Anne Truitt Zelenka

My most marked-up book of recent has been Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age by Duncan Watts. Among the many insights I found:

• Some communities can be too clustered, leading to stagnation, where no new ideas can percolate. That happens when every person is so connected that whatever they hear about matters very little to them. Imagine you have 10 friends and someone says, “this is great!” you pay attention, right? But if you have 1,000 friends and one says the same thing, you don’t pay much attention. I think this has happened in tech blogging. We are jaded, stagnant, overconnected.
• Problem solving under uncertainty and ambiguity requires ad hoc social networks. I wrote about this already; the basic idea is that when we are doing problem-solving (and perhaps more important, problem finding) under uncertainty we need to use our social networks to search. And we need social networks that connect us with people like ourselves… see below.
• Multi-dimensional identity makes our world small. What I want to write about tonight in the few minutes before I go make Braised Chicken with Mushrooms and Oven-Baked Polenta: we cluster with people who are like us (homophily) but we still live in a small world, because we each have many different ways of being like other people.

Let me grab from Watts to move this forward:

As long as individuals are more likely to know other people like them (homophily), and — crucially — as long as they measure similarity along more than one social dimension, then not only will short paths exist between almost anyone almost anywhere, but also individuals with only local information about the network will be able to find them.

And now I’ll offer a few implications that I can go into in more detail later:

• The niche vs. non-niche blogging question arises from our multi-dimensional, multi-faceted identities. I am interested in Web 2.0, enterprise software, mindfulness, cooking, new ways of working, gardening, painting, creativity, and so on. By engaging in non-niche blogging, I have a chance to bring together people and ideas who are otherwise very far apart.
• Your multi-faceted identity is a source of breakthrough innovation and creativity (read Richard Ogle’s Smart World for more). Think about how things you’ve learned in one domain can be applied to another. That’s where bursts of insight can be found.
• Now we are close to each other by reason of our multi-faceted identities and we can activate the links using social networks online. That’s why the connected age is so different from the knowledge age. The knowledge age might have been about thorough grounding in one field. The connected age is about the links between the fields. And you can put those links to use.

As I reach out to people who are like me in different ways: people who live in Denver and share with me an interest in mindfulness, people who care about creativity and earning right livelihood from that creativity, people who want to work and be parents at the same time, people who want to see enterprise software take on the values of the social web, and on and on…

I am inspired by what we might do together.