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One of the things that I liked about Cory Doctorow’s Makers is that he didn’t write for the screen. Sometimes perfectly fine novels include chase scenes, combat with vehicles, emotionally resonant moments with interesting landscapes, ensemble dramatic climaxes, and other gratuitous moments seemingly designed with a film advance in mind. Doctorow’s Makers avoids these cliches. The structure sprawls, and several climactic moments happen over un-filmable email and online chat.

The sprawl of Makers is mostly a strength. A classic story has a setup, dramatic middle, and resolution. The dramatic arc of Makers takes its characters – a team of technology entrepreneurs and the journalist who helps to publicize and create the market for their innovations – through a couple of boom and bust cycles, and back again to the creative impulse that got them started. The emotional arc of the story seems to come from the experience of having lived through the dotcom boom, and subsequent boom and bust cycles in the tech and overall economy. As a novel of ideas about the evolution and integration of promising technologies, the book rejects the beginning-middle-end structure that is misleading in the context of a longer trajectory. Technology changes, business cards change, business models change, but people’s motivations and tensions replay in each cycle.

Doctorow’s future scenario has emerging technologies paired with business process innovations. Makers imagines a boom in micro-fabrication, accompanied by quickly-assembled networks to produce and distribute the innovations. After a bust in the microfab market, there is a boomlet in theme parks built on the detritus of the first boom. The theme parks are built and re-assembled by microfab robots, collaboratively designed with open source, crowd-sourced processes. The fun of the book is the way the book pictures the crazy particulars of this future – a car being driven by a set of robots assembled from parts of Elmo dolls, a narrative story that starts to emerge from the flow of a collaboratively created amusement park ride.

In Makers, the social, economic and legal trends remain fundamentally the same while technology changes. The US remains on a downward path toward away from first world status, with growing gap between rich and poor. One of the big opportunities for the microfab market is cheap products for the growing market of people who live in shantytowns. Cheap space for startup businesses is found in abandoned malls and big box store buildings around the country left behind by the early-century real estate bust.

The social and legal stasis in the world of Makers is particularly interesting. Consumer brands retain great power to create images and to market products, even as the power to make things decentralizes. At the beginning of the story, the Disney Corporation, and the legal defense of old business models of IP protection remain in place. Large corporations retain power, are still slow-moving and bureaucratic, and absorb the innovative products and creative energies of entrepreneurs who sell to them.

Perhaps this telling represents pessimism about the slower change of social structures in the face of technical change. At the least, it is a dramatized argument against the techno-deterministic viewpoint that technical change will inevitably lead to social and political changes.

Makers focuses on several trends, and doesn’t develop other trends that could be powerful forces in the coming years. The book only barely touches on energy and material resource issues. The communications technology seems like a straight extrapolation of a couple of years ago. Characters remain dependent on email. Twitter is a continued presense, but social networks don’t play a major role in communications. It’s fine by me that Doctorow varies some factors in his future scenarios and leaves others constant – there is plenty of fodder remaining for future books!

While the book’s richly-imagined, evolving future scenarios belie simple techno-deterministic models, the episodic structure and sprawl also shows some signs of attention deficit. The microfab boom, like the dotcom boom, ends in a spectacular crash. The explanation is that the transformative technology couldn’t generate hoped-for economic returns. But the internet revolution also left behind slower but far-reaching change. Markets for travel, maps, books, news, music, voice and other information-rich services are fundamentally different and still changing fifteen years later. Makers does a less good job of imagining the ways that things get fundamentally different after the microfab revolution, and the ways the economy might be different if more economic activity could be performed by quickly-assembled small networks of workers.

One side plot is the emergence of “Fatkins”, a boom in biotech-fueled weight loss that creates a new class of formerly fat people who pursue hedonistic lives with their new slim bodies. But the book doesn’t follow through broader themes of body transformation that might have occurred given the same technology revolution. Another side plot is a subculture of “goths” who are the target market for a subdivision of Disney, and join the open source ride revolution when it happens. These are two intriguing examples, but the book doesn’t deeply follow through the concept of cross-geographical lifestyle tribes.

Basically, it’s easier to brainstorm and imagine a few entertaining outcomes of a promising idea than it is to fully develop the idea’s consequences. The book displays on a larger canvas the esthetic manifested in the Boing Boing blog that Doctorow has co-edited for years – it is an imaginative, relentlessly miscellaneous compendium of novelties. It illustrates trends but is inconsistent in exploring them.

The previous Cory Doctorow novel I read was Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom. I enjoyed the book, but thought its treatment of ideas was somewhat shallow, and its plot and characterization were more shallow. I thought that book would have been a lot better if Doctorow had spent many times longer writing and editing it.

Makers has much more of an emotional core – I found some of the key moments really moving. The characterization isn’t Shakespeare but is much more interesting than the earlier book. And Makers does a good job of imaginatively envisioning potential consequences of current trends. It still seems to me that with his talent, activism, and globe-trotting life, Cory Doctorow can get away with publishing books that would be even better if he edited them more.

The book’s not perfect, but I liked it a lot, I recommend it, and I’m enjoying the author’s maturation as a writer.

Yesterday at TEDxSV, Reid Hoffman spoke about the opportunity for low-cost, highly-scalable internet platforms that can engage millions in social change. These platforms, Reid envisions, will take advantage of the ability of open source projects to self-organize to harness small contributions to make a large difference. Examples included Kiva.org and Facebook Causes. Hoffman is currently a VC at Greylock partners, was an early PayPal employee, founded LinkedIn, and (disclosure) was an early investor in Socialtext.

The trends Hoffman described are interesting and promising, but they are not enough. As an example of the failure of large-scale internet activism, think of the trend for users to turn Twitter avatars green in support of people in Iran protesting the election. The green avatars raised awareness outside Iran but had negligable impact on what happened in Iran.

The next presentation from Stanford Professor Clayborne Carson revealed several layers that were missing in Hoffman’s talk. Carson is best known for his work editing the papers of Dr. Martin Luther King, but he got his start researching the work of Bob Moses, whose pioneering community organizing with SNCC enabled poor black folk in Mississippi to build courage, skills and leadership abilities. The charismatic leadership of Dr. King inspired millions to protest segregation and press for civil rights; the less-glamorous, on-the-ground work of developing local participants and leaders laid the foundation for longterm transformation; and the disintegration of SNCC into violent spinoffs made King’s emphasis on nonviolence seem more prophetic in retrospect.

Hoffman’s vision of a platform for change is missing the layers of inspiration and organizing. Tools can lower the cost of coordinating and taking action. But tools themselves do not inspire people with the vision and hope to make a change. And tools themselves do not provide the organizing methods to give courage and leadership skills among people in the community. There is a layer of inspired leadership above the tools. There is a layer of organizing above the tools.

The well-known example of the Obama campaign’s use of social networking for fund-raising and organizing supports this distinction. The campaign used its social networking and campaign data tools well, but it was Obama’s inspiration and the fear of Bush administration failure that provided the drive, and the community-based, personalized, and highly-co-ordinated organizing methods that enabled large numbers of people to take effective advantage of the tools.

There are a few additional elements in the layers above the tools. First is the design and leadership of self-organization. Reid Hoffman talked about the ability of open source projects to “self-organize” and break work up into many small contributions. But in the Obama campaign, and in large open source projects such as Linux and Apache, there is substantial human effort involved in coordinating project roadmaps, making technical decisions at many levels, coordinating code integration, and more. From a distance, it looks like open source projects are “self-organized,” and contributions flow to the project like streams to the Amazon to the ocean. Closer in, there are sophisticated practices of governance that are different from the centralized processes of traditional corporate development, but that still require human effort.

Second is the connection of online to offline. Hoffman was particularly skeptical about this element, seeing that offline connections add friction to otherwise simpler, more viral on-line only programs. But in order to catalyze real change in the world, there needs to be connection to people’s real world social networks, and to the levers of power that operate in the real world. Without this offline connection, we are often left with ineffectual green avatars and no change in the world.

In summary, Reid Hoffman’s presentation sketched a vision of internet-powered, low-cost, scalable platforms for self-organized change. As Silicon Valley tech innovators, we are often tempted to consider technology as the determining factor in social change. But the change enabled by new platforms is likely to be trivial without the presense of other layers of practice above the tools that long predate the internet: visionary leadership, grass-roots organizing to empower participants, effective co-ordination of decentralized action, and connection to realworld networks and actions.

This image from Townes Van Zandt’s At My Window sounds awfully like an echo of William Butler Yeats.

Time flows
through brave beginnings
she leaves her endings
beneath our feet
walk lightly
upon their faces
leave gentle traces
upon their sleep

Here’s the short Yeats poem, “He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven.”

Had I the heavens’ embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

“Tread softly because you tread on my dreams” is one of the more memorable lines in the English canon. It would be surprising to me if this wasn’t a deliberate allusion.  Assuming that the quote’s on purpose, what is Van Zandt doing with the Yeats?

The Yeats poem is about hope – the narrator lays out his aspirations to the listener and hopes they are treated gently. In Van Zandt poem, the narrator also asks the listener to tread lightly, but the fragile floor-covering represents the remainder of things that have ended.* Yeats’ narrator is poor but hopeful – he offers his dreams to the listener. TVZ’s narrator is down on his luck and high on heroin “Three dimes / hard luck and good times / fast lines and low rhymes.”

Yeats’ envisions night-time as enchanted – the blue and the dim and the dark cloths of night and light and the half light. Van Zandt’s nightfall is a more uneasy place “At my window watching the sun go/hoping the stars know/it’s time to shine” – maybe the stars won’t come out and the night will stay black. Yeats’ magical night-time is a representation of heaven. Van Zandt’s nightfall is an allusion to death without afterlife “Living is laughing / dying says nothing at all”

Not to forget sheer style – Yeats’ early lyric style is notoriously pretty; Van Zandt has one of the better lyric ears in the language for whatever my opinion is worth; and Van Zandt carries the tradition without sounding precious. (“Aloft” is a little poetic, but so is “enwrought”.) Yeats uses the lyric style to convey enchantment. TVZ conveys a feeling of being tranquilized. Feel fine / feel low and lazy / feel grey and hazy / feel far away.

If Townes Van Zandt is quoting Yeats, he is doing something rather different with a similar image in related style – Yeat’s poem is a vision of hope; Townes’ lyric is a vision of oblivion.

*The image of walking over sleeping faces also brings to mind Tolkien’s dead marshes; Van Zandt is also known to have read Tolkein, maybe he’s quoting that too?

As I’ve written earlier, the new catchphrases to describe business use of social software don’t matter much to me, but the term shifts signify a trend – organizations are starting to understand the value at a more strategic level – and people selling to organizations are selling at a higher level – to executives in terms of business results, rather than to mid-level champions in terms of technical trends and social goals. The focus on business results is not just about implementing and assessing social software in terms of existing business goals such as new product development, but in taking opportunities to re-think the business goals and metrics themselves, as in this Stowe Boyd presentation where networks are increasingly central to the way work gets done, and real-time synthesis is increasingly critical to business results.

Being strategic is good. It takes social software out of the world of feature lists (tags! wikis! ratings!) and value-free adoption metrics (who cares about page views if they don’t relate to business goals). But strategy becomes the dilbert-ism du jour if it’s not accompanied by real changes in what is done and how. Will Evans describes the gap between strategy and execution: “Companies are now aligning around “social business” without a strong understanding of experience design or even what it means to be ’social’ in online mediated spaces, nor how to leverage that to increase value and engagement with their core customers.” Whether the domain is consumer marketing (the context of Will’s post); and/or company processes and business networks, organizations need to consider how the social tools and experience will relate to the business goals, integrating social capabilities with existing business processes, taking into account factors such as social incentives, discoverability and privacy as they relate to the organization’s culture. (And that business integration is key – friendly customer service reps on twitter can’t compensate for poor service).

The business goals (and reconsideration of the goals) are at the level of social business strategy. And the what and the how – the choices that make it successful in a given context – are the considerations of social design. Enterprise 2.0 strategy is needed to sell and implement at a high level in the organization, driven by business goals. Social design, in tools and process, is needed in order to realize the strategy.

This week, FriendFeed co-founder Paul Buchheit popped up on FriendFeed to let folk know that developers are quietly at work on a couple of longer-term projects that will help bring FriendFeedy goodness to the larger world. There has been a lot of discussion about the dropoff in FriendFeed traffic since the Facebook acquisition, and the appearance was intended to reassure the community. People weren’t reassured, not only because Buchheit didn’t share any details about what they’re actually working on, but because there is a fundamental questions about how that integration would work, because of a fundamental difference in the social model of the services.

Facebook is designed to to share things only with one’s friends, and FriendFeed is designed to make things discoverable through the social network. These social models look superficially similar – a user shares content through a friend list, but are deeply different.

Facebook’s default today is private/symmetric. You need to be mutual friends to see each others content, and if you are not friends with someone, you have access to very limited information. There is a “fan page” model but it is oriented toward “publishing/celebrity” rather than information sharing. By contract, FriendFeed has a public/asymmetric model like Twitter. Information is public by default, you can easily discover someone’s content without any “friend” gesture whatsoever, and you can follow someone’s stream without a mutual friend commitment. Information and conversation is discoverable. FriendFeed has strong searching and filtering capabilities that let you find things and people you’re interested in.

These two social models reflect very different values. With Facebook, the value is to share things in confidence with one’s friends, and to conversations in confidence. The deviations in the model that result from diverse friend networks, from disclosure through 3rd party applications, and other sorts of “information leakage” are seen as problems, “privacy violations” that need to be controlled through configuration, through restricting information, through policies that restrict information sharing.

With FriendFeed, the value is to share things publicly. On FriendFeed, the value is to make things discoverable and sharable, in one’s social network and with others who may find it, and to have conversations that attract interested people. Communities that gravitated to FriendFeed included scientists, journalists, and educators – communities that explicitly valued the discoverability.

In the discussion on FriendFeed, the community was not mollified, because they fundamentally value the discoverable model of FriendFeed. For FriendFeed users, simply adding FriendFeed-style service integration into the symmetric/private Facebook model, it will be much less useful. A user will able to more easily share updates from Delicious or Youtube or Last.fm to their friend network, but be unable to discover new people and information.

This difference is often put with a value judgement shortcut, Facebook is closed=bad. This judgement is too simple – the problem is that as Facebook gains more and more power to share information, and the defaults remain private, then actions like discussing news stories won’t be in the public domain, even if people would prefer them to be. But if the initial use case for many users is privacy, then changing defaults to increase sharing will have negative consequences.

For the community in the FriendFeed discussion – disclosure, myself included – the integration will have value if it brings more of the FriendFeed public/asymmetric discoverable model to Facebook, and will not have value if it doesn’t. Simply promising to bring FriendFeed features into Facebook is worthless without making that information discoverable.

How to create a social network that enables privacy but promotes and rewards discovery? That is a challenge. and the way that Facebook integrates FriendFeed will show whether Facebook is interested in discovery and so, are they up to the challenge.

Update: Questions about Facebook’s direction were short-lived. Later yesterday, Facebook announced that public updates would be searchable on Bing. Clearly Facebook is headed for more discoverability. The question is now how this will play out in terms of Facebook user expectations and user experience.

Social messaging can quick way for a traveller to find a friend’s recommendation for dinner in a strange city, for a salesperson to get a quick answer to a question when a customer’s on the phone. Realtime communication can enable rapid response, but a constant stream of chatter can be a time-consuming distraction.

In a Psychology Today article posted by Linda Stone and retweeted by Tim O’Reilly, a recent study by two MIT neurosciencentists shows that multitasking and distraction make people less efficient at getting tasks done.

In response to O’Reilly’s post, pioneering internet educator Howard Rheingold questioned the assumptions around the research and its interpretation: “Regarding neuroscience abt attention, distraction, multitasking – is efficiency highest & only goal? What about discovery? Pattern-finding?” If multitasking makes us inefficient, is efficiency always desirable?

In response to Rheingold’s question, I shared an article I read this weekend, contrasting the efficiency-oriented mindset of web developers with the focus of game developers. In a game context, the focus is on fun, story, character, not efficiency. There are also some salient differences differences between social media and traditional games: “Of course the game world thinks of games as built by game designers & the games we play in social media are often nomic [i.e. players make up the rules]. Also what efficiency misses is that in social media we’re often paying attention to people not tasks.” Rheingold took this one step further “Which leads me to wonder how much of the dreaded multitasking we do online is social discovery and relationship maintenance/repair.”

Efficiency isn’t necessarily the goal in social media. People are making social contact, developing patterns of social gestures that maintain relationships. When a colleague in Canada posts about tasty mango sushi, and a colleague in Portland, Oregon empathizes with turn toward fall weather favoring warm soup, we’re not just spewing pointless trivia, we’re sharing a personal connection that otherwise doesn’t happen separated by many hundreds of miles. Mark Drapeau makes this point with typical good-humored provocativeness: “I think that collaboration is the end result of leveraging social networks, which is in actuality what the social networking tools are for.”

Rheingold proposes, based on his own experience that multi-tasking may also help find meaning in diverse information: “I surf and task switch constantly, store and forward what I find, make notes, often find overarching patterns. Rheingold believes that students sometimes need to learn to be less focused: “Focus has its place, but many of my students who are adept at it need to unlearn dependence on it to zoom out to big picture questions.”

Jim Pivonka agrees that that multi-tasking is useful for young people learning, but brings evidence that it is otherwisecounterproductive for getting things done: “Other than the learning task, multitasking & high performance task execution suspected pretty much mutually exclusive.

In addition to learning, Rheingold posits art as an activity that is valuable, but not about efficiency. “To me, making art is an activity that is valuable for it’s own sake, not for the artifact or its utility, so efficiency is orthogonal… To paraphrase Kierkegaard, for me, making art “is a reality to be experienced, not a problem to be solved,” or artifact 2 B displayed.. dl willson suggests that art may be efficient in a different way, “@hrheingold I would argue that art is efficient…because art is a spark. “Art” is not the object but the spark.”

To be honest, I am not sure that I am correctly representing the dialog between Rheingold and Willson; they may be able to correct my mis-reading. Regardless of the respective understandings of art, it is clear that whichever definition would not meet the tests of the neuroscientists for task-based efficiency!!

Several others suggest alternative models for focus. Brad Ovnell cites a different type of focus needed in Karate: “Loved sparring in karate b/c it developed ability to focus & look wide at once.” Gregory McNish suggests that perhaps focus should have a rhythm, in and out, like breathing.

Jonathan Pratt, an educator with neuroscience background, suggests that the neuroscience research is looking at task efficiency since that is easy to research: “I think it’s a matter of tackling the easier/more quantifiable questions first…brain’s very complex & neuro’s a young field.”

For Rheingold, the hyper-focus on efficiency calls to mind his earlier reading of work by Jacques Ellul, who articulated in the 1950s a grim vision of society being taken over by “technique” – technologies and highly structured activities that eat away at human autonomy and community.

A summary of the conversation: there are goals and values for multi-tasking and social media, other than task-based efficiency. Social gestures, learning, pattern-finding, art – these are all very different from the task completion that is shown to be hampered by multi-tasking. Findings about the impact of multi-tasking on task completion is useful but limited. Hopefully future research will broaden focus to examine the relationship between the experiences of multi-tasking and ambient sociality and other dimensions of life.

In context of ongoing commentary about social media and branding, Adrian Chan observed on Twitter that “metrics analyze individ[ual] tweets for brand mentions and sentiment, losing context of talk and user’s relationships.” Follow-on conversation with Thomas Vander Wal and Chris Baum focused on opportunities for network conversation analysis to elicit valuable information about the social context of brand mentions.

The challenge for marketers lies in how to use this information in a way that preserves trust with customers. Trust is a leading indicator, and, as proposed by Chris Heuer, an important metric to assess a company’s relationship with its customers. Even though a company may have this information – and it is publicly available – doesn’t mean that using it well is easy.

Privacy is over, said Scott McNealy in a famous speech a number of years ago. The topic about the amount and richness of public information is often cast in terms of surveillance, privacy violation, individuals vulnerability, the need to protect against threats, and the futility of doing so. But for many sorts of information and in many contexts, privacy isn’t the salient concept.

There is another important concept from city and village living – the concept of tact. In coffee shops and restaurants every day, people converse about the matter of their lives – their kids schools, weekend plans, sports injuries. This doesn’t mean that it’s socially appropriate for the person at the next table to jump in and express an opinion about how to treat tendonitis. The participants aren’t trying to keep the information confidential – they know that what they’re saying can be overheard. But they take advantage of social norms of tact to assume that other people are choosing to politely ignore their conversation.

Similarly marketers may observe groups of people who discuss travel, or shopping, or gadgets, or heath. Some marketers search for broad keywords and auto-follow anyone who mentions the keyword. Additional social analysis would let them auto-follow others in the conversation, too. The marketer now has the power to jump in and start promoting themselves to everyone in the conversation. These crass activities violate the trust of the people in the conversation.

More sophisticated tactics entail longer-term listening, engaging in conversation when it’s sought and called for, using lower-touch gestures like retweets to engage recognition when appropriate. Employees participating as themselves act as community members and are community members. With an understanding of the culture, marketers can participate in and catalyze welcome public conversations. Within this context, it becomes valuable to know key conversational clusters to help spread information of shared interest, in a way that builds on shared interest instead of violating the sphere of ignoring. When participating with a business identity, tact is key to protect one’s reputation and customers’ trust.

At the Lunch for Good event last week, the primary topic of conversation was the role of identity in increasing participation in social sites. It was encouraging to see that the discourse seems to have moved well beyond the old, unproductive binary contrast between euphoria about the power of anonymity (on the internet no-one knows you’re a dog) and a world of draconian censorship. There was overall concensus that speaking with one’s personal reputation – whether by use of real names and reference to heavily grounded Facebook/LinkedIn realworld identities – or by use of persistent pseudonyms that accrue community karma – helps increase the level of pro-social behavior.

There were still a lot of nuances up for discussion. How and where to use realworld identities tied to your home address, and when to use pseudonyms (someone from the TOR project reminded us that in many places and circumstances, using one’s real name can be life-threatening). About the need for faceted identity, so it’s possible to express aspects of oneself in a social context without having those things be “too much information” in other contexts, whether or not the information is secret. About the value of social gestures and practices that go beyond mere identity – practices of welcoming, moderation, and facilitation that help in establishing a congenial place.

It is good to see the conversation move beyond simple, binary contrasts to the nuances that can help shape civil and congenial online social spaces.