Stone Age brains and the social web

I just listened to a brilliant "All In The Mind" podcast on "Stone Age brains in 21st century skulls" while jogging around Highgate Woods:

Front up to your shrink, and you bring a menagerie of hunter gatherers, anteaters and reptiles from your ancestral past with you. Or so Professor Daniel Wilson and Dr Gary Galambos believe. Both clinical psychiatrists, they provocatively challenge their profession to look to the Darwinian roots of human neuroses, and the evolutionary battleground that is our stone-age brain.

The podcast confirmed my thoughts on the importance of intimate social context in our lives—specifically, social intimacy appears to limit the extent to which the dynamics between manic/dominant and depressive/submissive personalities become excessively polarised within groups.

Such polarisation of social dynamics is an adaptive behaviour that is deeply rooted in the reptilian brain: assertion of leadership by the few within a small community allows the community to function without constant fighting. 

However, the exploded social contexts we live within in the modern world can distort assertion and submission into manic/psychotic and depressive behaviours respectively. Fascinatingly, we're told that all four of the major leaders in WWII (Churchill, Hitler, Roosevelt and Tojo) had manic personality disorders of one kind or another.

Given all the above, how might we build social software that helps us rediscover intimacy of social context in an exploded society? Sounds like it's a fairly urgent mission.

Identity Society—happenings and musings

I found the Mobile Monday "Mobile Digital Identity" event at SUN pretty interesting. Alex Craxton (his report here) did a great job of organising and MD-ing the evening, and the panel session seemed to go well.

As ever, though, the topic of identity quickly escaped the confines of "mobile" and we ended up talking about facebook and its privacy implications! The discussion reminded me a lot of the "Dark Side of Social Media" Chinwag event the other month, with both panel and audience divided between the privacy worriers and the information-must-be-free advocates.

I guess I attempt to span both camps with my "i-together" philosophy, which goes something like this:

It's natural that human beings assert and protect the boundaries of their individual identity in "win-lose" situations (my money, not yours!—"i"); on the other hand, people allow those boundaries to become increasingly permeable to others as they discover mutual interests and common purpose (saving the planet etc.—"together").

The individual and collective aspects of identity look set to weave ever more intricately through one another in our evolving culture, creating all sorts of social patterns at many scales ("i-together"). And networked technologies like facebook and new mobile capabilities are only accelerating the pace of the identity loom's machinations.

A weaver's view, you might say.

Incidentally, Charla and I spent a lovely day with my friend John Madelin and his delightful family yesterday, and John and I took the opportunity to make some good progress on the Identity Society wiki. Do check it out and edit away!

Wikipedia, credentials and authority

BBC News reports:

Internet site Wikipedia has been hit by controversy after the disclosure that a prominent editor had assumed a false identity complete with fake PhD.

The editor, known as Essjay, had described himself as a professor of religion at a private university.

But he was in fact Ryan Jordan, 24, a college student from Kentucky who used texts such as Catholicism for Dummies to help him work.

He has retired from the site and his authority to edit has been cancelled.

On the same topic, Nick Carr writes:

Of course, one thing that the Essjay scandal reveals is that credentials already play a strong role in Wikipedia's putatively anti-credentialist society. Essjay's great sin - the reason Wales [Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia's co-founder and effective leader] ultimately sent him into exile - wasn't that he lied to the press but that he hoodwinked his fellow Wikipedians, that he used his fake credentials to get them to grant him deference in editing articles. In making his proposal to adopt a formal credentialing process, Wales is simply underscoring what is now obvious: at Wikipedia, credentials matter, whether genuine or fake.

Credentials enable us to invoke an external authority in order to establish our identity in the eyes of others. The Wikipedia community has been fudging the issue of credentials for some time now, because to admit that they matter is to beg the question "who are valid authorities in any given context?"

Wikipedia's editorial community is not, and cannot be, a collective identity solipsistically set apart from the rest of the world. However, by perpetuating a myth that it is, and that its reputation system is "emergent"—dependent on no more than the actions and interactions between Wikipedians, within Wikipedia—the Wikipedia community has been able to avoid squaring up to the "credential authority" issue until now.

It looks like it is an issue that is coming home to roost.