Loosely joined or plain messy?
Scott Karp hates mess - the lack of interoperability between systems, the requirement to monitor multiple streams of data or publishing sources which frequently overlap or duplicate each other.
Stowe Boyd, in his inimitably pugnacious fashion, says “Bring it on!” - more mess (I’m paraphrasing very loosely here!) means more connectedness - and connectedness is what it’s about, not tidiness.
I’ve blogged a lot about my own frustrations with the diffuse nature of my online presence so I feel a lot of Karp’s pain. But on this occasion, I have to go with mess - more connectedness means more opportunity and however much overlap there appears to be between my presences on Facebook or del.icio.us or Flickr or Twitter or God knows where else, there’s much more blue water between them than at first glance seems apparent. Each context obliges me to express myself and relate to a frequently different subgroup of friends, peers, families or colleagues in a subtly distinct way. How it would be possible to capture those nuances (though I’ve discussed it in the post referenced above) is quite beyond where we are at the moment.
Which brings us back to mess…
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I totally agree. I’ll take the messiness of connectedness any day.
I recently got back in touch with three friends from college — one came via LinkedIn, one via Facebook, and another who found a comment I left on some random blog. I learn different things, meet different people, and interact in different ways on the various services.
Very interesting Michael. Your post reminded me of the Enterprise 2.0 RAVE conversation with Andrew McAfee earlier this year when he described the angst he hears from executives about the “messiness” of social media. LIFE!!
Nancy White provided an AH HA moment during our just completed connecting intelligence article writing experiment when in a phone conversation she said:
it is ‘…the space between the tools where things happen’ (N. White 2007, pers. comm., 2 July).
Agree it seems we are destined to confront messiness as the trade off for increased opportunities through network structural holes.
Well, as a fairly unreconstructed social constructivist by inclination, I’d have to say that the spaces and the ambiguity of the spaces, not to mention the downright impossibility of the boundaries around spaces, continues to be what interests me most.
Now I’ll have to go and work out what on earth I mean.