According to Russell Ackoff, a systems theorist and professor of organizational change, the way humans process input from their environment can be classified into five categories:
- Data represents a fact or statement of event without relation to other things.
Ex: It is raining.
- Information embodies the understanding of a relationship of some sort, possibly cause and effect.
Ex: The temperature dropped 15 degrees and then it started raining.
- Knowledge represents a pattern that connects and generally provides a high level of predictability as to what is described or what will happen next.
Ex: If the humidity is very high and the temperature drops substantially the atmosphere is often unlikely to be able to hold the moisture so it rains.
- Wisdom embodies more of an understanding of fundamental principles embodied within the knowledge and is essentially systemic.
Underlying this theory is the assumption that there is enough content in each of the related input streams to create relationships, identify patterns as well as identify and understand principles.
Recently, microblogging tools like Twitter emerged, which forcefully restrict users’ input to 140 characters, while still allowing for references to original authors’ tagging of keywords and providing URLs for content and location.
News channels like CNN, celebrities like Oprah and many companies are embarking into the microblogging adventure up to a point, where it seems that we often can read about people’s comments before they had the time to think about them.
Recently, a colleague attended his first event at which heavy underground tweeting accompanied a formal presentation-style conference. He claimed, that the dynamics that this underground chatter – combined with occasional public outbursts of emerging self-proclaimed representatives of the twitter community – added a completely new and possibly valuable dimension to the knowledge exchange at these types of professional gatherings.
Well, I don’t know…
Let’s look at it more closely: The knowledge and wisdom that a well-prepared speaker is communicating to the crowd based on a lifetime of experience in the form of simplified slides, multimedia materials, his or her voice, mimicry and gestures are absorbed by a most likely less experienced attendee whose mind is in parallel occupied by competing with others in the crowd commenting on the input in rapid sequence – 140 characters or less at a time.
Experiment: Turn on the TV, take a sheet of paper and capture what’s being said…. Done? Easy, isn’t it !
Now: Instead of capturing content, comment on what you hear while listening to the TV show. Still easy? What if I asked you now about details of the show? Most likely, you would draw a blank, since your mind was so occupied with creating an opinion and putting it to paper, that you had to stop following the show. We humans are just not good in parallel processing once we turn on our cognitive abilities and start thinking about the data we are absorbing.
In addition, since there is not enough space to put any contextual information and most tweeple (i.e., people that tweet using twitter) don’t know each other personally, the communicated information is reduced down to bits and chunks of data flying through the twittersphere. Since the speaker might not have had his twitter address on the first slide, he might not even get referenced appropriately for the space, thus removing the last hope for the data being interpreted in context.
So we have just reduced the wisdom of an individual down to a multitude of data chunks being broadcasted through the networks. What makes matters worse is the way some people use microblogging tools like Twitter to seek information and build knowledge. Busy with keeping up with their legions of followees (people they are following) and trying to make sense out of the multitude of parallel discussion threads they are engaged in, many people don’t seem to have the time anymore to reflect while critically inspecting the origin and context in which the data was presented. However, this process is crucial to finding relationships between data samples in order to turn them into information.
In consequence, any data is elevated to the level of being trustworthy information, which then makes pattern recognition easy: Knowledge is what is read more than once from different sources. However, usually that should mean – for instance also in serious journalism practice – from independent sources. Unfortunately, microblogging sites are also social networking sites. The social networks propagate information multiple times and it is very hard to ensure independence. Surowieki’s book The Wisdom of Crowds emphasized that such wisdom requires independent knowledge contribution and aggregation rather than the unfiltered propagation of word of mouth data.
Don’t you think there are better ways to gain information and build knowledge?
And what’s wrong with listening to and trusting the wisdom of an expert?
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DISCLAIMER ALERT: The ideas expressed in this post came out of my own head, were researched by my own eyes and were expressed by my own hands. They are not intended to serve as medical advice in any way, shape or form. And they do not reflect the views of Humana Inc. or any of its subsidiaries. I take full responsibility if you think this post is awesome or not awesome.
I woke up yesterday to a really pleasant surprise. A healthcare entrepreneur named John Moore had written a blog post about us. And it wasn’t just the blog post that tickled me; it was the way it came about.
John specializes in Healthcare IT, and was hoping to find some updates about what was happening at the World Health Innovation and Technology Congress (where I spoke earlier this week). It so happens that I had helped the conference organizers to establish a
hashtag for the conference (
#whitc08), so John was able to tap into the 8 or 9 people who were live-microblogging the conference on
Twitter.
[Side Note: I was thrilled that so many people were using the hashtag; it got NO publicity except for a paper sign on the registration table . . . yet a whole bunch of people got to follow the conference as a result . . . and I had a way to directly connect with these people who shared a common interest and experience. Very cool.]
Anyway, as John was “watching” the conference unfold through this set of twitter feeds, he got curious about the Innovation Center, and managed to find this web site (crumpleitup.com). Between the responses to my presentation and the info he found on CrumpleItUp.com, he wound up thinking that we were blog-worthy, so he wrote this post [
Humana Breaks the Mold] on
ChilmarkResearch.com.
As a newbie in the social media space, I am still amazed that things like this happen, but they do – all the time. So if you haven’t started twittering yet, give it a try . . . and by the way, you can now follow CrumpleItUp on twitter too –follow us at
http://twitter.com/crumpleitup.
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DISCLAIMER ALERT: The ideas expressed in this post came out of my own head, were researched by my own eyes and were expressed by my own hands. They are not intended to serve as medical advice in any way, shape or form. And they do not reflect the views of Humana Inc. or any of its subsidiaries. I take full responsibility if you think this post is awesome or not awesome.
This is the first of several posts about my plunge into the deep end of the social media pool. In addition to being wonderfully self-indulgent, I hope that it’ll be instructive (and soothing) to anyone who’s as cautious as I was about social media.
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When I joined Twitter in late 2007, I did it out of obligation. Everyone in business – at least our business – had started talking about social media. But most of us had done nothing more than read about it in Fortune or Fast Company.
It was starting to look pretty hypocritical. But I can tell you that I was not the least bit interested in making "friends" on Facebook or MySpace with total strangers. I didn’t have the energy to be interesting enough – often enough – to be a blogger. And I certainly didn’t care to tell anyone – whether I knew them or not – what I was doing every minute of the day on Twitter.
Up ’til that point, I had guarded my online identity with great care. My Yahoo profile page (way, WAY before real social media) said my name was Herve Villechaize (bonus points to anyone who can tell me who THAT is). My identity on Facebook and MySpace was Elmer Fudd – a 72 year old polygamist from Arkansas (most of those identifiers are not accurate). I had to introduce myself to the 1 or 2 friends I had in each place by stating that I was really Greg Matthews.
By the end of 2007, I decided that it was time to come out of the social media closet and put myself "out there" if I was ever going to have any real hope of understanding the phenomenon I was reading about. I started a blog. You can still find it at http://chimoose.blogspot.com. It was about whatever I felt like writing about – and it still is. It is composed mostly of updates on my family (lots of pictures and videos of my daughters that I still don’t feel comfortable posting to YouTube) but was interspersed with my commentary on whatever issues are on my mind . . . usually around politics and religion (and the separation of the two), health and health care, cool technology and IU basketball. My only regular readers are my immediate family, and I rarely say anything interesting to any group of people beyond that. I may someday, but I’ve decided that it’s just not worth forcing. My little blog has served two nice purposes. 1) It got me out there testing stuff out. I know how blogger works, I know how to use Google Analytics to track traffic on my site, and I can even write simple HTML code to program buttons and links on my site. I also learned the art of the link, which was the beginning of my education about the new currency of social media.
You see, while there are a few people who are making money blogging, there are millions and millions more who are blogging because they have something to say, and they can always, ALWAYS find someone to listen if they try a little bit. After I’d been blogging for a couple of months, I noticed that other blogs I liked had "blog rolls" on them – links to other blogs that were relevant (or not) to the author. I decided that I might as well start a blog roll of my own as another way of sharing a little bit of myself – in this case, things I was interested in. What I didn’t realize is that I was giving "link-love." What most bloggers want is an audience. And having other sites that link into your own is a great way to accomplish that – particularly because Google searches take the number of relevant links into consideration as their algorithm orders search results.
I had discovered a site called "Inside the Hall" – a blog about Indiana University basketball written by a group of young amateurs (by which I mean that they’re not professional journalists – yet). I loved this blog because it was insightful, funny, and updated almost daily with good new material. In fact, it became my primary source of information about my favorite team very quickly. Since my family (the main readers of my blog, if you’ll recall) are also Indiana fans, it was only natural for me to provide a link to Inside the Hall on my blog roll.
After doing so, it took about 12 hours for me to get a thank you note from one of the ITH bloggers. He had tracked back to my blog, read it, and realized that I was an IU fan living in Louisville. We sent a few emails back and forth, and formed a relationship of sorts. I am still a regular reader of and commenter on his blog. And I’d learned a great lesson about how to grow a network in the web 2.0 world.
Coming up next, Part 2 in the series: How I overcame my fear of Facebook, and what I’ve learned as a result
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DISCLAIMER ALERT: The ideas expressed in this post came out of my own head, were researched by my own eyes and were expressed by my own hands. They are not intended to serve as medical advice in any way, shape or form. And they do not reflect the views of Humana Inc. or any of its subsidiaries. I take full responsibility if you think this post is awesome or not awesome.
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This is the second of several posts (click 