Thinking and Working in Singapore and other more Virtual Places

Am I too soft, naive and romantic when it comes to Twitter?

The other day I went to meet someone to talk to them about supporting them in organizing an event here in Singapore.  We’d spoken briefly about this on the phone before and he seemed pleased at my offer to help. 

Practically his first question to me when we met was, however, ‘how many friends do you have on Facebook and how many followers on Twitter?’   Clearly a good part of my perceived worth in helping organize this event was how large my networks were – and not my real world network or ‘sphere of influence’, but my virtual friends and followers numbers.  At least I was able to give him an actual number which I don’t suppose I would have been able to do had he asked me a more pertinent question about what my influencing power was. (That's where the really interesting bit is I think)  He seemed slightly disappointed when I told him and then revealed that he had about twice as many people following him on Twitter and considerably more friends on Facebook.  It should also be noted I think that in both worlds we are very small players when it comes to numbers of followers and friends.

I should not have been that surprised at his question I suppose.  This guy - who is a friend of mine - had recently been involved with an event in Singapore that had been a big success - certainly in terms of the number of visitors.  As a friend of his on Facebook I had received a lot of emails on the run up to the event giving me the latest information and news.  There was an event ‘group’ too of course.   So I suppose if he wanted to adopt the same social media ‘strategy’ in promoting this next event, then having an organizing partner with lots of friends and followers would be a good starting point to a repeat strategy.  But isn’t this a tiny bit like looking for a mailing list?  I say ‘tiny bit’ because clearly there are some big differences – I know or at least have some sort of relationship with my virtual contacts whereas a mailing list may be cobbled together in any which way. 

It still irks me a little that I should be valued by this criterion (at least in some part).  Needless to say the strategy would have involved me being asked to email (within Facebook) all my friends but this is a bit like spamming isn’t it? And it begs the bigger question of course - is social media just a numbers game?

I really really hope it isn’t.  I’m aware that I might be kind of a bit naïve and maybe, in some ways, romantic when it comes to what goes on with Twitter.  My friend, whom I was having the meeting with, sees social media simply (I think) as a marketing gig.   Indeed - almost all (if not all) of his tweets are links to web pages often promoting an event or promoting social media as a marketing tool in itself.  Hey , there’s nothing wrong with this and I think he knows that I think that, but I have, shall we say, a ‘softer’ approach and I love Twitter because I get to, for example,  follow Stephen Fry, someone who  sees and uses Twitter from a position a million miles away from my friend.  I can’t help be reminded of the ‘marketing at’ position and strategy adopted by some companies in Second Life bombed.  Isn’t seeing a bunch of tweets from someone you follow that just point to websites that advertise an event or advertise the marketing medium itself a bit too much like getting direct text (SMS) messages?

I don’t know where Twitter will go when it gets monetized in the future but if it simply becomes a place full of social media marketers then I’ll probably bail – for me, whilst I am happy to see all sorts of people doing and experimenting with all sorts of things, the magic remains seeing what people like Stephen Fry are up to, having a laugh with Will Carling and being part of topics and conversations with some really cool and imaginative people.

There will be a 100,000-fold shrinking of computer technology over the next 25 years

Check out what futurologist Ray Kurzweil is saying about computer processing power, its size and what this will mean for our learning environments.  Powerful stuff.  I was speaking on Virtual Reality yesterday and talked about how we (and companies and organizations) need to learn to play with people in these environments.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           

Fully emergent games is really where we want to go. We will do most of our learning through these massively parallel interactions is how we principally learn and principally create,"  he said.

It’s not the emptiness, it’s the loneliness

 

In August I attended the State of  Play conference here in  Singapore.  Historically, a conference founded by some ‘legal folks’, State of Play is now a rather eclectic and, at the same time, interesting mix of both the original ‘legal folk’ interspersed with gamers, educators, people representing the emerging virtual world creators and other interested and curious onlookers. It’s interesting to note that this seemingly bizarre mix of people is somewhat indicative of the current landscape – a landscape that, whilst changing and evolving on a par with the technical innovations making it all possible, crosses over and overlaps with a myriad of social, technological and even philosophical disciplines and implications.

 

The panels and associated discussions reflected this as did the effusing small groups that gathered and reverberated during the coffee breaks and over the rather good lunches and dinners. Despite the diversity of conversation there was this almost bizarre meta layer (to use a term that seems rather appropriate) to all the discussions – World of Warcraft – a subject that a only a few years ago would have made little or no sense to almost anyone was now (to a large extent) binding together one of the most intellectually gifted and diverse group of people I have ever had the privilege to be part of.

 

Whilst the notion of gaming and, indeed, collaborative gaming is not new, the advent of, at first, the internet and subsequently vast processor power and fat data pipes into the living room and bedroom has meant a paradigm shift in the nature and level of engagement and taken the activity from places and environments few of us may have ventured into the desktops and laptops of children, teachers, work colleagues and CEO’s. As one of the well-established conference attendees so poignantly put it, “World of Warcraft is the new golf”.

 

My thoughts during the conference were as many and varied as were the discussions and it was only on the third day that I found myself saying something that I realized as I said it for me, at least, captures an underlying theme – a foundation even – of what makes this whole thing so exciting and important.

 

It was during a workshop where a few of the conference stragglers were having an informal discussion about commercial opportunities and applications in Second Life and other virtual worlds. One of perceived problems with Second Life and perhaps one of the main points raised by Second Life’s band of detractors is the large number of empty areas, specifically those areas created and built by large organizations, some of whom have desperately tried to get on board the Second Life speeding train with little or no thought about why they were doing it. Several participants alluded to these ‘empty’ spaces and whilst there is much that can be said on this subject my point is simple. It’s not that these places are ‘empty’ that has bothered me when I’ve wandered through the branded 3-D landscape often with little more than 2-D web pages stuck on the side of 3-D objects, it’s that I am lonely. What perturbs me is not that the creator may not be engaging me sufficiently with content and experiences that really should have been better thought through, it’s that there is no-one else sharing the experience with me.

 

And it is for this reason that we should be taking World of Warcraft, Second Life and all other community based spaces including 2-D social networking sites such as facebook very seriously. Whilst we are all increasingly accustomed to the functionality, access and opportunities the internet offers us, the possibility to do all those things and other things that people have not even thought about yet, with our friends, with people we have not met before, be it join a common interest group on facebook or hang out and share an experience in Second Life or go on a raid in World of Warcraft, is what makes these spaces wonderfully exciting and hugely important.

 

During the first dot com boom many people and companies went a bit wrong trying to invent human needs and activities that might fit the technology. World of Warcraft, Second Life and facebook simply enable us, as human beings, to do what we have wanted to do for a long time and feel what we want to feel day to day.

 

Golf anyone?