Complexity, patterns and links
March 27, 2012
The mainstream ways of thinking about management are based on the sciences of certainty. The whole system of strategic choice, goal setting and choosing actions to reach the given goals in a controlled way depends on predictability. The problem is that this familiar causal foundation cannot explain the reality we face. Almost daily, we experience the inability of people to choose what happens in their organizations – or in their countries. We live in a complex world. Things may appear orderly over time, but are inherently unpredictable.
Complexity refers to a pattern, a movement in time that is at the same time predictable and unpredictable, knowable and unknowable. Healthy, ordinary, everyday life is always complex, no matter what the situation is. There is absolutely no linearity in the world of human beings.
Human patterns that lose this complexity become repetitive and rapidly inappropriate for dealing with life. Unlike mechanical systems, human systems thrive on variety and diversity. An exact replication of behavior in nature would be disastrous and seen as neurotic in social life. For example, a failing heart is typically characterized by increasing loss of complexity.
A pattern is something that emerges through the complex interactions between elements in a system. Although there is apparent order, there is never exact repetition if the system is viable. This is why human interaction cannot be understood as processes in the way they were used in manufacturing, but as patterns.
Patterns that are more repetitive are normally called routines or habits. This conclusion is important for us. Novelty emerges in a radically unpredictable way. Creativity is seldom the end result of a repetitive process.
The Internet changes the patterns of connectivity, transforms our understanding what “local” is, and makes possible wide participation and new enriching variety in interaction. By relying on the interactions of millions of people instead of a few experts/managers to classify content on the net, Google democratized scientific citation indexing. To be able to manage the increasingly complex organizations of today, the same kind of democratization needs to take place in the corporate world. Companies are transforming themselves from industrial mass production to creating value in networks of mass communication.
Transparency of tasks is the corporate equivalent of publishing academic articles. Responsive linking, rather than predictive linking such as in corporate hierarchies and process charts, acts as a measure of relevance, control and value. This has served the academic community well. It made Sergey Brin and Larry Page billionaires. Now is the time to do the same in the corporate world.
The Google lesson for management is, that the more work is based on responsive, democratic processes of relating and the more organizing is an ongoing process of communicative linking, the more value we can create!
It is now time for the sciences of uncertainty.
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Markets, networks and management
March 18, 2012
The claim is that the best way to understand complicated systems is to investigate the workings of each of the parts. If a car does not start, the mechanic looks for the problem and finds a dead battery. In a similar way a doctor finds a wounded muscle. The idea is that the best way to understand life is to investigate the workings of the parts separately from those of other parts.
In the economic world, the concept of markets is based on the same idea: autonomous sellers and buyers engage in discrete transactions where each agent is independent from the other agents and each transaction is separate from other transactions. The unit of analysis is the individual agent.
Network scientists have recently made very different claims. They say that all human systems are connected and that connected systems cannot be understood in terms of isolated parts. The study of isolated parts offers little help in understanding how the parts work in combination and what emerges as the result of network connections. The notion of emergence is central. Their aim is to discover emergent patterns: is it really so that individual greed turns into a pattern that can be called public good, as proponents of free markets have suggested following the rhetoric of Adam Smith?
The suggested unit of analysis is now communication and emergence, not entities.
This changes many of the beliefs we have taken for granted. The first change deals with the assumption of a knowing individual, the basic idea of Cartesian philosophy. The individual was understood as having a knowing mind. Individuals were thus treated as if they possessed properties such as expert knowledge. On the bases of her personal properties the knowing individual is then understood as the designer and controller of an internal and external world.
The perspective of network science views knowledge as socially created and socially re-created not as stuff of the mind that can be shared and stored by individuals. Knowing is a process of relating. From the network-based, relational perspective knowing is viewed as an ongoing and, never-ending process of making meaning in communication.
Management literature typically emphasizes individuals and locates explanatory power in their personal properties. Leaders are the sources of motivation, control and direction. The manager’s perspective is taken for granted as setting the limits of action and what is thought of as right or wrong.
Management theory is based on the same Cartesian assumptions of the self as subject, the other as object and relationships as influence and manipulation. This is why the present management thinking severely restricts what is thinkable and doable in the world of networks.
The potential of social media cannot be realized without a very different epistemological grounding, a relational perspective. Independently existing people and things then become viewed as co-constructed in coordinated networked action. Accordingly, the role of management is different, opening up new possibilities: power in networks is about “power to” or “power with”, and not “power over”.
The emergent pattern changes when the local interactions change. Self-interest in the network economy looks different from self-interest in the market economy; individual success is likely to take place through enriching relationships and being part of networked interaction aiming to facilitate both the individual and the collective effort.
Cooperation is the new competition.
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Thank you Dian Marie Hosking for great conversations
More: Reid Hoffman interview.
Social media and the change from information to formation
February 25, 2012
The change towards the creative economy has major implications for the nature of what we have called assets. In the industrial age, the assets were physical resources, plant and equipment. Most of the resources were traded in markets and could thus be valued. Taking care of the value of an organization could be understood as managing physical assets and resources.
Now knowledge and people are seen as the major assets. But since neither of them are efficiently traded in markets, their value cannot easily be measured. Neither can knowledge be understood as an asset that can be managed like a physical asset. This is what many people within the Knowledge Management community learned the hard way. Knowledge is not a thing! Thus it cannot be stored, measured or shared.
From a more modern point of view, knowledge creation is understood as an active process of communication between people. Knowledge cannot be stored but is constantly constructed and re-constructed in interaction. Knowledge cannot be shared but arises in action. Knowledge is the process of relating.
The assumption was that learning and knowledge management involve processes that transmit content. This notion derived from the information theory/model of communication developed by Claude Shannon and Warren Weaver. Their theory created a sender-receiver model of communication according to which person A sends a signal (message/content) to person B, who receives it and then perhaps sends a responding feedback signal back to A. From this perspective, learning and knowledge creation are processes that resemble transmission or the sharing of content. This is why schools and other educational institutions still look the way they do.
But Shannon & Weaver’s concept was meant to be purely technical. They were interested in whether a byte sent was a byte received in a technical sense. They said nothing about the meaning of the bytes. For a human being a message can evoke a very wide range of associations and interpretations depending on the experience and emotional state of the individual. One person’s interpretation is never quite the same as another person’s interpretation. There is no linear causality in the world of human beings.
If learning was understood from a more modern relational perspective it would resemble a process of many voices interacting at the same time. In this way, each comes to know the context in which the other makes meaning. The progression of B’s understanding of A’s story also constitutes a change to A’s story – creating new meaning, learning, for both.
Social media are most meaningful when giving voice to multiple perspectives, making it possible to seek out, recognize and respect differences as different but equal.
All stories continue, meaning that learning takes place, as participants create a more shared understanding of what the other means. Knowledge which used to be regarded as existing independently in people and things – becomes viewed as co-constructed in communication.
Communication does not represent things in the world. It brings people and things into being in constantly surprising ways.
Supportive, energizing and enabling patterns of interaction are the most important “assets” of a modern organization. That is what should be nurtured and taken care of. Communication either accelerates and opens up possibilities or slows down and limits what would be possible. Communication either creates value or creates waste. Communication either creates energy and inspiration or demeans and demotivates.
Information theory is not only unhelpful but harmful, when trying to understand communication between human beings. Communication is not about sharing information but a process of formation.
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Thank you Karl-Erik Sveiby and Doug Griffin. What a great meeting!
A relational view to management
February 19, 2012
Gregory Bateson argued that humankind’s fall from grace began through separations such as separating the self from the other, separating thought from emotion, separating the sacred from the secular and separating the subject from the object.
Today, there is new thinking that is based on the very latest findings in the sciences of complexity and sociology. These new approaches define a participative, relational perspective: we should speak about subjects interacting with others in the co-evolution of a jointly constructed reality.
In mainstream thinking, managers are understood as the prime originators of what happens in their businesses. The central concern is how the manager/subject gets the follower/object to act in ways that reflect the manager’s perspective. Management continues to see relationships in terms of influence and manipulation. The manager’s perspective is taken for granted in terms of what the facts are, and what is true or false. Employees are treated as instruments. They are less active and less knowledgeable although they can be sources of information for the manager.
In identifying management with science, two concepts were imported, which we now take so much for granted that we hardly notice them. There is the assumption of the autonomous, rational individual which corresponds with the atomistic view of society and the objectification of nature. The second concept that is imported into management is that of the objective observer who identifies causality and tests hypotheses like visions and goals based on these identifications. The objective observer is detached from the phenomena being studied. When this idea is imported into theories of organization, the manager is the objective observer who is supposed to act upon rationally formulated hypotheses about organizational success.
These assumptions have created the still prevailing subject-object understanding of organizational relationships. When a person is understood as a knowing individual she is being viewed as a subject, distinct from others, the objects. Relations are considered from the point of view of the subject and are instrumental in nature.
The social media/relational perspective to management views life and knowing from a different point of view: knowledge is socially constructed. Knowledge is not stuff accumulated and stored by individuals. Contextual interpretation takes the place of the objective fact. When knowledge and truth are viewed as social and temporary then constructions of what we call understanding or knowledge are always a part of what is going on.
Whether the social process is called leadership, management, networking, or communication, knowing is an ongoing process of relating. Social media best produce connectedness and interdependence as processes that construct collective authority and responsibility. Social media are most meaningful when giving voice to multiple perspectives, making it possible to seek out, recognize and respect differences as different but equal. Accordingly, reality in science is no longer viewed as a singular fact of nature but as multiple and socially constructed as David Weinberger writes in his newest book: “Too Big to Know”.
In a relational model identity is constructed from being in relationships, being connected, as contrasted with the mainstream view of identity through separation. Knowledge of self and the other thus becomes viewed as co-constructed.
The relational view sees networking and social media as conversational processes of meaning making. Here, people who network may be regarded as seeking to understand the meanings of the others’ conversational contributions. To do so, they would have to give up the assumption that they and others necessarily mean the same thing by the same terms or expressions. A manager, when networking, would be asking questions that invite others to make explicit what is usually left tacit. In other words, networking is understood as moving around the stories that others are referencing for meaning making. In the end it is a process of movement of thought on the basis of multiple perspectives.
For Bateson and many others, re-engagement is essential for recovering wisdom and long-term vitality. This requires re-connecting with participative ways of knowing, with others as part of the self.
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Thank you Gregory Bateson, Doug Griffin, Ralph Stacey, Kenneth Gergen, David Weinberger and Katri Saarikivi
Christmas Letter
December 23, 2011
2011 was a year of major breakthroughs. The creative economy is here and looks very different from what we have been used to. I try to sum up some of the most important findings of the year.
The industrial logic was most vividly captured in the idea of the value chain. Value creating activities were sequential, unidirectional and linear. In the model, value was not really created but added step by step. The output of one task was the input of another. The image of work was the assembly line, meaning that work could be fragmented and individual performance goals could be set for each worker. The world was all about people and boxes separated from one another.
Physical tasks can be broken up in a reductionist way. Bigger tasks can be divided by assigning people to different smaller parts of the whole. For intellectual tasks, it is much harder to find parts that make for an efficient division of labour. Intellectual tasks are by default linked and complex.
Reductionism does not work any more.
Knowledge workers are often put in a position where they have to negotiate some understanding of what they face. The same event means different things to different people. The cognitive opportunity lies in the fact that as we don’t all select the same things, we don’t all miss the same things. If we can pool our insights in a creative, enriching way we can thrive in the complex world we live in. The challenge is that people often treat the existence of multiple views as a symptom of a weakness and conflict rather than as an accurate and needed sign of uncertainty.
Higher performance occurs through the combination of different perspectives and supportive, enriching communication.
Social interactions also play a role in shaping our brain. Repeated experiences sculpt the synaptic connections and rewire the brain. Accordingly, our relationships gradually frame the neural circuitry. Being chronically depressed by others or being emotionally nourished and enriched has lifelong impacts. Our mental life is co-created in an interconnected network. The human mind is not located and stored in an individual. Rather, what we have called the individual mind is something that arises continuously in relationships between people.
Supportive, energizing and enabling patterns of interaction have proven to be the most important explanation behind creativity and business success. The quality of action is always constrained/enabled by the quality of the interaction. The lines between the boxes matter more than the boxes! Communication either accelerates or slows down. Communication either creates value or creates waste. Communication either creates energy and inspiration or demeans and demotivates.
Communication forms much more than informs.
What is now needed is to unlearn the reductionist organizing principles that are still the mainstream. Knowledge used to be understood as the internal property of an individual. Today knowledge should be seen as networked communication.
Work is interaction between interdependent people and the network is the amplifier, and at best a supportive and enriching enabler.
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Small worlds
March 27, 2011
I was taking part in a training course on the management during an extreme national emergency. As a part of the program, we went through an exercise that simulated a deep global crisis with severe implications for the governance of Finland. Although the gravity of the situation as it was expressed in the daily briefings was beyond anything we really experience, or can think of, at home today, all aspects of the apocalyptic views presented are actually a reality somewhere in the world at this very moment. This led me to reflect on my learning.
Another reason for writing this was what is actually happening in real life at home. Finland has traditionally been one of the most pro-European Union countries. But now the government seems to be blindsided by the rise of the populist anti-euro party. In the face of the assault of the “True Finns” the Social Democrats too seem to be abandoning their pro-EU roots. If this trend continues after the elections, where are we heading?
The experience brought by the Internet is that all people on our planet are only a few links, or handshakes, away from each other. The claim is that even when two people don’t know each other or do not have a friend in common, only a short chain of intermediaries separates them. Stanley Milgram performed his first famous experiments even before the era of the mobile phone and the web. His results indicated a median chain length of less than six (degrees of separation). The research was groundbreaking in suggesting that the whole global human society is an interdependent network characterized by extremely short path lengths. If the median was just below six in 1967, it is safe to assume that the number is even lower today.
The dominant ways of thinking about the world have their origins in Newtonian mechanics in which the universe was simply the sum of independent parts. At the moment, this part – whole thinking is being directly applied to the ways we think. Interdependence plays a minor role and is anyway seen as the result of a deliberate choice. The populist thinking follows the logic that we can choose not to be interdependent.
I learned last week that leaders cannot know what the outcomes of their actions are. This is because what really happens arises in the complex interplay of many actors with many intentions, which is why leaders cannot choose outcomes although they can choose their next action. We often create things together that nobody wants to create
Nothing ever happens in an independent way.
Interdependent individuals relate to each other in a responsive manner, with a gesture from one party calling forth a response from another. George Herbert Mead was the first social psychologist to take the stance that meaning arises in the responsive interaction between gesture and response. The important implication is that meaning does not then arise independently in each actor first to be then subsequently expressed in action. Actions are not independent. Meaning is not attached to any single act but is perpetually created in interaction. Knowing is then a property of the interaction. Cognition is relational.
Our perception of the world is confined to groups of immediate acquaintances. Sometimes this is good news, sometimes very bad.
The old ways of understanding human behaviour are not up to the task any more. In contrast to Newtonian traditions, the science of social networks offers an entirely new way of understanding the interdependent human society.
Let’s imagine your house is on fire. Luckily there is a lake nearby. But you are alone. You run back and forth but without some help you may not be able to carry water fast enough. Lets then suppose that you are not alone, and people around you want to help. If you have seen old movies where this happens, a peculiar form of organization emerges. People form a line from the lake to the house passing full buckets of water towards the house and empty buckets back towards the lake. What is happening is called a “bucket brigade”. It is not about the individuals or the community but about a particular form of emergent linking that at the same time distributes the task at hand and integrates the efforts of the people in a coordinated way. If we take the idea of the bucket brigade and connect it with the notion of the small world network, we have a global concept of participation.
A better understanding of social networks is essential for facing the new threats in the world. They are only a few handshakes away, whether we want it or not. This better understanding of interdependence also leads to the necessity for empathy and participation. Stanley Milgram proved that the distance between the fires and the lakes in our world is very, very short indeed. This is why we need to take part in the bucket brigades, and not only when our own house is on fire.
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Thank you Duncan Watts, Ralph Stacey, Kim Mattsson, Torsti Astrén, Arto Kujala, Marjo Korkeamäki and Anna-Mari Pesonen. Thank you Olli Haikala for coaching. Thank you Lapin Lennosto for the photo
More on networks
Patterns and social objects
February 27, 2011
Complex systems are, as their name implies, hard to understand. The main difference between the sciences of certainty and the sciences of complexity lies in the different causal frameworks they are built upon.
Up to now, we have seen the world around us as systems that, we thought, could be described and understood by identifying causal links between things: if I choose X, then it will lead to Y. If, on the other hand, I choose A, it will lead to B.
We are accustomed to drawing boxes and lines between the boxes. We try to model the world as predictable processes that we can control.
The mainstream ways of thinking about management are based on the sciences of certainty. The whole system of strategic choice, goal setting and choosing actions to reach the given goals in a controlled way depends on predictability. The problem is that this familiar causal foundation cannot explain the reality we face. Almost daily, we experience the inability of leaders to choose what happens to their organizations – or to their countries.
We live in a complex world. Things may appear orderly over time, but are inherently unpredictable. If a system’s long-term behavior is unpredictable, goals can still be set, but there is no certainty that the actions taken are going to realize them.
Complexity refers to a pattern, a movement in time, that is at the same time predictable and unpredictable, knowable and unknowable. Healthy, ordinary, everyday life is always complex, no matter what the situation is. Human patterns that lose this complexity become repetitive and rapidly inappropriate for dealing with life. Unlike mechanical systems, human systems thrive on variety and diversity. An exact replication of behavior in nature would be disastrous. For example, a failing heart is typically characterized by loss of complexity.
Human interaction cannot be understood as predictive processes but as patterns
A pattern is something that unfolds through the complex interactions between elements in a system. Although there is apparent order, there is never exact repetition if the system is viable. This is why human interaction cannot be understood as processes in the way they were used in manufacturing, but as patterns.
Patterns that are more repetitive are normally called routines or habits. However, those routines do not cause our behavior. Instead routines are emergent patterns. They emerge in what we do. They continue to be sustained only as long as they are present in our everyday interaction.
The American sociologist George Herbert Mead (1863 – 1931) distinguished between two types of objects: physical objects and social objects. While a physical object may be understood in terms of itself, a social object has to be understood as being composed of patterns of interaction.
Mead referred to a market as an example of a social object. The acts of buying and selling define a market. Markets cannot exist without these social activities. When one person offers to buy something, this act involves a range of responses from other people. A person making an offer can only know how to make the offer if she is able to understand the attitude of the other parties to the bargain. The ideas of buying and selling are thus always interconnected. This is why it is called a “social” object.
The routines define the object. The social object can only be found in the conduct of different individuals engaged in the social act. Thus, there is no market that can be understood as an “it”. Mead’s social objects are not things but generalized tendencies to act in similar ways in similar situations.
We find it easy to regard social phenomena as things with an independent existence. We talk about financial markets being “nervous”. We want more people to recognize patterns “to predict what is going to happen”. But patterns can only be found in the experience of interaction itself. They have no existence separate from interaction and we cannot influence the patterns as separate entities.
We can just participate in interaction – in a dull and repetitive way or in a creative and rich way.
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Thank you Jyri Engeström for opening this discussion on the 13th. of April, 2005, with “The case for the object-centered sociality“. Thank you also Melanie Mitchell, Ralph Stacey and Keith Sawyer.
More on the subject: Venessa Miemis. Thierry de Baillon. JP Rangaswami. Article on Wired magazine. Blog post on Complexitys. Gartner on “Emergent Structures” Deb Roy in TED
Social media, start-ups and the system of management
February 24, 2011
In a start-up, the coordination of work takes place through the transparency of activities, close proximity of people working together and mostly informal, responsive, ongoing communication.
I have often wondered when and how the transformation to the world of formal reports and meetings takes place.
After closely studying several case companies, it seems to me that it is not at all the growth of the company that requires the development of formal communication systems. That takes place as a result of the managerial thinking that has evolved in response to growth.
The mainstream view of management science sees the organization as having a separate existence from individuals. In organizations, as in machines, the interchangeability of parts is thought to promote efficiency. This means that processes retained in workers´ interaction should be recorded in documents and passed back to govern work. The aim is to rise above the individual memory and to establish an organizational memory. This is what mainstream knowledge management was all about twenty years ago: “If only HP knew what HP knows”.
Industrial management has been about depersonalizing the workplace in the interest of efficiency, even up to the point of seeing people as (human) resources or (valuable) assets. Because of the strong desire to outdo the individuals, the communication habits of a “managed” company need to be different from the start-up. You have to go from conversations to documents.
Management is a system of communication
In this system you talk about flows, not people. There are flows of information to allow middle and upper management to monitor and control what goes on at lower levels. There are flows to guide the lower levels and to coordinate process steps. The ideology of management demanded “exact” written communication. It dismissed ordinary conversation as just talk. The controlled form of talk was a meeting with an agenda and clear outcomes. And you were supposed to come well prepared.
Industrial management is a particular pattern of communication based on specific assumptions about causality and human agency. This approach to coordinating activities was technically based on the high price and low quality of communication tools.
What social media allow us to do in organizations is to create transparency of activities, close proximity of non-co-located people and active, ongoing, responsive communication that coordinates and controls. The price of communication has gone down and the quality of tools is dramatically better today.
It is time to rethink some major issues.
What an organization is emerges from the relationships of its members, the interacting individuals. It is the people! The efficiency and creativity of the organization is a result of the efficiency and creativity of daily communication. We all enable and constrain one another all the time, meaning that we coordinate and control one another all the time – as we talk.
Changes in the organization always mean changes in the patterns of communication and vice versa. Novel patterns of communication necessarily change the organization. This is why social media challenge management as a system of communication and coordination.
Management as we are used to seeing it is getting more and more outdated.
We have started a research program on management in complex, responsive work. We study human-centric value creation that builds on the Internet and the very latest digital interaction technologies. If you want to be involved in the group of academic researchers and practitioners, please contact me or professor Doug Griffin.
We know that even very big corporations can be like start-ups!
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Thank you @jobsworth for being the inspiration for this post. I hope the discussions around the “systems of engagement vs. the systems of record” continue
Thank you Doug Griffin, Ralph Stacey and Clay Shirky
More on the subject: Steve Denning. Umair Haque. Peter Stoyko.
From information to conversation
January 14, 2011
People often need to act and make decisions in situations in which causality is poorly understood, where there is considerable uncertainty and people hold different beliefs and have personal biases. However, people very reluctantly acknowledge that they face ambiguity at work. Problems in organizations tend to get labeled as lack of information. It feels more professional to try to solve a knowledge management problem that is called lack of information than a problem that is called confusion.
Knowledge workers are often put in a position where they have to negotiate some understanding of what they face. The same event means different things to different people and just getting more information will not help them. What will help is a setting where they could negotiate and construct fresh ideas that would include their multiple interpretations of what they experience. The challenge is that managers often treat the existence of multiple views as a symptom of a weakness rather that as an accurate and needed barometer of uncertainty.
A mix of stimuli always surrounds people. The stimuli have no meaning apart from what the individuals make of it. In other words, the environment is a product of the persons, not something outside of them. People are selective in what they attend to in any situation and what is attended to become the environment. The reality is not an objective set of arrangements outside us, but is continually constructed in daily interaction.
If people want to create shared meaning, they need to talk about their experience in close proximity to its occurrence and have a common platform for conversation. They need to see their different views about the experience as richness and a prerequisite to learn what is going on.
Because any information can mean a variety of things, meaning cannot simply be discovered. Information does not help. We have to talk! Many meetings that are directed at the problems of ambiguity fail to handle it because potentially rich views are silenced by autocratic leadership, norms that encourage harmony or reluctance to admit that one has no idea what is going on.
A crucial property of creative work is that situations are progressively clarified in iterative interaction. Our reality is an ongoing accomplishment that takes form when people together make sense of the situations in which they find themselves.
Therefore our own joint sense-making actions are the determinants of the meaning that situations have. They are the true contents of our learning and development. Quoting Max Planck: “When we change the way we look at things, the things we look at change.”
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Thank you Doug Griffin, Jeffrey Sachs, Karl Weick, Stowe Boyd and Ralph Stacey
Background: Does more information mean we know less?
Communication as crowdsourcing
October 6, 2010
Communication constitutes reality. Communication is said to be the primary process by which human life is experienced: how we communicate creates and forms our experiences. Accordingly social life consists of dynamic interaction processes rather than stable structures. Therefore the way we communicate is of great interest. Where then do our communication-related habits come from?
We saw communication as a process of senders and receivers. The mass audience was seen as passive receivers and easily influenced by the media. The audience today is very different. Individuals have access to modes of communication that, just a few years ago, were available only for people working inside media channels. Most importantly the mathematical theory of communication, the concept of senders and receivers is not only unhelpful, but has been proven to be plain wrong in human communication!
Private and public modes of communication
Two distinct modes of communication have emerged and spread since the invention of the telegraph. The first mode was private point-to-point communication that was meant to connect people. The original telegraph was the classic example. It’s more developed form, the telephone, made synchronous communication between individuals on a global scale one of the defining technologies of the modern society.
The second mode was the public broadcasting of content. These two approaches to communication were advanced significantly by a series of innovations resulting in media technologies being perhaps the most socially disruptive developments of the past century, but the basic division into the two modes of private point-to-point and public broadcasting has remained essentially the same until now.
Thomas Edison filed a patent claim in the autumn of 1888 for a device, which, according to him “does for the eye what the phonograph does for the ear.” The kinetoscope as it was called, carried a long spiral of tiny images that could be viewed in a moving sequence by turning a crank and peering through a magnifying glass. Edison’s vision of this new technology was quite quickly taken over by people who saw motion pictures not as a personal experience but as a publicly broadcasted mass media.
In the US the primary financing for radio and TV broadcast stations came very quickly from airtime used for advertising. In other countries, different models emerged. In Europe radio/TV was funded largely through license fees paid by radio/TV set owners. This model was grounded in the belief that radio/TV is a political voice that should serve the interest of the “people” and not the interest of making a profit.
The broadcasting model of communication was now turned into the property of either advertisers or politicians.
This was because of the inherited way of thinking about people’s actions. We have two major ways of understanding why people behave the way they do. On the one hand, there is the causal explanation. People change because of external forces. People can be influenced, educated, motivated or even forced to change their behaviour. This is the causal thinking of mainstream management theory: I send you a message and you act. I steer you and your use of time.
Complex responsiveness
On the other hand, there is the assumption of agency based on response-ability and responsiveness. Instead of seeing the audience as an undifferentiated, passive mass, we understand the audience as a network of people, forming small groups and larger communities. The commercial and political interest to broadcasting was a result from the belief that the media can mold masses. In contrast to earlier thinking, the society is today seen to consist of numerous differentiated communities, each with own values and interests. All media content is interpreted within the community according to social sense making within the group. The individuals are influenced more by their peers than by media. Meaning is not in the message, but is produced in interaction. Different people will understand what they view and read in very different ways.
Private broadcasting that connects people
A new, third form of communication in the digital, networked world combines broadcasting and point-to-point. The means of broadcasting are today available for individual people. They are not only the property of institutions. The audience for this new form of private broadcasting is not a passive mass, but the emerging, active communities that the individual wants to reach and connect with.
In it’s most basic form, responsive communication involves a three-part relationship: an initial broadcasted gesture from one individual, leaving it free who in the audience acts on the gesture, a voluntary response to that gesture by another, and resulting crowdsourced activity. Meaning here does not reside solely in any one of these parts but in the relationship of all three.
The passive audience view suggested that people are easily influenced by the media. The active audience view thinks that people make active decisions about how to aggregate, and how to respond. The mass society theories subscribed to the passive conception of the audience and public broadcasting. It is time now to subscribe to an active, responsive notion of the audience and the possibility of private broadcasting.
A transformative, third mode of communication is here.
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Thank you Robert Friedel, Kenneth Gergen, Stephen Littlejohn, Stowe Boyd, Doug Griffin, Clay Shirky, Kim Weckström and Jeff Jarvis
More on this: confused of calcutta and Using communication tools as a form of “co-presence” (The New York Times). Changing communication patterns.
