Maura Welch on Social Media

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It's all about the humans

David Armano is one of those rare people that can think deeply but clearly and articulate complicated things in visual, emotive and uncomplicated ways. Thanks, David, for always making a trip to your blog Logic + Emotion well worth it.

Here is his latest killer presso:

The Micro-Sociology of Networks

View more presentations from David Armano. (tags: behavior human)

Typealyze your blog

Courtesy of Andrew Sullivan I found the link to Typealyzer.

Enter your blog and it will analyze the type of person you are.

I entered this blog and found that I am a doer.

"The active and play-ful type. They are especially attuned to people and things around them and often full of energy, talking, joking and engaging in physical out-door activities.

The Doers are happiest with action-filled work which craves their full attention and focus. They might be very impulsive and more keen on starting something new than following it through. They might have a problem with sitting still or remaining inactive for any period of time."

Yep.

"It's the people, not the technology"

Source: Fast Company via YPulse

Anastasia Goodstein says it right. I work with technology all day long. But all the technology in the world won't help you unless you have a flexible, smart and creative team that understand how to work and accomplish goals with other humans.

Fast Company uses IBM as an example of a company actively encouraging this behavior.

“IBM puts emphasis on employee contributions of ideas, collaboration, and motivating people to engage in…pro-social behavior.” The company seeks out instances where employees help others succeed. “Too often, we have measurement and reward systems that are focused on how many transactions did you process, how many orders did you ship, and how many deals did you close -- rather than who helped these other people succeed.” 

Henry had me at Hello

Henry Jenkins is my favorite academic working on the issues of media and online and how it intersects with our lives. OK, danah boyd too. (When I saw danah and Jenkins speak at YPulse, Anastasia Goodstein's fab Youth Culture conference last July, it was heaven.)

So no surprise that the high point of my trip to SXSW this month was the opening remarks by Henry Jenkins.

Here are some highlights:

• He discussed a book called Bowling Alone which made the argument that the 1950s and 60s damaged our society. Between corporate transfers, divorce, television, two-career families, suburban sprawl, generational changes in values created a breakdown in civil society as Americans became more disconnected from their families, neighbors, communities, and the republic itself. But the thing that's bringing it together again? The Internet. Regardless of all the naysayers who fear that it's isolating us.
• That most adults are in a moral panic and have started a trend he called “The Dumbest Generation.” That adults not clear on what’s happening online and in social networks, so they are in a “moral panic.” That’s when you stop asking questions and assume you already know the answers. Jenkins encourages us to have different starting point. Namely to start with the premise that people (and kids) aren’t idiots.
• That education and business do a miserable job of capturing the collective intelligence of individuals. That professionals go to school and learn huge amounts of information - consider doctors and nurses and teachers - but on the job they are only using miniscule amounts of information at a time. That we need to design systems that allow that info to be accessed by the collective organization.
• That the skills required to prepare you for life are not being taught in school where the teacher sits at the front of the class and downloads information in a one-way dialog and then rote information is memorized and regurgitated back. That now we are living in an era of collective intelligence. And for once, not everyone needs to know everything. So education needs to teach us how to pool and gather knowledge and work collectively to find solutions. And unfortunately we are still doing individual testing and knowledge acquisition.

There was so much more. And there always is with Jenkins. It's truly a gift to be able to sit and spew all of these incredible insights without any pause.

Here's a short clip:

Mapping the future of paper

I just love maps. Really.

And as you know, I'm also quite obsessed with sustainability and the ongoing issue with bags.

So when Eric Denison sent me a link to this map and story from the New York Times, my antennae began twitching away.

The map shows world wide paper consumption based on country per capita GDP. Take a look at the US - the world's most egregious consumer. On the positive side, we are on the decline for paper use. China?  Paper usage is fast on the rise.

Eric writes, "Personally, I find visualizations like this fascinating and think they help put a variety of complicated issues in perspective."

Right on. With the mountains of data we're generating every day and our innately human visual acuity, mapping is more important than ever. How else will we unlock and communicate the critical information that dwells in the 1s and 0s?

The New York Time covers the fact that more and more American households are going paperless, "perhaps more for efficiency than for environmentalism." We all love the convenience of online bill-paying, tickets and gift buying. The truth is, for most things today, the digital copy is the record copy.

But paperlessness is most striking to me in my work. I write and create media for a living. But there is almost no paper involved. That's especially so, now that my column doesn't run in the dead tree version of the Globe.

How about you? Are you trending toward paperlessness?

 

Thanks for the map, Eric!

Bummed and spending hard

Source: USAToday

This will come as no surprise to people who have done their share of shopping therapy. A new study confirms that "people's spending judgment goes out the window when they're down, especially if they're a bit self-absorbed." Subjects were shown a sad video clip and afterwards they were willing to "pay nearly four times as much money to buy a water bottle than a group that watched an emotionally neutral clip." That must be why I always buy a $50 bottle of wine after I watch a George W. State of the Union address.

Related:

Shopping genes

Women who love wine, and the men winemakers market to

Women as top tech shoppers

Logo angst & evolution

Source: Neatorama via TechCrunch

Ever been a part of the process of designing a company logo? It's an oddly fascinating nightmare.

For it to be fascinating, you have to be intrigued by the sociological and existential aspects of life. Because that's what logo creation brings out in people. A logo, when it's right, crystallizes something about its subject. It's not about the company itself. It's about the idea of the company.

And that's the nightmare - everyone has a different idea of the idea.

If creating a logo in the first place creates that much angst, re-creating a logo is, well, worse.

Neatorama does a great historical retrospective of the evolution of some familiar logos over time. Great logo and company trivia, such as how Apple is to Isaac Newton as Nokia is to a fish.