Social Networking and Self-Regulation
the potentially crippling problems inherent in the self-policing realms of Digg and Reddit
Posted Sep 28, 07:15 am in economics, experiences, human nature, improvements, marketing, politics, postmodernism, social networking, unanswered questions
Social networking websites are the big thing right now, not just for armchair sociologists and online businesses, but also for academics. They serve as sort of a vacuum where you can observe interactive behavior from afar in a venue that didn’t even exist just a few years ago.
Two of the sites that get a lot of the attention are Reddit and Digg. These sites are not like Facebook or MySpace, in that they are not pages in which you create profiles for the purpose of having your peers come check you out and find out what music you like. They are essentially link portals that allow users to submit content (links) and allow users to comment on those submissions. They also give users the ability to “upmod” or “downmod” submissions to indicate, respectively, approval or disapproval of said submissions, comments, and links. It’s supposed to be an egalitarian means of aggregating a collective response of the userbase to a submission, and to show others how worthwhile a contribution might be, and to establish a feedback mechanism to the poster.
Keeping count of ups and downs encourages good comments and submissions, and can be seen as a preventative tool to keep out trolls, spammers, and people who say don’t make worthwhile contributions to the public discourse. And like the Roman gladiator battles of old, the idea is that a preponderance of upmods will spare the life of a well-written or interesting contribution, while downmods will effectively slay it, striking it from the viewing grounds.
In theory, it’s a very good thing. Over humanity’s existence, and particularly over the past 15 years, there has been a glut of information flooding into the public sphere at a rate that seems to only accelerate. It become increasingly necessary to more effectively filter what reaches our eyes in order to make our limited time more meaningful. In other words, there’s a lot of junk out there, and you don’t want to waste your time reading it; you want to get to the good stuff immediately (this attitude probably is problematic in its own way, but that’s a different story entirely). These social networking sites help you put mass consciousness to use in achieving that agenda.
For a while this was being considered as the way that private citizens were finally going to wrangle the big bad world wide web and all its anarchic tendencies; finally the masses would be able to collectively wrestle power away from the disproportionately powerful spammers and media corporations, and regain control of the discursive sphere that the internet was always meant to be.
Alas, the debilitating cracks have already formed in the foundations of this well-meaning institution.
Digg was working fine up to a certain point, where articles were being upmodded based on merit and interest, but this utopic system was eventually usurped by an organized network of users operating on a platform of quid pro quo, in which users would agree to upmod another’s comments and submissions in exchange for similar treatment to their own comments and submissions. These rogue networks expanded, using Digg’s proprietary “friend” system, in which a user can befriend other users and monitor each others’ activities with ease. Pretty soon, the entire front page of the site, which was once supposed to house an aggregated list of topics that the entire userbase considered important, was commandeered by people subverting the system through mutual backscratching, thereby annihilating the democratic ideals of the site.
To this day, despite 150,000,000 page views a month and thousands of content submissions per day, the same 20 people’s submissions make it to the front page every day. This, of course, basically makes Digg the equivalent of a mainstream media outlet that uses editorial discretion to filter content, except in this case, it is not exercising supposed meritocratic discretion (“what are the important issues of the day?”) so much as they basically just have a staff of 20 contributors who are going to automatically have their voices heard, while everyone else is basically forced into a consumption role.
So much for that.
It was then that we looked to Reddit to become the site that would cradle our highest democratic ideals. Many Digg users jumped ship to come to Reddit after being disgusted with the downward slide in content quality at Digg. But soon enough, Reddit too was destroyed— but not by the same system as Digg. It was leveled by a much more subtle and insidious form of cancer.
Reddit had always prided itself on being a more thoughtful and educated mass of users than Digg, always mocking Digg for its tendency towards childish humor and ad-hominem verbal sparring. Reddit, on the other hand, was a site that was sophisticated, and more prone to having mature dialogues about subjects that were served more by complex dialectics than verbal drive-bys. But ultimately, this user self-perception and self-selection, combined with the “modding” rights of all users created an ideological vacuum that threatened the very foundation of the site through its own exclusionary behavior.
To understand how this happened, it is relevant for us to first understand what happened in a more concrete sense.
At the moment I am typing this, the front page of Reddit is littered with anti-John McCain/Sarah Palin articles that seem to recite various sensational or seemingly biased positions against them. This is not in itself a problem, but as a supposedly non-partisan site, it has repeatedly been shown that anti-Obama submissions get downmodded into oblivion. Reddit is now essentially a clearinghouse for liberal rhetoric, where every single anti-Republican and anti-progressive screed on the world wide web can be found, being upmodded by users who are probably only reading descriptions of articles rather than full articles, and who are voting based on ideology rather than quality.
Spend a few minutes on the site, and you’ll see liberal comments regularly upmodded (or at least not downmodded), and you’ll see conservative comments downmodded like there’s no tomorrow— with no apparent value put on the complexity or discursive quality of the comment.
Remember, upmodding and downmodding are supposed to be reflections of user opinion on submissions. The issue here is that there are many reasons why users might not like an article, and without consistency in voting patterns, it descends into a meaningless mush of upmod/downmod numbers.
Therein lies the problem with this form of social networking. Upmods and downmods do not carry with them a single unique and transparent value. A downmod does not necessarily mean “I thought this comment was bad on the merits of its thesis”; it could mean “I disagree with you ideologically.” It could even mean “I don’t like this user,” or “I don’t like this user’s username.” All this tends to render whatever submissions are highly upmodded or highly downmodded to be of somewhat ambiguous import— which of course means that anything you are seeing (or not seeing) because of others’ value judgments is based on somewhat arbitrary rationale… which should, in turn, make you wonder why this is such a great medium for brokering dialogue. After all, what if you want to read well-written opinions of people whose ideas differ from the site’s mainstream?
An idealized situation would have separate measures for the any number of factors that might elicit someone’s approval or disapproval: well argued/poorly argued; convincing/not convincing; ideologically agree/disagree; spam/not spam; worthwhile contribution/not worthwhile contribution; stupid username/not stupid username, etc. With such a system, one could theoretically exhibit approval for a contribution on multiple levels but simultaneously disagree on other levels (and let others know it). In this manner, we could read an article that was well argued, but not convincing, that was largely ideologically disagreed with. But we can’t do that now. And that’s too bad, because it forces regular users into intellectual stagnancy. As sociologist Mark Granovetter suggests, it’s actually the people who aren’t in our immediate intellectual circle who are the ones who can teach us things. We already “know” what our ideological peers think.
Of course, this opens up a whole new can of worms because it relies on the ability of users to police themselves in what category of approval or disapproval they choose to give to submissions. Vindictive liberal users might angrily describe an eloquent and well-argued conservative post as “not worthwhile” simply because of their own parochial point of view. This is problematic, and unlikely to be resolved in any meaningful way.
Another reason why this is potentially troubling is because of intersubjective value judgments. What’s worthwhile for you does not match the threshold of what is worthwhile for me. Aggregated over a massive userbase, we’ll end up seeing a sort of middling effect that promotes submissions that basically hug the bottom rung of the ladder of quality. That is, we’ll end up elevating the sorts of things that the most people happen to agree are good. If you listen mainstream radio, read mainstream magazines, and watch mainstream television, you can see why this may not be such a great thing.
Will this ever see resolution? Will humanity’s mainstream be forever condemned to mediocrity in everything it engages in? Will our music, television, movies, literature, politicians, and now content portals all be mediocre? God, I hope not.
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Dirt-Digging When Hiring Employees: Why You Shouldn't Do It
Unrealistic expectations, their limitations, and the dangers they promise
Posted Jul 28, 08:12 am in branding, business, economics, experiences, human nature, human resources, marketing, social networking
The New Reality
I wonder if there are going to be any viable candidates for anything in the future. The accessibility of information on the internet as well as the general ease for one to post information to it, especially at a young age, has led few curious and tech-savvy individuals from the internet generation to have clean, unsearchable online slates. If you’ve observed the behavior of 8-25 year olds recently, I think you will make the reasonable assumption that people of this age group comprise the lion’s share of Facebook’s 36 million users, and MySpace’s 73 million users, and have made their mark online in many other arenas.
And what kind of comments are these people posting on the internet, that would reassure potential employers of this person’s quality? Here’s one from a person I’ll call Ashley Pinsky, 15, from MySpace.
OMG i was so fukced up last nite lol!!!
Granted, this is an extreme example, but not an uncommon one. That offhand comment will probably prevent Ms. Pinsky from ever becoming president. And the nature of the internet is such that this comment may not be easy to find in the future, but it’s never going away. Someone who wanted to find dirt on Ashley Pinsky will find that comment 35 years later, no doubt. It’s not like it was in the good old days, where your exploits and comments could be geographically contained, or confined to the memory of a couple people who overheard your off-color joke in the privacy of your living room. We live in a world of YouTube, digital cameras, hidden recorders, live microphones, and ill-considered internet confessions.
The Problem with Vividness
But in the wise and out-of-context words of Marge Simpson, as long as everyone is videotaping everyone else, justice will be served. Right? Right?
Wrong.
One of the big concerns we should have is our tendency towards misleading vividness. The following is an example, and one that is intended intended as a convenient analogy, not a political screed.
Think about the difference between the respective presidential bids of George W. Bush and Barack Obama, in particular the controversies. We only criticized George Bush for his long history of alcohol abuse and coke-snorting, but we skewered Barack Obama for attending a church that appeared to deliver hateful sermons. Aside from the respective gravity of these apparent violations of character (the weight of them essentially created by the media), there’s one thing that separates them significantly: one was documented on camera and the other was not. We could watch Jeremiah Wright on endless loop, in vivid detail, cementing our impressions of his “hateful” church and its link to Obama.
The Wright tape was so visceral and immediate that it was hard for it to not make an impression somehow— even though it literally represented 2 minutes of the church’s decades-long history, and there was no further proof of similar activity. But all we heard about Bush’s years, possibly decades of hard partying and drug abuse was that he was reputed to be a former cokehead and alcoholic. We had didn’t have 2 minutes of videotape showing Bush snorting lines or stumbling around drunk or emotionally damaging his loved ones. For that, Bush didn’t have to own up to anything, while Obama had to do a lot of dancing around. Due to the vividness, the Wright issue seemed much more real and immediate than the other, so we pressed it much more, and it played a much larger role in our mental construction of Obama’s character.1
My point is not to get into whether these controversies themselves are important to examine in a presidential candidate; instead, I want to explore the economics of hiring techniques which involve the use of vividness and “dirt-digging” to establish character, and the lack of foresight that companies and our electorate may be unwittingly entering into by engaging in such practices that forcibly marry vividness with significance.
No One is Who They Appear to Be at Any Given Time
Our immediate instinct is to say when we find dirt on someone online, or in photographs, or in videos that we use these occurrences as evidence, testimonials to someone’s personality. Did you see that photo of him drunk at a bar? He’s a loose cannon. We can’t possibly trust him with our industrial equipment, or have our clients find out that (outside of work) he behaves in an unprofessional manner.
The problem is that we ascribe too much meaning to these words and images when they come from an unprofessional environment. First of all, it should not come to a surprise to anyone that people behave unprofessionally when they’re not at work. To expect that they don’t is an unrealistic and fairly ridiculous expectation that, when you think about it, demands far too much of someone who is only human. People are not their jobs. They behave themselves at work because they have to. At home and in their leisure time, they feel like they should be able to let loose and be themselves. After all, why should they be evaluated on behavior that does not directly and demonstrably affect the quality of their work?2
This leads me to wonder whether our apparent demands for a sparkling personal history is the result of us actually wanting to hire “clean” individuals for reasons of productivity or wanting to hire individuals who can at least appear clean so as to not horrify outsiders. The difference is that the latter acknowledges the imperfection of humans and settles for someone who can keep his indiscretions private, while the other wants us to be held to unmanageably high standards all the time.
In fact, I doubt seriously that there are completely clean people in this country, or the world. It’s just that much of our ‘dirty’ behavior occurs without documentation. I’m sure that if we all were being filmed all the time for everyone to see, there would be no one out there without some unsavory event connected to their name. If it wasn’t some frowned-upon activity like drug or alcohol use, it would be something else like violence, sexual indiscretion, off-color conversations and asides, shady business dealings, rude behavior, subtle racism, or anger management issues. And it’s not like these people are bad people; we’re talking about isolated moments that would appear damning if documented and replayed— moments that actually permeate all of our lives constantly.
Indeed, what man or woman would not appear foolish, controversial, unreasonable, or perverted if monitored 24/7 and edited to exaggerate the most sensational segments of his day (which is essentially what so-called HR background checks do)? Producers of reality television shows know this. They know how to work Final Cut Pro to make a normal girl seem like a raving bitch, a decent guy into an aggressive, misogynistic hothead, and a neurotic, socially-maladjusted lunatic into Simon Cowell.
Presidential candidates aren’t allowed the normal lapses of speech or judgment that the rest of us are afforded because everything they say is constantly being deconstructed by pundits and played 300 times in succession on news networks, giving every offhand comment a hyperreal, set-in-stone weight that the original probably didn’t have. Just imagine how you or someone you love might come off if every act or word uttered were subjected to the laws of television news overanalysis— every moment of frustration, giddy delight, or agitation there for the world to judge you with. People who have never met you are now basing their perceptions of you on a two second loop of you getting irate at the guy who cut you off on the highway, and it’s been playing all day and night, making you look increasingly psychotic with every repeat. It’s exactly what happened with Michael Jackson and Britney Spears and countless other celebrities, and it unsurprisingly drove them both to madness. It would most likely happen to you too.
Underlying this fundamentally unfair depiction of you is that while you may have lost your cool for that two seconds, you don’t get credit for the nearly 18 hours of collected calm that you exhibited. Nobody’s watching that part. Therefore, you are branded with the scarlet letter of being the psycho who flipped out when someone cut him off.
How HR’s Enthusiasm for Dirt-Digging is Going to Come Back to Bite It
So far, my point in describing all this is not to excuse occasional idiocy, bad judgment, or the appearance of foolishness, out-of-control behavior, or low ethical standards so much as to universalize it. Knowing that our past mistakes are out there and none of us are truly free from them, the only possible outcome from gross and commonplace hiring practices that seek to find our documented dirt is that candidates who are more undocumented (and therefore more unknown) than their competition are the ones who are more likely to get the job. How? Let’s look at these two potential candidates of equal qualification:
Mike — Online research finds that he admits to drinking and womanizing; is prone to occasional off-color jokes; was once arrested for indecent exposure 8 years ago.
Jeff — online research finds absolutely no information, damaging or otherwise.
In the split second you have to make this hiring decision, the chances are you want to hire Jeff. But consider this unsettling truth for a moment: After looking over their backgrounds, you feel more comfortable with the guy you know less about. In fact, it is the absence of information about Jeff that makes you feel unjustifiably secure about hiring him. You don’t know Jeff’s dirt, and therefore you mentally assume there is none. But as science teaches us, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. The idea that ‘Jeff must be clean because we did not find any dirt on him’ is clearly false, but it does not stop our conscious mind from elevating him in comparison to Mike.
The problem is, you can almost never be sure whether that decision is justified or not because you simply do not have the information you need to make a legitimate comparison. As it turns out, Jeff might be a) a serial murderer that makes Mike seem like a great guy in comparison, b) an alcoholic with strikes against him just as bad as Mike, or c) a wonderful, clean-cut young man. You simply do not know which, and you continue to base your hiring practices on prejudices built on vividness: You read that Mike got arrested once and drinks a lot, so you now prefer Jeff.
This tendency should bother you; you are favoring someone who has only earned preferential status by information omission rather than information addition. Your lack of knowledge about this individual, who you have chosen after making a faulty comparison with another candidate whose vivid background rubs you the wrong way, might very well result in a poor hiring match for your company, or even a very damaging personality getting the job.
All of which doesn’t mean a lick of difference to you if the only reason you are screening for dirt is to keep up your company’s appearance with outsiders, which in this context, makes your hiring focus seem awfully misguided. Maybe I’m going out on a limb here, but I doubt outsiders give a damn about your employees unless they are dealing with them directly, which again comes back to the question of why you should care about anything your employee does as long as it doesn’t affect his work.
If I Shouldn’t Screen for Dirt, How the Heck Should I Be Hiring?
Hiring someone is a big decision. It can cost a large company between $80,000 to $1,000,000 in training and loss of productivity to bring in new people. It’s not easy. Yet, typical HR departments don’t invest much time or energy in hiring, and tend to do things in ways that are easy rather than effective. Really what they they need is something to judge character on. Ideally, they’d have all the same quantity and quality information about everyone so they could make accurate comparisons. But they don’t. Instead, they look at your resume, ask you some dumb questions, maybe call a couple references, and then search for dirt on you. This automatically— and unfairly— favors people who script their interview responses and who are either careful to hide their dirt, who haven’t gotten caught, or who are lucky enough to not have been documented. This is a very dangerous trend in hiring.
I think that the ideal, but definitely not the most convenient, means of hiring should involve the following:
- A large number of personal references that draw from a wide cross-section of relationships
- A series of real-world interactions in a variety of casual atmospheres conducted by professionals whose job it is to get to know people; this might involve going with the candidate to museums, coffee shops, baseball games, etc. but not really with the pretense of grilling the candidate so much as understanding them and gaining a sense of who they are
- Professional interviews that ask relevant and thought-provoking questions that would demonstrate knowledge, reasoning, critical thinking skills, etc.
- A series of open-ended questions that attempt to determine a candidate’s personal value system and life priorities, and the fit of that to the company
1. Of course, this wasn’t the only issue that separated the two. There were obvious divisions of racism, classism, and religious fears as well.
2. This is not to imply that we should allow bad behavior at work; order obviously needs to be maintained in a professional environment. It’s just that we need to accept that for most people, there’s a division between work and home, and one that hardly anyone wants bridged. After all, as I mentioned in a previous post, we are different people depending on our environment. Our receptivity to different stimuli differs in different places, which is why we don’t feel compelled to drink at work, but that same beer seems enormously inviting the second we step out the door.
Some Ideas for Cell Phone Companies
Let’s not embrace stagnancy
Posted Jul 18, 03:00 pm in business models, improvements, marketing, social networking
Sometimes I feel like cell phone companies have no idea what they’re doing. I’ve thought of any number of simple concepts that would make phones so much more useful. Here are some ideas:
1) You know the routine; you spend 5 minutes typing out a text message on your cell phone for an idea that it would take you 2 seconds to say. There are times I want to tell someone something, but I don’t want to talk to them or spend time texting it out. I want to be able to call someone’s phone and immediately reach their voicemail, but bypass causing the person’s phone to ring; instead, it should be a system that allows the caller the option of going directly to voice mail as opposed to allowing the phone owner to be in charge of that decision.
2) Allow me to use the GPS to find out whether my friends are physically near me. Update: I found out that a third party company is developing technology to do this.
3) Let me input information regarding my interests into my phone, and let me know if there are any people near me who share my interests. This could also potentially be used as a dating tool.
4) A memo function that allows you to quickly store to-do’s, reminders, ideas, and whatever else you may want to leave for yourself.
Those are just some thoughts. But given the competitive sphere of the cell phone market, why aren’t companies being more imaginative about their products? We’re talking about Fortune 500 corporations with billions of dollars in R&D money in an innovation-driven, high-tech industry that for reasons unexplained, cannot be bothered to push the boundaries!
The Fabric of Our New Collective Experience
“What binds us is what we stand witness to”
Posted Jul 13, 10:43 pm in branding, consumerism, human nature, postmodernism, social networking
This morning, I was about to go to the gym in the same shirt I had slept in, a white shirt with red hems with the word “KAHLUA” printed in big letters on the front. As I stepped before the bathroom mirror before exiting the house, I realized that I had to change. For some reason, I didn’t want to be seen as the type of person who would wear a shirt with a liquor brand emblazoned on it, even though I apparently am. I’m not a very fashion-focused person in general, which is why as I was later examining my behavior, I found it somewhat curious. Yet, it seemed to be indicative of something very basic in our society that is accepted without much thought: images are one of the primary building blocks of our collective inner world, and the way in which we parse the world around us.
In David Foster Wallace’s essay “E Unibus Pluram,” found in the book A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again, he comments about how the common currency of interpersonal relationships used to be shared experience, but is now built on a foundation of the images that bombard us, and seep into our consciousness and now form the primary means of relating to others.
“Americans [seem] no longer united so much by common beliefs as by common images: what binds us [becomes] what we stand witness to. In fact, pop-cultural references have become such potent metaphors not only because of how united Americans are in our exposure to mass images but also because of our guilty indulgent psychology with respect to that exposure. Put simply, the pop reference works because 1) we all recognize such a reference, and 2) we’re all a little uneasy about how we all recognize such a reference. [I disagree with this second point — RK]
Today, the belief that pop images are basically just mimetic devices is one of the attitudes that separates most [people] under 40 from the generation that precedes us. We’re not different from our fathers in that [pop images] present and define our contemporary world. Where we are different is that we have no memory of a world without such electric definition.”
He goes on to remark about how he’s read books in which the author can instantly flesh out a character by describing the brand name on his shirt, a strategy that only works because the post-modern generation equates one’s brand loyalty with one’s character. An astute point, and one that I think is not so far divorced from what I had commented on earlier about the power of symbols to override our critical thinking about them, and how the associative meanings of symbols can form a feedback loop to constantly redefine and augment their meanings. Perhaps it is not so surprising then that the Western world is so defined by— and perhaps stifled by- its obsession with the images associated with consumer goods and brand labels, and the benefits these supposedly give us.
I would expand Wallace’s idea of our postmodern society being built on images to it being built on a foundation of media vignettes in general. But its not just that we like these images and shared media, we find communion in them. It’s not uncommon to meet people who speak in bursts of movie quotes, or who are so insular that the only way one can break through their thick shells is through a cavalcade of pop culture references. And it’s just as common to find people who are able to use this as a tool to gain in-roads with others, to build trust and friendship. In fact, this has become an expected means of relationship building.
There’s no faster way to be ostracized from a conversation than by admitting that you haven’t seen the movie everyone else is talking about. The problem is not that you literally haven’t seen the movie; it’s that you haven’t been indoctrinated into the set of images that the movie represents. At that moment, you are not in the same class as the people who have seen it; you are lacking a shared experience that the others have witnessed— even if they didn’t witness it together. And there simply isn’t a way anyone can bring you in. If someone was talking about anything in their personal life, you could be brought in because the conversation is no longer about the images, but about the human condition that we all share.
It’s for this reason that companies like Netflix can cash in on people who rent out movies they don’t really want to watch so that they can say they’ve seen them. Watching movies— particularly ones with social cachet— is a passport into conversations and acceptance with social groups. There’s a fear that if we don’t witness these images, we may be left behind somehow.
Nothing speaks more about our love for images and media than the popularity of the television show Family Guy. Based on the life of a bumbling, overweight suburbanite and his family, each half-hour episode is loosely bound by a rather flimsy plotline thickened up with an endless series of shared images from the collective pop consciousness. For example, the program might make sly references to a short-lived television program from the mid-80s, or a washed-up child actor, or a celebrity’s ongoing troubles with the law. Or even all of these in a single scene! The whole show is a composite of such images. These are not subjects that are thematically linked to viewers’ personal lives; nor are they rooted in humor that expounds on the human condition.
This is beyond a game of ‘spot the reference;’ these references are the new definition of shared experience. We all know about that washed up actor. We all know about that celebrity’s trouble with the law. It is part of the unwritten history of our lives. Except we didn’t live it. We, as Wallace says, were witnesses to the images, we integrated them into our own narratives, and they now make up the fabric of our experience.
I once witnessed a couple friends of mine reminiscing about a time they were driving along a beach together. They were throwing out all these minute details about their adventure, laughing and egging each other on about their behavior on this trip. This went on for 3-4 minutes, before I asked what beach they had gone to. They said they were talking about a time they were playing Gran Turismo on their Playstation console. My jaw hit the floor.
Something struck as deeply sad about this story, but I can’t really explain why. If these images are capable surrogates for “real life”, if a video game simulating driving on a beach can serve as an alternative for actually being on one, and if we can watch “Friends” instead of maintaining real ones, does it matter? Should it matter? There’s a feeling in my gut that there’s something terribly backwards about this trend, but I can’t really argue with it on any logical, non-conditioned level. We are humans, and we have choices to make; the choices of some would not be ones that I would make, but it does not make them wrong or backwards. Indeed, why shouldn’t we savor whatever we embrace? Perhaps it’s all we have.
The Loss of 'Incidental' Conversation
One more way that the advance of technology has isolated us
Posted Jul 10, 04:46 am in experiences, social networking
I haven’t really spoken to my girlfriend’s father in a while, though I used to talk to him with some regularity. The reason for this is because we no longer have a landline. He would never ask to speak with me on the phone; instead, we would have ‘incidental’ conversations that stemmed from the fact that I just happened to pick up the landline phone when he was trying to reach his daughter.
Without these incidental conversations, I hardly ever get the chance to talk to him, unless I happen to see him in person, which is rare.
I wonder how the lack of these conversations will affect our social relationships. Now in-laws may have less of an excuse or opportunity to dialogue with their sons- or daughters-in-law. You may not get to talking to a friend’s roommate because they don’t pick up the house phone that no longer exists. Parents can’t screen their kids’ calls anymore, and keep their daughters away from Johnny, the neighborhood badboy.
Sometimes there are unexpected side effects of any technological phenomena, and these have a way of changing our lives in manners that weren’t really intended— sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse. The way I see it, we’ve incurred collateral damage from the advances that have all but eradicated landlines, and have made cell phones the centerpieces of our telephonic communications.
Perhaps it is just another way that the advance of technology has, contrary to popular thought, isolated us from others and kept us from developing meaningful relationships with the people around us.
An Alternative B-School and Interviewing Strategy
It probably doesn’t work, so don’t try it. Also, it’s something that Hitler would do.
Posted Jul 1, 03:04 pm in economics, experiences, pictures, social networking
Before I started B-school many people told me, rather matter-of-factly, that it was going to be 2 years of partying. This, as it turned out, was not at all the case. Of course, my rationale for joining had absolutely nothing to do with this alleged reality; in fact, I do not really consider myself the type of person who thrives in party environments (and the fact that I wrote the previous sentence in that fashion probably attests to that).
Regardless, I understood from the very beginning that networking was going to be a big part— perhaps the biggest part— of the whole experience, and in fact, the foundation on which my future career would lay. This was made clear to me in no uncertain terms by any number of the school faculty, and especially career counselors. I bristled against this thought; what did they mean, networking was the central component of B-school? Was this whole B-school deal really as shallow as outsiders probably think it is? Is it really just a loathsome amalgamation of entitled white dudes who look like the guy below (and act exactly the way you think he does), getting high-powered jobs by kissing ass and joining old boys’ clubs, and then expecting their followers to do the same?
Well, yes and no, as I found out. During the process of the internship search that occurs in the second semester of classes, which for me was unpleasant and protracted (despite my eventual success), I immediately noticed how little having actual business acumen was a component of the screening process.
Sure, recruiters would routinely ask questions that posited certain business scenarios and asked us to respond to them, but like every other interview question they would bombard us with, they were almost uniformly ones in which genuine, candid answers were far less productive for us than giving scripted responses that came directly from the lamest, most pathetic job-hunting play book. Outsiders would be stunned by the level of artifice that was given by students and expected by recruiters in internship interviews.
Since I was 12, I have always known that I wanted to be a brand manager at ABC Industrial Manufacturing Corporation. There’s nothing I like more than hard work. I am an excellent team player, and have sought out leadership roles on cross-functional teams working in competitive industries. In five years, I want to be Managing VP of Finance at ABC Industrial Manufacturing Corporation.
Seriously now, who the hell says that in real life? Who even thinks it? Certainly not me. When people asked me where I saw myself in five years, I often said that I tended not to have such expectations of myself because the things I wanted had a tendency to shift, and what I wanted from the bottom of my heart today could very well not be the same as what I wanted two years from now. I don’t think that is unreasonable in real life, and I highly doubt that you would judge it against your friends if they said that. That said, I can see how it might rub someone the wrong way in an interview setting, given that their only means of evaluating our apparent quality was to take everything we said (no matter how incredibly lame) at complete face value. But the flaw is that they should not be using our words alone to understand us; the quality of a person should be judged by their moral and ethical fiber, their standards, their priorities, the way they treat the people around them, their goals for themselves, and how they see their place in the world around them. These were issues that were never approached in any meaningful way in any interview.
I was even called into career counselor’s office at one point for telling a recruiter that my eventual career goal was to enjoy my job thoroughly and to feel like I was contributing to something that I really cared about. “You are not being paid $100,000 a year to ‘enjoy your job,’” the career counselor told me, exasperated by my conduct. In retrospect, it was, perhaps, too fundamental, too naked, a fact to tell a recruiter. It must have really jarred with the sorts of responses other gave.
Yet, there is little doubt that many of my peers either knowingly or unknowingly felt the way I did, but others didn’t articulate it, or had less compunction about bending the truth as they saw it for a job (I don’t judge them for it, despite the way I phrased that; really, it is an issue of how one places his priorities).
Nevertheless, I felt so awkward to give these bizarre, inhuman responses that I couldn’t bring myself to do it (though eventually, I did have to craft answers that while they did encompass my feelings, also melded them tactfully with standard responses that perhaps deflected their ‘sore-thumb’ quality). As a result, I suffered pretty badly in interview after unsuccessful interview.
The weird thing was that I thought my resume was quite impressive; I felt that my candidness in my successes and failures would give me a humanistic depth that the fakers couldn’t achieve; I thought that being truthful in my answers and not exaggerating my accomplishments would be valued; and most of all, I was under the impression that being dignified and not being blatantly sycophantic towards my recruiters would be held in my favor amidst all the obvious shenanigans going on from my peers. Seriously, how could any self-respecting recruiters not feel utterly and completely embarrassed by the way these overzealous ass-kissers were gushing all over them in a such a labored and frenzied manner?
It just goes to show you: I do not understand the psyches of recruiters, apparently.
It was clear from the first week of interviewing season that the coveted jobs were going to ass-kissers, networkers (who were like ass-kissers but over a longer period), and cute, bubbly girls. These groups, to a very large degree, excluded people in my classes who I had viewed as actually thoughtful or insightful. This in itself was utterly maddening— although not entirely unexpected given that those three groups tended to have another quality that was valuable: boundless, if contrived, enthusiasm; something that was almost definitely less visible in the intellectual group. Nevertheless, how is it that business knowledge and intellectual curiosity be such a negligible part of the process? Should they not have been a crucial component of the interviews?
It soon became clear that ‘company fit’ was one of the little remarked-upon details that could make or break your case in the eyes of recruiters. If they couldn’t envision you as ‘one of the gang,’ or otherwise seeming like ABC Corporation’s sort of guy, you simply weren’t up to snuff. Given this, it’s not surprising that ass-kissers, networkers, and cute, bubbly girls comprised the bulk of the immediate hires. They had proven that they could conform to the standards of corporate America. No one needed to say ‘jump’ for them to say ‘how high.’ It was an implicit dialogue, and they understood it, and could play the game without being told the rules.
I began to believe at one point that I could, theoretically, employ a completely different strategy in school than the one that most of us at least paid lip service to; you know, the one where you do homework, turn in assignments, and try to actually learn something?
Instead of slaving over books; working on tedious, semester-long projects; and crunching numbers, one could instead hold regular parties at his house, inviting the whole school and buying beer for everyone. This could be supplemented with any number of seemingly genuine efforts to win over the respect, admiration, and general positive sentiments of other students; a feat that can be accomplished by being generous to classmates in whatever way one can think of.
It might be an expensive endeavor to do this in the short term. We’re talking about maybe two $50 kegs once a week multiplied by, let’s say 34 weeks a year for 2 years. That’s nearly $7,000 dollars on beer alone.
Regardless, at the end of the program, you’d have 200+ well-wishers whose opinion of you might be good enough that they would be willing to return the favor of all those downed beers by bringing you aboard their companies once all their oily tentacles had expanded into the far reaches of corporate America. And it wouldn’t just be one company that you’d have connections with; it would be dozens.
Now, theoretically you could leverage all these friendships to bounce around from company to company, pulling yourself ever higher up the corporate ladder. And because ‘fit’ is something that is something that is so integral to the hiring process, your company-internal buddies would no doubt pull strings for you to indicate that you were a good guy and should be brought into ABC Manufacturing Corporation. This was my thought after the first year.
Soon afterwards, I realized that this strategy probably would not work. Some— though certainly not all— of these first persons snatched up at the beginning of interviewing season returned to the second year of B-school with their tails between their legs, having embarrassed themselves somewhat on their jobs due to their collective lack of ability. Admittedly, I found some schadenfreude in this, but yet it irked me. Why would corporate hiring practices continue in this way despite what I could only presume was years of backfiring at least in some significant percentage of interns? No answer was forthcoming— short of the standard answer as to why corporate America continues to tread down misguided paths in every aspect of their businesses year after year: inertia.
However, I discovered that those who got jobs jealously sought to keep them, and made concerted efforts to build and preserve their reputations amongst co-workers. They would never do anything that might compromise their image, and would work hard at doing things that would strengthen it. For that reason, and that reason alone, the “party guy” strategy couldn’t possibly work. No one who had spent any time establishing their reputation in the eyes of others, or who was concerned about how others might view them would ever bring a party animal on board their company; it’s simply too risky. If the party employee doesn’t live up to the original employee’s recommendation, it’s the latter’s whose reputation at the company is damaged. And what could a friend possibly have to gain by bringing in party person, anyway?
It would be different with a close and respected friend, but there’s very little to gain by getting “party guy” into the company beyond doing him/her a personal favor. According to game theory, you have much to lose, very little to gain. Why bother?
I guess maybe it’s worth paying attention in class after all.
Hey, You're a Lot Like Me! (Except Nothing Like Me!)
the connections between us
Posted Jun 23, 06:46 am in business, business models, consumerism, experiences, marketing, postmodernism, social networking
Recently, a friend of mine told me that he had been able to score a job interview with a company on the basis of having gone to the same alma mater as the interviewer. Judging from the context of this interaction, it is likely that there was at least a few of decades removal between their respective graduations, but that’s no matter. It’s easy to see the logic here: anyone who graduated from University of ABC, where you graduated from, must be a decent fellow. After all, that’s where you went, right? What else do you need to know?
The Granfalloon
In his 1963 book Cat’s Cradle, author Kurt Vonnegut coined a rather interesting term that might be applicable here: “granfalloon.” This odd expression describes a proud but meaningless connection between people.
An example: let’s say that you are thrust into a room full of strangers, and you know nothing about anyone except their birthdays— and amazingly, there’s a guy there who has the same birthday as you! Chances are, you will be able to form a more instantaneous bond with this individual than anyone else in the room on this basis alone. Surprising?
Based on my own observations, I don’t find it so surprising. When I think about this concept the first image that comes to my mind are Mac users.
Mac users make up a rather small percentage of computer users (between 5% and 8%). Perhaps it’s for this reason that I’ve noticed that Mac users tend to trust each other and form weird, superficial bonds based on their choice of computer brand. It’s really strange to observe, there’s a sense of ease that seems to develop when one Mac user meets another.
Finally. Another Mac user. You’re like me, a member of the elite coterie of beings who are devoted to high quality and aesthetics. An evolved individual who is light-years beyond those Windows-using plebians. Someone I can relate to!
I apologize if I came off as too mocking there; as a current Windows user, I have my own granfalloons to maintain.
You might have witnessed this same attitude when owners of the same car wave to each other on the street. Hey look, it’s another Blue 2007 BMW 5 Series. I’m going to wave now.
Often other bicyclists wave to me for no apparent reason. I return the wave out of courtesy. Interestingly, I’ve found that people wearing the spandex biking outfits wave at others who are wearing the outfits much more often than they do to cyclists who aren’t. I would wager that if the other individual’s colors were similar, there would be even more of a positive attitude.
The Minimum Group Paradigm
This is all due to to what social scientists call the minimum group paradigm, a manner in which people instinctively find ways to divide themselves into “us and thems” in social settings. This was initially noted by British psychologist Henri Tajfel. In a pretty stunning experiment, Tajfel ostensibly assigned subjects tags of whether they preferred paintings by Wassily Kandinsky or Paul Klee based on their supposed picture preferences beforehand. The subjects, incidentally, had never heard of these painters before. What followed was a bizarre situation in which the “Klee-lovers” treated other “Klee-lovers” like close friends, and “Kandinsky-lovers” treated “Kandinsky-lovers” like close friends. They even suggested that other people who shared their meaningless label were more likely to have a pleasant personality and be better workers. But here’s the kicker:
They also doled out rewards to fellow group members in a more generous and competitive manner. They preferred to give people who shared their labels $2 and give members of the “competing” group $1, instead of giving their own members $3 and members of the other group $4. Note that the latter of these two would have favored their group monetarily over the former, but also implicitly suggested that the “competing” group was somehow superior.
The meaningless label clouded judgment, and allowed people with nothing in common but an empty label to suddenly trust each other and connect.
The So-What Moment
Think about how marketers are constantly using this to get you to buy things. It happens much more than you realize.
Remember the Be Like Mike campaign, which suggested that you too could be the world’s greatest basketball player if only you drank Gatorade? Technically it’s true that if you drink Gatorade, you’re more like Michael Jordan than if you don’t (assuming he actually drinks it), but seriously— how obscure a connection are you willing to accept to be like Mike? If I really wanted to be like Mike, I’d think about working on my jump shot.
Interestingly, this particular marketing execution might not have worked in the somewhat distant past, if we are to believe what David Foster Wallace has to say about our fixation on images vs. belief systems. More on that here.
Sources:
(1) Age of Propaganda, by Anthony Pratkanis and Elliot Aronson. 2000.
(2) A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again, by David Foster Wallace. 1997.
(3) Names That Match Forge a Bond on the Internet, New York Times.
Social Networking and the Import of 2D and 3D Relationships
Posted Jun 18, 07:24 am in business, experiences, marketing, social networking
One of my college professors once said about advertising that it’s about getting the right message to the right person at the right time. This would suggest that we are not always the same person, and that our personalities morph— bend and fold, expand and contract— depending on our situation. To many, this is probably no amazing revelation about others (like your brown-nosing co-worker or the Eddie Haskell-like friends your kid hangs out with), but once your starting thinking about it with regards to yourself, you’re likely to find yourself putting up resistance. Most of us would probably like to think that we’re consistent, that we tend to act the same irrespective of who is around us, and what environs we happen to find ourselves in. Not that we want to be considered predictable, per se; but we tend not to see ourselves as the social chameleons that we actually are.
Ponder this point: let’s say that you’re being watched by six hypothetical but identical clones hired to monitor your behavior in six unique situations: at work, at home, when you’re hanging out with friends, when you’re at the bar, when you’re playing recreational sports, and during a job interview. Read over the notes taken by these impartial witnesses, and it would almost certainly suggest six distinct identities. Sure, there might be similarities between different sets of your doppelgangers, but if one were to extrapolate each of these sets of characteristics and mold them into full-blown and separate people, you’d have six guys who are only somewhat alike. You might not even like them all, which is an interesting thought.
So what does this have to do with relationship-building and networking?
Think about someone you have spent a lot of time with only in one physical setting, like a co-worker, or perhaps an acquaintance that you only see at a certain friend’s house. For the sake of example, let’s say we’re talking about your hypothetical co-worker Mark. You spent 8+ hours with Mark nearly every single day. Yet, you never— never —see him during the weekend, or after work. He’s “Mark from work,” after all.
Now think about people you know very well but haven’t literally spent thousands of hours with year after year, like your closest friends. Let’s say your best friend is named Jeff. You’ve gone everywhere with Jeff, like to the movies, bars, parks, road trips, other cities, Jeff’s house, your house, Jeff’s parents’ house, and so on. You’ve done things together, worked on projects together, and have discussed ideas at length. You’ve gone through some trying times with him (like the time you were hundreds of miles from home and you had got a flat tire in the boiling summer sun, and were far, far from help), and you’ve had great fun (like your great trip to Seattle just before that tire went flat). Your cache of shared experiences with Jeff are diverse and many, though the literal time amount you have spent with Jeff is perhaps not as much as it has been with Mark.
The distinction between your relationships with these two individuals is what I describe as 2D vs. 3D relationship.
Mark is a square. To you, Mark will always be a two-dimensional figure. He’s just a simple shape on an otherwise blank piece of paper. You can rotate him, but he always looks pretty much the same. Even turning the paper over just reveals an empty space.
Jeff, on the other hand, is a sphere. You can walk around Jeff and see all different sides of him, and from different vantage points. Sometimes he can appear bright, sometimes dark. You can see the flaws on some parts of him and the brilliant construction on others.
Interestingly, though you know Jeff as a sphere, his co-workers see him as a circle. They have no idea that he likes to build tiny replicas of Civil War battles and sell them on EBay, and they would be floored to hear that his favorite band is Slayer and that he’s seen them 200 times in concert.
You would be surprised to know that Mark likes to collect antique mayonnaise jars—just like you! But you don’t know that because you haven’t been in a situation in which that little factoid would come out. And so to you, Mark remains a square, rather than the cube that he really is. Given the nature of your relationship, no matter what you do, the complexity of your understanding of him will always be somewhat simple because you only know the “work Mark.”
And that’s kind of a tragedy because you have someone close to you who shares your interests— except you’re not aware of it. So that’s a wasted opportunity. But it’s a double tragedy for you because Mark thinks you’re a triangle, not the pyramid you really are. He doesn’t know your character well enough to recommend you to an old friend of his in the publishing industry who came to him desperately looking for someone with your qualifications. And that’s too bad, because you’ve been trying for years to break into publishing.
Because we are not always the same person, at any given time, the people around us are only getting a cross-section. The more settings we see someone in, the more complex our understanding of that person is, and the more they transform from a 2D figure to a 3D figure. Further, I would argue that if you want to accelerate the development of a friendship for whatever reason, the single most important thing you can do is to meet with that person under a wide variety of circumstances or settings. Find or make reasons to do it, if you are committed to befriending someone, whether it be a potential business partner, just a friend, a “more-than-a-friend,” or just someone you find interesting.
Contemplate this with regards to your own life, and you’ll see how crucial a wide variety of settings is in getting a full picture of someone. It’s important to how your relationships develop, and how strong they will likely be in the future. And often, these relationships are the fuel for our own courses in life. This is not to suggest that we should all forge artificial friendships based on the vague desire of capitalizing on them sometime in the future. What I’m saying is that it’s never a bad thing for you to know people fully, and unless you’re in the most demented 0.05% of the population, it’s probably good that they know and appreciate who you are. Social scientists argue that deep, meaningful relationships are the fundamental building blocks of happiness, and suggest that the more people experience these relationships, the happier they typically are.
Will Rogers once quipped that a stranger is just a friend you haven’t met. After seeing who my friends were in college, I find that statement remarkably true. A lot of my friends in college weren’t even the slightest bit like me and in normal circumstances would not have been in the same room as me, but we were forced into shared experiences that helped us see each other in many different lights, which almost by necessity developed into mutual respect and friendship. This leads me to believe that my friends could have been pretty much anyone who I had gotten saddled with in the dorms. Which, in turn, suggests that anyone I meet could be a 3D friend. Why not? We’re all just like tiny babies, lost in the big world, after all.
Think about that the next time you blow off networking, sadly, as I regularly do.