Social Media’s Tower of Babel

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This publication contains my personal views and not necessarily those of my employer. Since I am a lawyer, I do need to tell you that this publication is not intended as legal advice or as an advertisement for legal services.

Social Media’s Tower of Babel

The Hebrew Bible tells the story of the Tower of Babel. This monument to human achievement and pride was to be built so tall as to reach the heavens. It was never completed because the builders were unable to communicate properly with each other. According to the Book of Genesis, it was through divine intervention that during the building of the tower the people involved began to speak in multiple languages and thus could no longer understand one another. When they spoke, all they heard was noise. On May 31, people in the Western church celebrated (and on June 7 the Eastern church will celebrate) the Feast of Pentecost, which remembers the day when through divine intervention people speaking multiple languages suddenly began to understand one another. In other words, they went from making noise to making sense.

We are in danger of building a modern Tower of Babel via social media. Thanks to social media, there is more information on the web than anyone can read or understand in a lifetime. Every day more and more people take up social computing and, in the process, proliferate comments, links and blogs. The net effect is one of deafening noise. Not only are we all speaking different languages, but we are all speaking at once.

The clamor of these interactions is enough to drive a person to consider opting out of social computing all together. However, in so doing you choose personal peace over rich opportunities for learning, innovation and community. So what will it take to help us make sense of the noise generated by social media? The better answer is to find ways of improving your personal (and ultimately our collective) sense-making. Some of that happens naturally via social computing itself as fellow travelers sift through the information and pass on things of merit. if you can tune into the voices of the right guides, you can follow the trail they blaze for you. In time, each of us needs be a reliable guide to provide that filtering and refining function for others.

Social media is in its Tower of Babel moment. I hope I’m around to see its Pentecost when we can celebrate the triumph of sense-making and then truly enjoy the rich resources social computing offers.

[Photo Credit: Thomas Thomas, of a painting by Pieter Breugel the Elder]

Published on May 31, 2009 · Filed under: Social Media; Tagged as: Bible, Noise, Sense-Making

Comments

Wendy Reynolds

You're right, Mary - it's getting a little difficult to separate signal from noise right now. Hopefully there will be some convergence in the next few years, and "super platforms" , which allow us to filter and manage that flow more precisely.

VMaryAbraham

And, along with that improved technology, it would be nice to have some trusted human guides. After all this is supposed to be "social" computing and we are supposed to be in community with one another.

Thanks, Wendy.

- Mary

VMaryAbraham

For reasons I can't begin to explain, the comment Christoph Schmaltz left on June 1 failed to appear. So, I'm reproducing it below with my sincere apologies to Christoph (http://www.twitter.com/christoph):

"Nice piece, Mary! I agree that we need to make better use of our networks and 'employ' them as human filters. There are some good examples of crowdsourcing and letting interesting content bubble up by passive intervention of people.

At the same time people need to learn the way social tools work and what effect they have. I actually thought I followed a very smart crowd of people until some of them started playing #spymaster on Twitter. And I certainly can't cope with all the FB application nonsense that I receive in my stream. We need to have better (technology) filters but also 'smarter' people ;)

Also, I absolutely agree with Doug. People overwhelmed by the flow of information think that it works like email - that they need to read everything. In fact, the 'flow' is similar to the daily newspaper. You never know what to read tomorrow and it's hardly ever the case that you need the information you read right away. However, it distributes information widely (within an org) and helps you keeping up to date with developments. That's very different to an encyclopedia where you want to have an answer to your question right away."

VMaryAbraham

Thanks so much, Christoph. So, if you'll permit me to switch metaphors for a moment, we should treat this wide array of information as the abundant buffet it is and focus on teaching ourselves how to eat intelligently? This may be hard for folks who relish having access to this wealth of information. We're all going to have to learn a little restraint or quickly collapse from overload. Clearly, the onus is on the user to find a system that allows sufficient enjoyment (and nutrition) without running the risk of being overwhelmed. But I do hope more experienced members of the community step up and provide guidance on what works best. In this new environment, that experience and advice is priceless.

- Mary

VMaryAbraham

Doug and Mark -

It appears that we have consensus (at least among the three of us, Clay Shirky and Dave Weinberger) on the proposition that the solution to the Tower of Babel problem is not to restrict the flow of information, but rather to improve our filters. The point I tried to make in my post was that it may well take a community effort to help each other find effective ways of filtering this endless torrent of information.

I agree with Mark that one person's noise may be another person's signal. Nonetheless, I wonder if there aren't some neutral filtering techniques that allow each person to find what suits their tastes and circumstances in an efficient and effective manner? Perhaps this is another area in which the collective wisdom of the social commuting community can help identify and teach those techniques. And perhaps, as Nick notes, this identifying and teaching role is tailor-made for KM.

- Mary

Mark Gould

Mary,

You are right to emphasise neutrality. One of the important risks in asessing socially-driven signals is that groupthink develops extremely quickly, and powerfully. I see this sometimes in our own groups. We tend to follow the same people on Twitter, read similar blogs, and so on. (The 'we' here is universal, not just personal.) As a result, we often need someone to come from outside the circle to challenge the group view. "Tastes and circumstances" change, and people may not realise that they have changed (even their own) until they are shown a different view that is equally, or more, acceptable.

Mark Gould

There is an additional problem, which is that one person's noise is another person's signal. Nick is right to give up on Facebook if the ratio is wrong for him and the purposes for which he wants to put it. The same could be said of Twitter. However, I can control the ratio on Twitter because I can choose who to listen to (and it is not necessarily the same group of people who listen to me).

I agree more with Doug, that we need to accept that there is more information than we need, and develop the tools to allow us to filter the flow in a way that suits us, rather than trying to limit the information made available in the first place. (This is Weinberger's "filtering on the way out.")

Doug Cornelius

Mary -

My thought has always been that the solution for too much information is more information. We need tools and information to help sift through the flow to find the good pieces.

We also need to realize that we can't read and absorb every piece of information in the flow. But we do need to be able to retrieve information from the flow when we need it. Usually, you do not need that piece of new information. More often you need to recall it later.

There are certainly lessons to be learned and analogies to the knowledge management practice. The flow itself is important. You need to focus on people contributing to the flow and not just piling up information in their own silo.

Retrieval is important. Not just search, but the ability to find what you are looking for in different ways.

Nick Milton

Good post. I would definitely see one of the roles of KM as being to increase the signal-to-noise ratio. At the moment, haowever, the ratio seems to be going in the wrong direction entirely. I have given up on Facebook, for example, as containing far too much noise and not enough signal yo be useful.

VMaryAbraham

Thanks, Nick. I agree with you that KM can play a role in improving the
signal-to-noise ratio. The question is, what are the best ways of doing
this (without simply adding to the noise)?

- Mary