of McArdle’s writing (in which case you may have read some of this before) or have a primary interest in economics and politics.

She does correctly nail certain nuances often overlooked. She observes how we reward pundits for hyperbole rather than accuracy in prediction (A point Nate Silver’s Signal and The Noise also emphasized), and the unavoidable failures of faith in testing of any kind (See Dangers of  Faith of Data). She captures how much randomness there is in why things fail or succeed (The films Waterworld vs. Titanic is one example) and points out how the Mona Lisa only rose in popularity after it was stolen (and returned), which has nothing to do with the quality of the painting itself.

And she explores a standard roster of studies from academia like The Stanford Marshmellow test on self control and the Peter Skillman Spaghetti bridge challenge (which coincidentally also involves a marshmallow) that showed how kindergarden children outperformed adults in a design challenge simply because they were the most willing to fail fast and learn from it.  She also references Carol Dweck’s work on Fixed vs. Growth mindsets which is a concept rising fast in the corporate world as the latest panacea (for those wanting to replace their obsession with Myers-Briggs). Cognitive Bias, one of my favorite subjects, gets coverage too. Had these themes been more central to the book it would have faithfully lived up to the title, been a better read and easier to recommend.

Here’s my short list of related books I’d recommend first:

Being Wrong Adventures in The Margins of Error, Kathryn Schulz: This is probably the layperson oriented book about how to look at failure differently that you’re looking for, covering most of the bases of stigma of failure, mental models, while keeping the focus on individuals, and ordinary life situations. 
To Engineer Is Human: The Role of Failure in Successful Design, Petroski: If you’re an engineer or builder of any kind this book is for you. It’s a short book with case study exploration of several different famous failures (Tacoma Narrows bridge, Challenger space shuttle, etc.).  There’s limited analysis of how to prevent failure, but the message of how we primarily learn from failure is made clear.
The Logic of Failure, Dietrich Dörne - If you are a manager or leader Dörne focuses on how data can lead you to the wrong conclusions. It’s not the most entertaining book but it’s one of the deepest for understanding the nuances of how what appears to be reasoned decision making based on data can set you up to fail.
You are Not So Smart, McRaney: The best single book on Cognitive Bias. It’s a series of short articles, each covering a different bias. It doesn’t go into how to overcome them, and he can be loose with the references and supporting arguments, but since Cognitive Bias has a huge role in why we fail understanding them is a great place to start.
Deep Survival, Gonzales: an examination of who survives in disasters and dangerous situations. It’s not specifically about failure, but about how we handle crisis, and what habits and patterns of thinking matter, or can get you killed. McArdle briefly, and positively, mentions it in the Up Side of Down.

Big Questions for “Secret Ingredient for Success” (NYTimes)

Ranting about opinion pieces isn’t generally worthwhile, but some pieces are deeply flawed and popular enough that they demand critiquing. I’ve taken Susan Cain and Jonah Lehrer to task in the past, and I’ve come across another post worthy of examination.

The article is a New York Times opinion piece titled “Secret Ingredient For Success” and the title itself is hyperbole: what they describe is no secret and it’s not necessarily an ingredient for success.

Even it’s opening story is problematic on several counts:

WHAT does self-awareness have to do with a restaurant empire? A tennis championship? Or a rock star’s dream? David Chang’s experience is instructive…

He recalls a low moment when he went with his staff on a night off to eat burgers at a restaurant that was everything his wasn’t — packed, critically acclaimed and financially successful. He could cook better than they did, he thought, so why was his restaurant failing? “I couldn’t figure out what the hell we were doing wrong,” he told us.

Mr. Chang could have blamed someone else for his troubles, or worked harder (though available evidence suggests that might not have been possible) or he could have made minor tweaks to the menu. Instead he looked inward and subjected himself to brutal self-assessment. Was the humble noodle bar of his dreams economically viable? Sure, a traditional noodle dish had its charm but wouldn’t work as the mainstay of a restaurant if he hoped to pay his bills.

Mr. Chang changed course. Rather than worry about what a noodle bar should serve, he and his cooks stalked the produce at the greenmarket for inspiration. Then they went back to the kitchen and cooked as if it was their last meal, crowding the menu with wild combinations of dishes they’d want to eat — tripe and sweetbreads, headcheese and flavor-packed culinary mashups like a Korean-style burrito.

Here’s the rundown on poor logic in this opening story:

This story suffers from survivorship bias. How many restauranteurs make the same type choice Chang did and still fail? MANY.
It doesn’t show Chang as particularly self-aware. There’s no mention in the story that he’s aware of his tendencies, his thinking process or his biases. The story merely says he chose to continue the same career, and same restaurant, by taking a new risk in the face of failure. He might be very self aware but nothing in the article suggests it.
He was working 18 hour days. Was he aware of his workaholism? Aware of the impact on his health?
And worst of all, nothing in this story, or the entire article,  is a secret. The notion of pivoting a business is an old idea, far older than the term itself.

The article falls further into overwrought and unnecessary theory:

During the 1970s, Chris Argyris, a business theorist at Harvard Business School (and now, at 89, a professor emeritus) began to research what happens to organizations and people, like Mr. Chang, when they find obstacles in their paths.

Professor Argyris called the most common response single loop learning — an insular mental process in which we consider possible external or technical reasons for obstacles.

LESS common but vastly more effective is the cognitive approach that Professor Argyris called double-loop learning.

A better and simpler term for this is metacognition, or the ability to think about how you think. It’s an ancient idea that was also popularized and given this name in the 1970s. Metacognition is a term often used for learning, and learning how to learn, but it’s applicable to skill development too.

More importantly, there are always multiple obstacles in front of us. The question is when will we deal with them and how? There’s a good argument you can’t deal with every obstacle at the same time and you have to choose carefully which challenge you take on, and how you decide to move on to the next one.

Arguably Chang was desperate. Is desperation a valuable forcing function? How is desperation different from courage? These are good questions raised by Chang’s story, but not raised in the article.

The successful people we spoke with — in business, entertainment, sports and the arts — all had similar responses when faced with obstacles: they subjected themselves to fairly merciless self-examination that prompted reinvention of their goals and the methods by which they endeavored to achieve them.

They have this story backwards: these people didn’t set out to be self-aware. They set out to ACHIEVE. They were already highly competitive and high functioning individuals who had failed. With their level of commitment they would have tried just about anything to achieve their goals and in the case of already successful athletes (Martina Navratilova is mentioned) they had coaches and trainers who were experts at analyzing their weaknesses and training them to work on them.

Another observation: high achievers are sometimes assholes. They can be narcissistic, self-centered and frustrating to live or work with. Are high achievers self aware in this way? I’d love to know but it’s not a question suggested (e.g. what are the downsides of being a “high achiever”?).

The indie rock band OK Go described how it once operated under the business model of the 20th-century rock band. But when industry record sales collapsed and the band members found themselves creatively hamstrung by their recording company, they questioned their tactics. Rather than depend on their label, they made wildly unconventional music videos, which went viral, and collaborative art projects with companies like Google, State Farm and Range Rover, which financed future creative endeavors. The band now releases albums on its own label.

This example has nothing to do with self-awareness or metacognition. The band was frustrated with their music label! Is there any band that isn’t? Do you know how many bands have made unconventional music videos to get attention (most of them)? Do you know how few get offered projects by Google and State Farm (almost none)? This is an even more egregious example of survivorship bias than the Chang story (although the famous treadmill video for the song “Here It Goes Again” is fun to watch). Most bands that followed similar thinking  as Ok Go did not see the same results.

But what we learned from conversation with high achievers is that challenging our assumptions, objectives, at times even our goals, may sometimes push us further than we thought possible. Ask David Chang, who never imagined that sweetbreads and duck sausage rice cakes with kohlrabi and mint would find their way beside his humble noodle dishes — and make him a star.

That last sentence is a complete mistruth and contradiction: Chang did imagine that sweetbreads and duck sausage would find their way next to noodle dishes. It was his idea, at least according to the opening story.

What I think they meant to say is his imagination was fueled by:

his commitment to his craft
his persistence in the face of failure
his willingness to take risks and try new approaches

These are admirable traits, but none are new, none are secrets and sadly none are at the center of this poorly constructed article.

When Did You Last Change Your Mind?

When was the last time you changed your mind about something important?

As children we changed our minds frequently since we were continually exposed to new experiences and were encouraged to learn new things and consider different ideas. The very goal of education for children is to accelerate the reconsidering of assumptions, providing tools for asking questions and finding good answers.

But somewhere in adulthood we find a career, or a circle of friends, and the rate at which we change our minds slows. We settle in to past positions and spend more time defending our old beliefs rather than exploring for better, more refined or more informed ones. There is infinite knowledge out there, but we give up on the habit of growing and choose comfort and familiarity first.

William James said “A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices.” It’s easy to fake due diligence in our own minds that we’ve vetted new ideas. We allow confirmation bias to mask the difference between shallow inquiry and a serious reexamination of ideas we’ve held on to for longer than we can remember.

As social creatures there is great pressure for us not to change our minds and not to keep learning. The older we get the more we and our peers value tradition, and tradition of any kind resists change. We learn to take pride in being loyal and consistent which is at odds with progress, growth and learning. We get better and better at ignoring the many wise people who believe something different than we do, dismissing them for no good reason at all.

Emerson wrote “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds” and he meant that he saw little reason to stay consistent with his past self. He believed if he was continuing to learn and experience, his opinion on some matters should continue to change and he should be worried if they stayed the same for too long. Being inconsistent with who he used to be was necessary if he wanted to be wiser this year than the last.

Scott Adams recently published a list of when he changed his mind about certain beliefs:

Age 8: Superman, Santa Claus, Tooth Fairy, Easter Bunny

Age 11: God, Angels. Miracles. Money isn’t important for happiness

20s: Reincarnation, Ghosts, People are mostly rational, Unquestioned patriotism is a good thing

….

Regardless of what you think of the specific items on his list, it seems a great exercise to make a list like this of our own.

When was the last time you changed your mind? What do you do to keep foolish consistency at bay?

What is the nature of friendship in an era of Facebook? An opinion

I’m back on the reader suggestion horse, and what a fun horse it is. The current top voted question from readers is this one, coming in with 32 votes.

What is the nature of friendship in an era of Facebook?

I recently finished reading Writing On The Wall, a book about the 2000 year history of social media, and this excellent book demands several clear questions in response to this one.

What was the nature of friendship in an era of scrolls?
What was the nature of friendship in an era of letters?
What was the nature of friendship in an era of telegraphs?
What was the nature of friendship in an era of telephones?

The nature of friendship through all of these eras was damn near the same as best I can tell. In any of these eras if we asked people to describe “what is a friend” I believe we’d get very similar answers.

Certainly the ways friendships are started and maintained changed with technology, but the core nature of friendship stays the same. Even as today’s teenagers are already moving past Facebook to the next wave of tools, in any era if we asked someone to define a friend, they’d say a friend is someone you like or trust and share a part of your life with.

Facebook improves friendships by:

Providing a convenient tool for staying in touch
Allowing the passive consumption of information about each other
Introducing people together through common friends
Facilitating parties and gatherings among friends and acquaintances

Facebook diminishes friendships by:

Having a major corporation as an intermediary
Diluting the meaning of the word ‘friend’ (see Dunbar’s number)
Distracting people away from intimacy and towards superficials (see study)
Emphasizing indirect rather than direct interaction with friends
Making real life serendipitous encounters less likely

I recognize all of Facebook’s superficiality and privacy issues. I think they are real. However I recognize the advantages it provides in trade. There are people I consider friends that I would not stay in touch with if not for Facebook and I find that beneficial. I travel often and Facebook keeps me in touch with people I might get to see once a year or two. Without Facebook it’d be more awkward to reach out to them when I’m in town.

The superficial postings, and the reluctance to post about bad news or sad times, may not be Facebook’s fault. We are a superficial species. Few people are comfortable sharing their inner lives and thoughts, even with friends they see every day. I don’t know that I can blame a tool like Facebook for that. Some friends are far more open and honest about their lives on Facebook than others. I point to Facebook’s indirect nature for the endless cliche postings of babies, dogs and beach vacations we see. People share not knowing precisely who, or how many people, will see it.

Sometimes I do think in this age people are less open to meeting strangers at events or public places and starting friendships that way. We have great fear about strangers and situations we can’t control with our phones. But honestly I doubt that was ever an easy way to make new friends. It was for me in college when there was high density of young, single people interested in discovery, but those factors rarely combine again in life. If we want more friends or better friendships we have to actively seek it the older we are.

I also recognize good friends are people I share my life with and I can’t share the most important parts of my life digitally. I want to be with my friends. I try to use Facebook to help involve people in my real life, meeting together, going to movies, meals, drinks, etc. I’m a writer which means ideas are my life, and I can engage in discussions and deep questions online. But I try most of all to use Facebook to help me connect with the people in my city, in person. I can’t say Facebook itself emphasizes this, but that’s the way I try to use it. I use meetup.com in the same way.

The one friendship related technology I miss most is letter writing. I used to write letters to people often and there was something uniquely intimate about spending a half hour writing something directed at just one person. You could think deeply about one person and ask questions that required thought. And they’d reciprocate. Many great friendships in history were maintained primarily through letter writing and arguably those friendships had more depth and meaning than many friendships we have today. But I can’t blame Facebook for the lack of friends interested in connecting this way. We now have dozens of ways to send personal messages to each other and the interest in exchanging letters fell out of fashion long before Facebook was born.

What do you think? How has Facebook changed the nature of friendship for you?

Q&A from Toughest Public Speaking Situations

Here’s the Q&A from today’s webcast on How To Overcome Tough Presentation Situations. If you tuned in, thanks for tuning! If you didn’t, the actual webcast will be posted in a few days.

You can download the slides (2MB PDF):

Free things mentioned in the talk:

Checklist for Great Talks
Overcoming fear (Attack of The Butterflies)
6 best tips (video of key ideas from Confessions)
Present without slides

Q: Ok, Scott, am I the first to ask? Are you wearing any pants?

Yes!

Q: A question would be how one can handle differently experienced crowds. Like half of them expect to hear detailed technical explanations and the other ones just want an intro into the topic.

This should be solved by your title and description. If you don’t want novices, the title should be “Extreme ultimate advanced cake baking”. If you only want novices, title it “How to make a cake for the first time.” The organizer should be trying to help you avoid this situation too.

The first item on the checklist is to ask about demographics for your audience before you work on your presentation.

If you do somehow end up in a room with a mixed audience, find out how mixed it is. Poll them: “How many of you have never done X? Done it 5 times? More than 5 times?” And then at least you know who you’re talking to.

The best stories and insight cut across expertise. Listen to This American Life, The Moth or RadioLab and pay attention how they tell stories about seemingly basic topics but make them interesting to almost anyone.

Q: Should you prepare shorter versions?

If you prepare using the method offered in Chapter 5 of Confessions of A Public Speaker, you’ll always have a list of key points you can fall back on no matter what happens. Also see how to present without slides.

Q: Any tips for presenting to youths? E.g., regarding careers in computer science for a career day? This is a particularly tough audience for me.

It’s harder to speak to people who didn’t choose to come. Always think hard about why they might be interested and start there. Tell them how much money they can make or the amazing things they didn’t know were made by computer scientists (video games, the phones in their pockets, etc.). There is always a way to focus on the audiences perspective – it’s just a question of working to find it. You could also talk one on one with a student and get a personal perspective on what they would advise, or what feedback they have for you for the next time you give the talk.

Q: What if the people staring at their smartphones are the members of the Board of Directors, meanwhile your are presenting a project for their approval? 

If you think there is a zero % chance you’ll get the approval if they stare at their phones, ask them not to. Every organization has a different culture and different rules for etiquette. But if my job was to get an approval and I was failing I’d take the risk breaking of etiquette.

Q: How do you skip several slides gracefully?

You can’t. Some people complain when I skip slides but it’s far better than the alternative (wasting their time covering something I no longer feel I need). I skip slides for their benefit, not mine. Either I already told a story or a point seems less relevant given what I’ve learned about the audience. Maybe I’m running out of time so I’m reprioritizing. Often I’ll just say “I already covered this” or “we don’t need this now so I’m moving ahead”

However if you’re doing a lot of slide shuffling you didn’t practice enough or didn’t practice with a timer.

Q. What if you get to Q&A sooner, but there aren’t any questions?

Everyone goes to get a beer! Seriously, if there are no questions it means all questions were answered or the audience isn’t interested. In both cases it’s time to go.

Some cultures, Asia and Northern Europe, are more conservative about engaging with speakers and it can take more effort from the host or the speaker to get someone to break the ice.

I like questions so I usually have a stack of books to give away and offer them to people who ask questions. I’ll at least have one copy to give to the first asker since that’s the hardest one to get.

Q. Two questions: I attended a Q & A with an author who has a very devoted following. One of the attendees asked her “Will you be my mentor?” What followed was an awkward conversation that threw the rest of the Q & A off. How would you have handled it?

I’d have been polite and made some kind of joke and then moved on to the next question. There is no obligation for a speaker to answer or respond to everything.

There’s never harm in moving along. You can always choose to return to a question later if you decide, later on, it’s worth more time.

Q: How can you manage switching media (e.g. slides and some live demo or a video file) – I tend to prepare “backup” slides in case demo failure. Any other tips for such a situation?

My advice on demos is here: how to give a great demo.

Keynote handles media better than most other tools I’ve seen, but it’s always risky. Projectors are finicky beasts. Backup in slides is a great idea. I also never trust wifi or any network for anything: if I don’t have a local copy of something I won’t depend on it working.

Q. Do you have good reading tips or similar on preparing the presentation itself. It’s a creative process that I struggle with sometimes. How to tell the right story, what should i keep in the presentation and what should be removed and so on.

Chapter 5 in Confessions of A Public Speaker the simplest and strongest process I know for developing material. Most people simply fail to practice. You can’t know how all of the stories and facts will fit together until you try it. If you were doing a play you’d rehearse dozens of times. For a presentation you should do a dry run early in the process so you don’t get distracted by slides and other props.

Q: What if you have no microphone and/or the heckler is a VIP?

They are not a VIP for the talk if they are not on stage. The rules are the same. If they interrupt me the audience expects me to stay in charge of the room. Heckling is very rare. If the VIP were my boss or something like that I’d still ask them to hold questions and comments to the end. They’d have to break that request in front of dozens of other people which even the most arrogant executive is unlikely to have nerve to do.

Q: How do you prepare for an “impromptu” talk (ie, given an hour beforehand to prepare for a short talk)? You know generally what the topic is but not specifics.

My advice is basically the same as  how to present without slides but with a simpler structure. I’d consider my audience and the 5 or 6 things questions I want to answer or major points I want to make. If I’m knowledgable on the subject I should be able to talk on each of those without any planning for a few minutes each.

Q: Would you recommend to follow training like improvisation theatre classes?

Improv classes are great fun and teach you many useful lessons. Here’s Why I Recommend Taking Improv. I found it particularly useful for dealing with many of the situations discussed in the talk. Through playing games you learn how to pay attention, how to listen better and how to, well, improvise. I became dramatically better at Q&A after taking a series of improv classes.

Q: What do you think of PechaKucha format? Any tips for doing this properly?

I’m one of the organizers of Ignite Seattle, a format similiar to PechaKucha. Here’s my talk, in the Ignite format, about How and Why To Give An Ignite Talk. Also see this How To Give A Great Ignite Talk.

 Q: How do you make a presentation about Project Management without sounding like you’re telling people how to do their jobs? (i.e. you want some improvement in the company but don’t want to offend etc).

Presentations aren’t the best way to make change happen. No one is obligated to listen or to do anything even if they agree.

I’d work the other way. Who is doing great work in project management, inside the company or outside? What examples will inspire people to consider working differently? A talk is a great way to expose people to different ways of thinking about their work and get them interested in learning more.

I’d also much rather give a presentation highlighting a team or project that is doing some of the “right” things and use them as an example, rather than simply tell an entire company they’re doing something wrong.

Q: I talk fast, like Jesse Eisenberg fast. Is it best to prepare more material so the talk doesn’t go by too fast or try to really slow down, which feels a little unnatural?

Talkingfastisverybadbecauseitmakespeoplesbrainshurtjustlikethisdoes.

First rule of speaking: don’t make people’s brain hurt.

Speaking fast is a simple problem to solve. It’s not fun, but it’s straightforward. Grab a favorite speech or a talk of your own and set a timer. Practice doing the talk in 10 minutes. Then practice, with the same talk and same number of words, doing it in 12 minutes. Then 15 minutes. Pace is a habit and it’s easy to learn to change. You’ll learn it’s ok to pause and breathe between sentences (and words!).

Q: what techniques do you recommend to prevent “filler sounds” (ah, um, etc…) when speaking?

Similar to the above. Grab a favorite speech or a presentation of your own. Get a timer. Start timing. Whenever you use a filler sound, start over. At first you’ll only get a minute or two in, but as the repetition drives you crazy you’ll slowly learn to control it and eventually turn it off completely.

Q: Tips for feeling comfortable away from a podium?

You stand behind a lectern, and on top of a podium.

The way to feel comfortable with anything is to practice it. Go into an empty conference room and give your talk. Try moving around. Try standing to the side of the lectern. Try try try. You can’t be comfortable with something physical just by thinking about it. You have to do it.

Q: Any suggestions for preparing to speak on a Webcast? Hard to speak without audience feedback.

It’s the P word again. PRACTICE. When you practice you are giving your talk at full voice and volume to an empty room. As weird as this is it helps make the weirdness of a webcast familiar. Good webcast tools give you a chatroom and the ability to poll an audience. Use them. Take a break every ten minutes to jump into the chat room for 5 minutes and answer questions.

Q: As an instructional designer who is required to prepare material to be delivered by others, can you offer tips for the best way to get them to engage with this material?

No one can feel engaged presenting someone else’s material. If you want them engaged involve them in the process of making the material. Or provide options for them about which stories to tell or exercises to use. Then at least they have some decisions and control over how the material is delivered.

Q: What are the important differences between delivering lectures versus giving speeches?

Speeches are rare these days unless you’re a politician. A speech typically means you’re formally addressing a large crowd without slides or other materials (e.g. commencement speech). A lecture typically means the goal is to teach something, but it’s far less formally defined.

The best way to think about all of this stuff is the audience. They don’t care about forms or whether you’re doing a lecture, or a talk, or a presentation. They care about getting what the came for. Information? Inspiration? A story? A lesson? If they get what they came for they won’t complain about whether you used slides or didn’t, or whether it was 10 minutes long or an hour.

Q: Do you prepare multiple versions of a presentation to tailor the talk to the audience on the fly?

Depends. If I’m asked to give a basic talk about one of my books I’ll often change specific stories or facts to best match the audience but keep the core structure of the talk the same. There is no shame in reusing a talk. If you’ve done a talk many times it’s probably far more polished than any new talk you could make. As long as it addresses and engages the audience how old the talk is is irrelevant.

Q. How much do you move around when you are presenting? Importance of body language?

Your voice matters more than your body or your slides. Body language isn’t anywhere near as important as people think (except the body language consultants). The single best piece of advice I give people is to be loud. To be loud you have to stand up straight and make eye contact. Those two things alone change your body language and your attitude.

Everyone is different. Some people are comfortable moving, others aren’t. What matters is that what you do helps you and helps the audience. If you pace quickly you’ll make everyone nervous. If you hide behind the lectern, you’ll be harder to hear. The only way to get comfortable moving is to practice and to speak enough that you can try different things.

Can Free Speech Survive The Social Media Mob? (slides)

Thanks to SeattleSMC for hosting me to speak at Seattle City Hall on Free Speech and The Social Media Mob. The talk was livestreamed and recorded, and I’ll add that video to this post once it’s live.

Additional thanks to everyone who participated in two threads on the topic: input wanted and Compiled list of legal cases related to social media harassment and mob behavior.

Here are the slides I presented, modified slightly to add context for stand alone consumption:

Can Free Speech Survive The Social Media Mob? from berkun

Book Review: Writing On the Wall – The First 2000 Years of Social Media

I’m a fan of Tom Standage‘s earlier works, particularly The Victorian Internet, which explored the parallels between the rise of the telegraph and the rise of the Internet. His latest book, Writing on The Wall: The first 2000 years of Social Media takes a much wider view of the history of social technology and social media.

The big surprise of this excellent book is that the challenges around modern social media that we assume are new have largely been experienced before by different cultures at different times. Back when technologies like the printing press, pamphlets, newspapers, the telegraph and television were the newest innovations, societies struggled to sort out both how to use them and what the cultural implications would be. I found Writing on The Wall to be a palliative in this sense,  showing that while Twitter, Facebook and blogging are new in some ways, the questions and opportunities they raise are fascinatingly old and we can benefit by comparing them the impact of  inventions of the past.

Concepts like information overload, being distracted by media, trashy reporting and misinformation, and even questioning who should have the right to publish, and to read, come up continually in each era with each new wave of technology, sometimes repeating the patterns of the past (and predicting patterns for the future).

The book proved to be a handy reference in my recent presentation at Seattle City Hall on “Can Free Speech Survive The Social Media Mob?”

I strongly recommend the book for anyone professionally involved in social media, as to claim expertise without even a basic understanding of previous social medias is to fall into one of the greatest traps of innovation we have: chronocentrism, the blind faith that what it has happening now is unique in all history and that we have nothing to learn from the past (A term I believe Standage himself coined). Standage writes well and the book balances a focus on historical detail with insights into the present.

Here are some choice quotes from the book:

Gossip is an extraordinarily rich source of social intelligence, both about the person speaking and about whoever is being discussed. And because our brains are wired to process just this kind of information, we find exchanging it extraordinarily compelling.

Benjamin Franklin’s first foray into newspaper writing took the form of a series of fourteen letters, supposedly written by a widow named Silence Dogood, which he submitted anonymously to the New-England Courant’s office, and which were enthusiastically published by his unwitting brother. James was furious when sixteen-year-old Benjamin admitted to having written the letters. This tale does not simply illustrate Benjamin’s ingenuity and writing prowess; it also shows how newspapers at the time were open to submissions from anyone, provided they expressed an interesting opinion. Such newspapers consisted in large part of reprinted letters, speeches, and pamphlets, and thus provided a platform by which people could share and discuss their views with others.

The average number of titles published in print in England during the 1630s was 624 a year, but the figure jumped to more than two thousand in 1641 and more than four thousand in 1642. In all, some forty thousand different titles appeared between 1640 and 1660. Assuming an average print run of one thousand, that amounts to forty million copies, at a time when the population of England was about five million. This outbreak of printed material put even Luther’s campaign in the shade.

The social mixing that took place in coffee houses allowed ideas to leap over the boundaries of England’s class system, as the writer John Aubrey observed when he praised the “modern advantage of coffee houses … before which, men knew not how to be acquainted, but with their own relations, or societies.”

The bewildering variety of new voices and formats made it very difficult to work out what was going on. As one observer put it in November 1641, “ofttimes we have much more printed than is true.”

Newspapers also began to distance themselves from their readers in another way. Under the new penny-press model, advertisers were a more important source of revenue than readers. From a business point of view, the goal of a newspaper was now to gather as large a readership as possible in order to provide an audience for advertisements. Readers were no longer seen as participants in a conversation taking place within the newspaper’s pages; instead they had become purely consumers of information and, potentially, of the products and services offered by advertisers.

After a one-hundred-and-fifty-year hiatus during which the person-to-person aspect of media was overshadowed by centralized mass media operating on a broadcast model, the pendulum has swung back.

In many respects twenty-first-century Internet media has more in common with seventeenth-century pamphlets or eighteenth-century coffee houses than with nineteenth-century newspapers or twentieth-century radio and television.

Compiled list: Legal cases related to online harassment & free speech

In preparing for my lecture on Free Speech and Social media, I’ve been looking for examples where these issues have been explored legally. I was hoping to find someone who had kept a list of them, but since I didn’t find such a thing I started one.

If you know of others to add, or other similar lists, please leave a comment:

Lawsuit against Yelp reviews, Hadeed carpet
USA vs. Jeffries, re: Youtube video
Teen in jail over Facebook threat
Threats and abuse for online women
Twitter harassment case in Toronto court (more)
Montreal twitter harasser arrested 
Pennsyvania vs. Cox, Facebook posting lawsuit
San Francisco court protects free speech (EFF)
Court finds offensive IM messages
Cyberstalking law unconstitutional
Bullied student does not have to hand over media
No restraining order over uncle posting family photos
No permission needed to tag Facebook photos
Site operator defends anonymous commenters

Thanks to Venkat, Babs Guthrie, Heather Bussing, Jen Zug, Skud, Cameron Campell, Ellie, Christine Bower, Sarah Jeong for helping find these.

scottberkun.com may be down this morning

I’m having some work done on scottberkun.com today (moving to a new webhost) and the website may be down, or acting strangely, for part of the morning. Don’t be alarmed. I’ll post again to give the all clear.

 

Lecture Wed 1/22: Free Speech and Social Media (Seattle)

The Seattle Social Media Club is hosting me to speak next week about Free Speech and Social Media. They hosted me in 2010 to speak on Calling BS on Social Media Gurus (slides and notes) and it’s good to be back.

I’m very excited about this talk: the history of the collision of free speech and technology is a subject I’ve studied for a long time. I’m honored to get a chance to talk about these important issues. Here are the details:

Title: Can free speech survive the social media mob?
When: Wednesday January 1/22, 7pm
Where: Seattle City Hall, 600 4th Avenue, Seattle, WA 98104
Tickets: $15 (appetizers are served at 6pm)
Livestream? I don’t know but I’ll update when I do.

Description: The disturbing trend of online mob “justice” continues to grow. Has the unprecedented power of social media made us more or less free to express ourselves? What can we learn from how social media handled controversies and events like the Justine Sacco firing, The Boston Marathon bombing and the A&E Duck Dynasty debate? This entertaining and challenging talk explores these questions, providing clarity and advice on how media experts and ordinary citizens can make a difference.

You can help me develop the ideas that will be in this lecture by participating in this thread.

You can get tickets on eventbrite now. Hope to see you there. And you’ll earn that appetizer with a good pre-lecture workout by climbing the famous city hall stairs.