The Vine

Stephen Marche’s cover story in The Atlantic reports a rising trend of loneliness in America. Facebook and Twitter, it seems, are making us simultaneously more connected and more isolated.

Marche is neither technophile nor technophobe; he regards social media neutrally, a tool in the hands of the user. The problem, he says, is how we’re using the tool. For millions of Americans, our connections are growing broader but shallower.

“What Facebook has revealed about human nature,” he writes, “is that a connection is not the same thing as a bond, and that instant and total connection is no salvation, no ticket to a happier, better world or a more liberated version of humanity.”

It’s tempting (and convenient) to conclude that this is a case of technology shaping our behavior—but I don’t think that’s right. I suspect, actually, that it’s the other way around. We’re choosing superficiality. This is our behavior shaping technology.

Do check out the article. Highly recommended reading.

In honor of TED 2012 getting underway today (and in anticipation of more fantastic videos sure to come from it), here’s one of our favorite talks from the past year.

Brené Brown is a research professor who has spent the past ten years studying human connection—our ability to empathize, belong and love. In particular she looks at how and why people are connected (or not) to others around them. Without giving away too much of her presentation, Brown asserts that the basis for meaningful relationships is vulnerability, and the greatest impediment is shame. People who lack connections don’t consider themselves worth connecting with.

It’s a fascinating, heartfelt and deeply moving talk. Highly recommended.

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Community grows through small but meaningful acts. Sometimes it’s taking a plate of cookies to a new neighbor. And sometimes it’s getting a postcard from a stranger halfway around the world.

I’ve recently become an avid user of Postcrossing, a website that facilitates postcard exchanges across the globe. Over 250,000 members from 198 countries have collectively sent (as I write this; it increases by the minute) nearly nine million cards.

After creating an account, the system will randomly generate a recipient and a unique code for you. Each time one of your postcards is received and registered, you’re then eligible to get a card from someone else—and that’s where the magic kicks in.

Every postcard that arrives in your mailbox—like the one pictured here, from Mimi in Malaysia—brings a spontaneous touch of culture, warmth and humanity into your day.

And, just as importantly, yours do the same for someone on the other end.

Here’s a brilliant use of high-tech gadgetry to facilitate the timeless, low-tech act of buying someone a cup of coffee.

Jonathan’s Card allows you to download a picture of a prepaid Starbucks card on your phone and use it to pay for your order. (His card gets charged, not yours.) It’s the work of Jonathan Stark, a mobile app consultant who describes it as “an experiment in social sharing of physical goods using digital currency on mobile phones.”

The site also gives details on how you can make a contribution to the card in order to keep the karmic cycle going—and that’s the whole idea of the project, of course. Turns out this is a modern twist on an old Italian custom called Caffe Pagato (“coffee paid”), an act of kindness in which a patron pre-pays the espresso of someone who’s short on cash.

I just added $10 to Jonathan’s Card (five coffees, or two fancy schmancy drinks). I hope others who read this blog will do the same.

Props to Marjorie Kessler—who’s been a reverse mentor to me over the years—for clueing me in to this.

UPDATED: Starbucks has since deactivated the card (with what seem like genuine regrets, in fairness to the company) because of concerns over hacking and abuse. The twists and turns of the story may actually be more interesting and telling than the original experiment. And when you consider that the main goal of the project was, in Stark’s own words, to inspire “more people to think like this and spawn more projects,” it has already succeeded.

IT consulting giant Gartner predicts that within the next few years, one in ten of your friends on Facebook and other social networks will be nonhuman social bots—automated profiles capable of mimicking human conversation, created for the purpose of reaching and influencing consumers.

We’re in the early stages of this now, they speculate. The social media presence of most organizations today amounts to a steady drip of outbound communication. But with time and funding, these efforts will grow increasingly sophisticated, as software “learns” how to listen, observe and eventually engage in two-way interactions personalized to each individual.

I suppose this was inevitable. With more and more people retreating behind the walls of the social web, clever and persistent marketers are finding ways of breaching those walls. (Did we think they’d just go away, leaving us to our unfettered friending and liking and poking?)

But before subjecting all of your online colleagues to Turing tests to flush out the bots, consider a simpler precaution, a human version of the electronic captcha screen.

Want to be my Facebook friend? Gladly. As long as we’ve first met in person. A face-to-Facebook encounter.

Photo credit: Don Solo

The New York Times Magazine features an article that’s perhaps serendipitous—in that it’s a perfect lead-in to next week’s Vine salon—or perhaps simply indicative of how prominent the food-as-community movement is becoming.

Christine Muhlke set out to write a column about farming and food artisans. Along the way, she discovered that it’s really a story about community.

In interview after interview, food producers and enthusiasts inevitably described their passion, their craft and their livelihood in relationship to the larger network around them. As one farmers’ market baker tells her, “People hand me money all day and tell me they love what we do, so it’s not really work at that point, it’s my social life.”

But this is not just the rarefied territory of university towns, foodie blogs and Michael Pollan book clubs. What’s most exciting and consequential, in my opinion, is the potential for farming and food to help repair and restore broken neighborhoods.

Muhlke writes:

The strongest example of a food community I’ve seen was in Detroit, where a vibrant farming scene has sprung up literally from the ashes. In a neighborhood that is a true food desert — there are no national chain grocery stores within city limits; more than 90 percent of food providers are places like convenience and liquor stores — I watched young men and old women socialize while picking collard greens in abandoned lots brought back to life by the Urban Farming organization. There was no fence, no supervision, no charge. Some of these people — neighbors — haven’t spoken to each other since the 1967 riots, the Urban Farming organizer Michael Travis told me as we watched.

“The new food movement is still labeled as Do It Yourself,” she observes, “but it’s really Do It Ourselves.”

NB: The Vine, in collaboration with Hart Howerton, will host a salon on innovative ways of integrating new development with existing agriculture (enhancing the value of both) on October 28th in Fairfield, CA. A limited number of seats are still available. Details are here.

Here’s a bit of “social” web humor courtesy of Dan Piraro, aka Bizarro.

I saw this and laughed at the irony, then realized it’s closer to truth than I care to admit.

Somewhere along the way, the ease of digital interaction has made a simple phone call seem invasive, and a drop-in visit borderline stalking. For crying out loud, you can now use sites like Avoidr to see where your ‘not-friends’ are hanging out—so you can steer clear of them.

And so we applaud GOOD Magazine’s Candy Chang for creating a simple device that helps overcome this tendency and brings people back together.

Candy’s Neighbor Doorknob Hanger is a low-tech means of sharing resources with the people around you, whether offering or requesting. Cut out the card, hang it on your front door, and swap stuff.

Ostensibly it’s a non-intrusive way of saying, “Can I borrow…” or “If you ever need…”.

Its real purpose, I think, is deeper than that. It’s an ice-breaker for human contact.

Sad that we should need one.

Two talks from the recent TEDGlobal conference set the broader context of this topic perfectly. Both are highly recommended.

Ethan Zuckerman points out that even as the web makes our globe increasingly interconnected, most of us still source information and ideas from people who are just like us. (And he offers some suggestions and tools for how to change that.)

Matt Ridley demonstrates how, throughout history, the meeting and mating of ideas has massively accelerated productivity and innovation. As he puts it, more tantalizingly, this is what happens when ideas have sex.

Jonah Lehrer’s latest blog post, The Secret of Successful Entrepreneurs, brings this all into a modern business context.

In a 2007 study at Columbia University, executives were invited to a cocktail mixer and encouraged to network with new people. The vast majority of participants even declared that their primary goal was to meet “as many different as people as possible” and “expand their social network.” Not surprisingly, however, birds of a feather drank together. Investment bankers clustered with investment bankers, marketers with marketers, and so on. According to the researchers, “the only successful networker at the event was the bartender.”

To demonstrate the tangible benefits of a diverse social network, Lehrer cites a separate study by Princeton sociologist Martin Ruef. Interviewing over 700 Stanford Business School grads who had gone on to start their own business, Ruef noticed that most of these entrepreneurs had very homogenous networks—but a small subset had significantly expanded their circles.

“They didn’t just hang out with colleagues and close friends,” Lehrer writes. “Instead, [they] maintained a large number of ‘weak ties’ with people at different companies and from different backgrounds. Their social networks were varied and undirected, full of surprising interactions and ‘informational entropy.’ These entrepreneurs made a habit of hanging out with people who told them unexpected things; they chatted with acquaintances and struck up conversations with random strangers.”

Here’s where it gets really interesting. When Ruef analyzed the innovation levels of all the subjects (measured by patents and trademarks, with bonus points for entering an unexploited niche or pioneering new marketing methods), he found that those with wider networks were three times more innovative than their narrower peers.

By interacting with a wider range of contacts, they were exposed to a wider range of ideas and what Lehrer calls “non-redundant information.”

He concludes:

There is something unsettling about Ruef’s data. We think of entrepreneurs, after all, as individuals. If someone has a brilliant idea for a new company, we assume that they are inherently more creative than the rest of us. This is why we idolize people like Bill Gates and Richard Branson and Oprah Winfrey. It’s also why we invest in the meritocracy: We believe that we can identify talent in isolation.

But Ruef’s analysis suggests that this focus on the singular misses the real story of entrepreneurship. Unless we take our social circle into account – that collection of weak ties and remote acquaintances who feed us unfamiliar facts – we’re not going to really understand the nature of achievement. Behind every successful entrepreneur is a vast network.

If you don’t already have a “collection of weak ties and remote acquaintances” feeding you unfamiliar facts, you might want to think about cultivating one.

From the aforementioned What Matters Now ebook, this commentary from Howard Mann nails it.

I’m continually amazed by the number of people on Twitter and on blogs, and the growth of people (and brands) on facebook. But I’m also amazed by how so many of us are spending our time. The echo chamber we’re building is getting larger and louder.

More megaphones don’t equal a better dialogue. We’ve become slaves to our mobile devices and the glow of our screens. It used to be much more simple and, somewhere, simple turned into slow. We walk the streets with our heads down staring into 3-inch screens while the world whisks by doing the same. And yet we’re convinced we are more connected to each other than ever before.

Multi-tasking has become a badge of honor. I want to know why.

I don’t have all the answers to these questions but I find myself thinking about them more and more. In between tweets, blog posts and facebook updates.

While filling out a profile for an online community, one of the questions asked us to submit “An idea worth sharing.”

I chose this one, from Meg Wheatley’s wonderful article Relationships: The Basic Building Blocks of Life:

“The scientific search for the basic building blocks of life has revealed a startling fact: there are none. The deeper that physicists peer into the nature of reality, the only thing they find is relationships. Even sub-atomic particles do not exist alone. One physicist described neutrons, electrons, etc. as ‘…a set of relationships that reach outward to other things.’ Although physicists still name them as separate, these particles aren’t ever visible until they’re in relationship with other particles. Everything in the Universe is composed of these ‘bundles of potentiality’ that only manifest their potential in relationship.”

The notion that we’re social creatures wired for community is so self-evident that it hardly requires scientific proof. If you have a pulse, you yearn for the companionship and touch of others. Babies die if they’re not held. And the chronicled effects of solitary confinement are alarming.

Yet it’s somehow reaffirming to learn that our desire for relationship—and the potential it unleashes in us—is embedded at the most elemental levels.

We are “bundles of potentiality.” An idea worth sharing indeed.

(NB: Meg was a speaker at The Vine ’07. You can watch her presentation here.)

If you want people to listen to you. If you want people to follow you. If you want people to buy stuff from you.

Lead them.

Seth Godin’s fantastic talk from this year’s TED conference is posted below. In it, he argues that the most powerful form of marketing today is leadership.

We are tribal in nature. We yearn to connect with others who share our interests and passions. And thanks to the internet, it’s never been easier for these people to find each other. The opportunity for any marketer, then, is to identify, connect and lead a tribe. This applies whether you’re for-profit or non-profit, fighting for a political cause or selling soap.

The problem with traditional (ie, mass) marketing is that it requires you to act like the king—you’re the one in control, tossing things to the peons. (And how’s that working for you these days?) But when you’re leading a tribe, the desire is built in. Life is good didn’t invent optimism, they simply gave optimistic people a symbol to rally around.

So find a group that already has a yearning for something, but is disconnected. Give them a way to connect, a cause to commit to, and a culture that lets them know whether they’re in or out. Understand that your movement is not for everyone. Be willing to polarize.

I’ll stop there and not give away too much of the material. The full presentation is well worth watching, and just 18 minutes long.

NB: You can hear more from Seth at PCBC next month, where he’ll be the closing keynoter.

While I’m not a basher of social media, I love this commentary from David Murray about Twitter use taken to absurd lengths.

Twitter/Facebook/YouTube/et al. are certainly having a paradoxical effect on human interaction. We’ve never been more connected, and yet we’ve never been more disconnected. A man appears to be in medical distress, and the logical response is to tweet about it?!? It’s a Web 2.0 version of Kitty Genovese.

Social media is, of course, neither inherently good nor evil. Like any tool, it can (and will) be used in the service of all that’s beautiful and all that’s despicable about human nature.

And in the spectrum of media consumption, I do believe it’s a step in the right direction. If nothing else, it has created what Clay Shirky calls an architecture of participation. Wikipedia is a far better use of social surplus than sitting on the couch watching Desperate Housewives.

But my biggest criticism of social media is that it causes people to confuse quantity of connections with quality, and to substitute digital experiences for human ones.

In David’s post he quotes Kurt Vonnegut, who once said, “We are dancing animals. How beautiful it is to get up and go out and do something.”

And David himself sums it up this way: ”Spend one day surfing the Internet and spend another roaming your neighborhood. See how many good dinner table stories you have after each. There won’t be a contest.”

Amen.

According to a study published in the New England Journal of Medicine, your friends can make you fat. So can your siblings or spouse, although less so. (Your neighbors, apparently, cannot.)

Among the 12,000+ people monitored over a 30-year span:

A person’s chances of becoming obese increased by 57% if he or she had a friend who became obese in a given interval. Among pairs of adult siblings, if one sibling became obese, the chance that the other would become obese increased by 40%. If one spouse became obese, the likelihood that the other spouse would become obese increased by 37%. These effects were not seen among neighbors in the immediate geographic location.

The study’s conclusion: “Obesity appears to spread through social ties.”

The full report is here. For a more humorous commentary, go here instead.

Chris Waugh illustrated these network effects in his fantastic talk at The Vine, drawing upon IDEO’s work with the CDC to counteract youth obesity, including the powerful (and poignant) example of Pie Ranch.

Kudos also to Dr. Richard Jackson, who introduced this topic two years ago at our inaugural meeting. Jackson addressed the impact of the built environment on our health and wellness, and he showed us the alarming medical and societal ramifications of obesity — to name just one: the airline industry burns an additional 350 million gallons of fuel per year because of overweight passengers — exacerbated by neighborhoods designed for cars, not humans.

This is not to let individuals off the hook. Certainly your health is, first and foremost, your responsibility.

But the influence of your community — both social and physical — appears to be profound.