Play, Micro-Messaging, and Organizational Self-consciousness

Mother Jones’s sentiment “Twitter is massive waste of time” is one that finds resonance far beyond her blogs audience. Google this phrase, or any like it and you are likely to find yourself on a battle field of heated discussions between evangelical micro-bloggers and, well, everyone else.

Based on the way it is implemented, Twitter can be an impressive research tool to monitor and affect brand image, establish relationships with users, follow prolific knowledge specialists, and tap into and gauge the broader cultural conversations happening in the Twitterphere.

tweetstats

There are, however, much higher order implications to technologies like Twitter that both evangelists and critics predominately overlook; the truly interesting developments here lie in play, and its implications as to significant changes in organizational self-consciousness.

Just as children first develop serious and practical future tools, skills, and behavioral structures (hierarchy, collaboration, etc.) for functioning within future adult climates through the format of play – we may observe the same phenomena at work on a species-wide scale in the realm of communication technologies.

Our military certainly understood the power of play, as it has employed computerized simulation gaming for very serious purposes for the last five decades. It is also worthwhile to note, that micro-messaging is a derivative of IRC technology that has been employed by military and intelligence agencies since the Gulf War.

Beyond this, the evolution of new technologies historically have come from the peripheral experimentation we call play – and right now, these communication technologies are in the process of play: experimenting, naturally selecting and evolving the structures and groundwork for the next stages in organizational self-consciousness.

twittershpere visualization

Let’s consider the larger implications of statusing currently manifesting in the scores of budding services like Twitter, Yammer, Jaiku and notably Identi.ca.

Statusing as a process has roots as far back into history as there have been stratified organization, with systems like flag signaling to communicate and coordinate military movements going back at least to Roman times.

Our current shift is from a system where if a Chief Operating Officer (COO) wants to know the state of project X, he sends the request down the organization hierarchy to person Y, who in turn sends it down until it arrives to person Z who informs them that this project has, in fact, moved to division E, the request having to be re-routed back up and down the reptilian corporate nervous system – to a system of real-time feedback and interaction.

That is, imagine the scenario which we will begin to see manifest in a variegated manner across the corporate sector over the next decade, and already taking root in some intelligence agencies, where statusing, like email or scheduling, is an integral part of workers daily functions.

Within a regular structure, such as a set number of times per day, or at relevant points within project work-flows employees will provide a status for what they are doing. This status would include automatic metadata such as business unit, division, function and name, and metadata entered by the user such as project, phase, and current state.

social network visualization

In the same example we spoke of before, the COO now sitting at his terminal (think as simply as a TweetDeck-esque interface with data visualization) can observe the real time status of his organization from top to bottom parsed by relevant dimensions (division, client, project, budget, etc.), and find and immediately and directly interact with person Z.

When considering two organizations co-existing within the same environment, one that can perceive itself and react in real-time, and one that cannot, the evolutionary inevitably of this development becomes apparent.

In a sense, we are observing the organizational organism of society evolving rapidly – and it is about to develop a nervous system not unlike our own, where the relationship our cells occupy to our bodies, we will occupy to our organizations.

As we develop deeper understandings of the current paradigm shifts, fruitful parallels may be found in the models of evolutionary biology, particularly the progression of single-cell cohabitational organisms to multi-cellular organisms, and cell signaling…

“Cell signaling is part of a complex system of communication that governs basic cellular activities and coordinates cell actions.”

- Witzany, G. (2000). Life: The Communicative Structure. Norderstedt, Libri BoD.

my twitter connections

In this series of posts I will explore some of my thoughts and conjecture on these patterns of play, their contexts and potential implications.

Did you know?

In March 2009 the Nielson blog ranked Twitter as the fastest growing site in the Member Community category at 1382% annual growth, and the third most used social network after Facebook and MySpace. For more data on twitter Twitter traffic and demographics go to quantcast.

posted by Popular Front on April 8th, 2009 at 8:26 am Permanent link to this post