And I Don’t Much Want Your Business Card Either

For various reasons too boring to get into, I’ve been handed an awful lot of business cards over the last few months. It was a relief, while attending BookCamp Toronto a couple of weeks ago, to escape the day w entirely ithout any of those sorry floppy items being apologetically proffered. I felt like some kind of temporary respite had been granted from my tenure in an extended episode of Life on Mars.

What was behind it, of course, was that most of the participants at BookCamp had made the leap that something like Twitter is not just an improvement on Cro Magnon technologies like email, but geological epochs ahead of the Neanderthal business card.

That’s not just because you have to carry business cards around and remember to input them into some kind of storage system later (usually, let’s be honest, the desk drawer). And it’s not just because, while they are occasionally gorgeous, creative, and inspiring, business cards usually showcase the most appalling and amateurish use of appalling and amateurish typefaces like Comic Sans. Let’s not even mention the clip art.

No: these folks didn’t give out business cards because exchanging contact details is, counter-intuitively, pretty much the worst way to go about developing contacts. It places an enormous burden upon first impressions and upon your powers of recall. Is that person you met several months ago at a technology conference really the right person to email about the idea you have just had at work? Did the person seem reliable and personable? Can I glean some insight into either of these questions from the sorry-looking creased piece of tree bark in front of me? Probably not. So I just won’t bother.

The barriers of the medium just prevented me from getting something done.

Following someone new on Twitter, by contrast, allows you to enter their orbit — to see what they think on the topics which, presumably, are of some shared interest. And, because of the mixture of personal and professional that Twitter allows, permits, and almost requires, you can develop some sense of whether their approach to life is likely to be conducive to yours. It will also allow you to get a glimpse into this new person’s ability to engage (and survive) in a medium that allows all of that to happen. Does this person seem good at managing multiple streams of their life — and maintaining the contacts necessary to do so?

You can then use Twitter to continue to lurk until an opportunity presents; to participate in a public conversation which by default is a casual interaction requiring less formal follow up; or to contact them privately via a direct message.

What’s more, because there is only a single piece of information — the username directly associated with you — you don’t risk losing every potential contact the moment that your phone number changes and those pieces of card you so diligently distributed become, everywhere, instantly, obsolete. (For those who simply can’t live without lines and lines of personal contact information that you have to remember to update whenever they change, you may want to check out twtBizCard.)

In short, exchanging contact details is a waste of time. Don’t give me a list of fourteen different means to contact you and try to entice me into doing it via some showy logo design. Give me access to your orbit. I’ll take it from there.

First thing tomorrow morning, destroy your business cards. Let’s make a stand.

The revolution will not be the only thing going on

Can I truly be interested in everything all of the time?

There are two kinds of things I want to know about right now:

• things that are important, world-shaping, and deserve my immediate attention, and
• things of very little value that aren’t going to have any value at all unless I know about them when they happen.

Twitter serves up both equally well and at exactly the same rate. Is that a problem?

We’re all guilty of boring our families with diatribes against the 6 o’clock news when they jump from coverage of violent revolution in some temperate clime to the discovery of a family of squirrels that resemble various ex-presidents. But left to our own 3G devices are we any better? What would “better” look like? More sombre? Serious? Erudite? The opposite of frivolous?

I’ve been watching the Twitter stream on Iran’s crooked election today and found myself by turns horrified and inspired. But I’ve also kept up with friends. I’ve had a nap. For dinner I had leftover curry with a cold beer. I’ve listened to Queen.

I don’t have any profound moral conclusion to draw at this point (and I hope for the sake of the readership of this blog I never do). But I wonder whether, as the power to filter information shifts downstream, our increasing responsibility for the use of our own attention comes with a moral imperative to attend to certain things that wouldn’t be otherwise accessible, or is this just a transition towards people acting more like themselves?

Don’t Tell Me Your Email Address

An interesting generational moment (one of many, to be entirely honest) at BookCamp Toronto yesterday. At the end of one session, the panel made a plea for all concerned to share any ideas, practices, or projects that might overlap with (or contribute to) the initiative that the team had spend the last 50 minutes outlining.

A member of the audience asked for the resource at which this sharing would take place.

One of the panel members pointed to the email address that he had pinned to the wall about fifteen minutes earlier.

There was an awkward collective silence — one of those “ah, what?” moments — as everyone realized that, yes, that email address (an email address) was going to be the conduit for idea-sharing and contact management for the project.

Email is a terrible media for this kind of thing, and to this crowd — a significant proportion of which had their Twitter usernames pinned to their chests through the day — it carried a heavy implicit message. Email is not only a closed hatch, behind which activity is invisible, but it also suggests a very distinct model of information management. By emailing your information or ideas to someone, you are putting yourself at their disposal. It’s a private communication vessel — entirely inappropriate to a public plea for information sharing, and implicitly antithetical to an open source model of participatory innovation. And it’s completely dependent on the recipient’s ability to efficiently manage their inflow of information — not something that most people are good at.

Twitter, to pick only the most obvious contrast, may allow for private ‘direct messaging’, but it is a public medium. The default means of a conversation — the @ reply syntax — makes the dialogue visible for all to see.

Positioning your email address as a the place at which I should post my ideas or contact details requires that I trust you to efficiently do the following things:

1. Receive and record my information.
2. Understand it completely, not only within the terms which I used to express it, but in all the possible implications it might carry for other people coming from a complete diversity of backgrounds.
3. Distribute it to the most suitable members of the community.
4. Do all of the above in a timeframe that is most appropriate to my ideas and best rewards my sense of engagement with the project.
5. Warehouse all of that information in such a way that you can repeat steps 1-4 if someone new comes to the table later whose ideas and identity might have a fruitful relationship to my own.

In short, you’re asking me to bet on your superhuman efficiency to understand information in all its possible permutations and maintain an encyclopedic knowledge of the network. But for most people of my generation that just isn’t how we’re used to interacting with the world. We like the instant public archiving of the internet (including the kudos and bragging rights that that provides), and the distributed networking that exposure to the crowd allows. In short, we’d rather rely on a network to do the things that a network does well.

I can understand that the team at this presentation might not yet have had time to put together a robust software solution (a forum? wiki?) at which open participation might take place. But a Twitter username or hashtag would have been better — much better — than someone’s email address. Particularly when the topic was technological innovation. You guys know that email is 40 years old, right?