Granular Thinking

I’m almost finished with the theme for this week – just one more concept to flesh out.

Too often we simplify to an extent that’s beyond the reach of the supporting reality. It’s a normal part of the process of assimilating what we can from our environment. We don’t remember every stark detail of every conversation (unless we are my wife, and I am saying something that has the potential to be hugely embarrassing when recalled in 20 months or so.) We don’t memorize every rock along the side of the road. We do tend to watch for patterns that interest us, or are at odds with entropy. “Rocks don’t just naturally trace the outline of an arrow on the ground” we say to ourselves, and we impart some meaning or message from that.

This is the process of encoding – packing in the essential information in as few memory chunks as possible. If there is a need for us to remember things in more detail, we can focus and do so.

The two errors we have in encoding are encoding too much (like when I remember that my wife looked happy on Wednesday, but forgot the list of things she wanted for her birthday); and encoding too little (remembering to packs five shirts, five pants, and no socks – because we weren’t thinking of “full outfits.”) It’s a delicate dance between the two. If you never end up over-encoding, then maybe you’re remembering too many facts and letting some slip by. Or more importantly, maybe you’re missing the big picture entirely. If you always over-encode, you are making decisions today about the things you will never ever need to remember again.

All of this talk of packing and unpacking data has a point. We’re at a time in our culture when we don’t have to remember nearly as much. We have machines to do it for us. I have a password manager on my Blackberry that stores at least 30 passwords for me. Sometimes I have to pull it out to use my debit card! This couldn’t happen until two things occurred: long-term memory got cheap, and search algorithms got efficient.

My fear is that our increased reliance on external memory for the little tiny bits will slowly rob us of the ability to see the bigger picture. If you spend less time “encoding,” the wiring that allows us to do so will atrophy. Maybe I’m wrong – and maybe some people will feel more empowered to do grander thinking. I can’t help but wonder, though, that we’ll start losing touch with our skills at pattern recognition.

Here’s an example where it bites us.

Look at individual grains of cornstarch. They are uniform, and slick, and behave like sand. Stir them into water, and you get something completely different:

There are a lot of counterintuitive things happening here with the cornstarch. While the standard line is ‘the whole is greater than the sum of its parts,’ this is a clear example of the whole being altogether different than the individual units. (Another example? Chlorine is a poisonous gas. Sodium is poisonous to the human body. But together they are table salt.)

I promise, this will be the last post on social networks for awhile – but I fear the thinking up until now has been flawed. We’ve spent decades learning about the buying, spending, and communications habits of individuals. Marketers reach out through broad channels to inform and sell products. The messages are researched meticulously to appeal to individual consumers based on groupings like demographics and income. We know what works.

We also know we’re entering an age of social networks, whatever you want to call them. They are lightning-fast, ephemeral, and highly-specialized. You no longer have a small circle of close friends – you have dozens of topic-specific huddles that you can skip to and from as needed. The illusion of the past marketing models was they were “mass” marketing. There was no “mass” there, other than millions of individuals drinking from the same parallel pipes. Now communicators are trying to engage the customer through these social networks – and I can’t see where they’ve asked the right question: “Do we know how the group, as an organism, will react?” Then they act surprised when the group stiffens up faster than that cornstarch above.

People, as individuals, act differently in tribes. That we’ve known. We know very little about the group dynamics of these ephemeral little gatherings. Which sorts of interfaces lead to a more emotional bonding? Are there similarities in the leadership structures of these groups? How do they mete justice? What generalized principles govern the internal rules and etiquette of a gathering? How predictable is all of this? Can we replicate? What is the randomization factor? How volatile are they? How forgiving?

Before we run out half-cocked and try to embrace the world with our conversation, shouldn’t we know a little more about what we’re wrapping our arms around? Because it’s clear to me we haven’t wrapped our brains around the fundamental issue: when our granular data gets all wet, we’re going to be slogging through the oatmeal, and it will be messy.

[tags]Ike Pigott, Occam’s RazR, communication, social networks, marketing, theory[/tags]