All Posts by Bob Lewis

|In: Industry Commentary|Last Updated:

Back in computing pre-history, Apple (Computer) claimed ownership of the Satanic fruit that got us humans tossed out of paradise 6+ millennia ago. Trendiness wasn’t part of the plan.

In the 1990s, Microsoft claimed ownership of the architectural element that lets the sun shine in while keeping the bad weather out. Trendiness wasn’t part of its plan either.

Which brings us to Meta, facebook’s 180 degree out-of-phase attempt at trendiness.

Here at IS Survivor Publishing we take trendiness seriously. We also take nonsensical half-donkeyed (figure it out) outrage-factory-driven commentary seriously.

“Meta” is slang for ironic self-awareness, which I guess would make it trendy, except that if Mark Zuckerberg is capable of ironic self-awareness he’s kept it well-hidden.

If corporations have personality traits, few would accuse Meta, nee facebook, of ironic self-awareness either. “Meta” is like someone past their prime saying “I’m hip! Trust me! I’m still hip!”

Then there’s the infinity half of Meta’s logo. There is a certain disturbing honesty to it, implying as it does that with the name change Zuckerberg is claiming ownership of everything in the virtual universe.

Which would be less disconcerting if his vision … that we’ll all spend most of our lives in his “metaverse” … weren’t so troublingly reminiscent of Isaac Asimov’s masterpiece, The Naked Sun.

The name change to Meta is the former facebook’s response to the outrage over how it’s fanned the flames of misinformation and disinformation by knowingly spreading it to those most likely to (1) believe conspiracy theories so inane they make flat-earther-enthusiasm seem sane by comparison; (2) read and like (sorry, “Like”) the next conspiracy theory to reach their inboxes, and (3) be so inflamed by these conspiracy theories that they’ll take action on them, with “action” running the gamut from voting for lunatics to invading Congress.

Regular readers here will know I’ve been railing against intellectual relativism in all its forms for more than 15 years now (“Political Science,” 10/3/2005) and the ease with which the Internet can be subverted to spread misinformation starting 10 years before that, in the World Wide Web’s earliest days (“Trusted Information Providers,” 3/17/1997). So I have little sympathy for facebook as it attempts to deal with all the criticism.

But I think the criticism mostly misses the root cause.

One complaint is that facebook was motivated by a desire to maximize profits using all legal means at its disposal.

In the wise words of Mom, “What if everyone did that?”

Oh, wait. That’s what every corporation is supposed to do. Some do more harm than others, and where many pollute the physical world, facebook pollutes the virtual.

But where critics have completely missed the mark is the complaint about facebook being (allegedly) most likely to recommend the most inflammatory posts to those most likely to Like them.

Assume for a moment that facebook is guilty as charged. What it’s guilty of isn’t deliberately spreading misinformation and disinformation to the gullible. It’s guilty of a practice successful retailers have engaged in since retailing supplanted bartering all those millennia ago: cross-selling.

Amazon suggests that if you read Book A you’re likely to enjoy Book B. facebook, in contrast, suggests that if you believe in Jewish space lasers and Like reading posts about them, you’re also likely to believe the entire universe and all of your memories were created last Thursday.

What facebook and Amazon are doing is equivalent.

Except, of course, that in Amazon’s product and service space cross-selling is, if annoying, harmless. In facebook’s marketplace it’s toxic.

Bob’s last word: In 1990 Republicans proposed a superior approach to environmental regulation. They called it cap-and-trade. How it worked: To reduce the sulfur dioxide emissions that were causing acid rain, polluters could, instead of reducing their own emissions, buy pollution credits from another company that already had.

It worked and worked well.

And so I propose Congress pass the Keep the Joint Running Toxic Meme Reduction Act. It would set an overall industry cap on the number of toxic memes that can be posted on social media. When that limit has been reached, any entity that hasn’t yet posted its share could trade them to another that wants to post another toxic meme of its own.

Write your elected officials.

Bob’s sales pitch: The Archives are back!

Okay, that probably didn’t warrant an exclamation point, especially as Search never went away. With both now working you now have full access (at no additional charge) to 26 years of Keep the Joint Running and its InfoWorld-published predecessor, the “IS Survival Guide.”

There’s good stuff in there, most of it still relevant today.

Comments

|In: Leadership|Last Updated:

My plan was to condense my leadership book down to 2,000 words or so. Hold that thought.

I’ve started the final section of my CIO.com “Building effective IT 101” series. It will cover the most important organizational effectiveness dimension – human performance.

Strong human performance entails leadership – all eight tasks of it, along with compensation and organizational structure. Having already written 28,000 words about leadership, I figured I could knock this one out without breaking a sweat.

Somehow I’d forgotten a long-ago-learned publishing lesson: editing is harder than writing.

Not that writing is easy. But at the risk of splitting hairs rather than infinitives, bad writing is easy, good writing is hard, and editing is easier or harder in inverse proportion to the ease of writing.

(Metrics sidebar: Some publications pay by the word. That’s counterproductive, because the more words a writer puts in, the more time an editor has to expend to remove them.)

Effective writing is part of every business executive’s, manager’s, and knowledge worker’s job description, too. But they (you) don’t have the mixed blessing of an editor to sharpen up the dull penpoint that’s supposed to be mightier than your average sword. Then add this challenge: Much of the advice you’ll find about how to write effectively pertains to scribing for publication. Its value for your average Reply All email ranges from limited to counterproductive.

Don’t believe me? Google the subject and count how often you’re told to eschew adjectives. Plot spoiler alert: You’ll find this advice scattered all over the Googleverse.

I’ll take it when someone explains how I’m supposed to describe an edifice made of stacked blocks that reflect 700 nanometer electromagnetic radiation without preceding the noun “brick” with the adjective “red.”

In business writing, sometimes the most tedious adjectives (adverbs too) are modifiers – words like very, somewhat, mostly, and so on – and they’re essential.

They can make a published work dreary. But excluding them in business writing can commit a manager to unachievable results. “We’ll get this done by the end of the year,” makes a dangerous promise. “We’ll probably get this done by the end of the year” does not.

Nor is “probably” just a safety play. It’s more accurate. Certainty might make for better writing, but when it’s about the future it’s best left to the Oracle at Delphi, not those responsible for implementing Oracle.

When you, like me, need to squeeze a first draft that fully explains a complex or contentious subject into a much smaller space, cutting down on modifiers doesn’t help. What you need to do is to make hard choices about what and what not to leave in.

For example: The first of the eight tasks of leadership is setting direction. I could limit my explanation to a definition – “Setting direction is about how things are now that the leader wants to be different and better in the future.”

Or I could break setting direction down into its component parts: “Setting direction includes vision, strategy, mission, and values,” and leave it at that.

But that still leaves a lot of room for misunderstanding. I’ve tentatively decided (this is, after all, a work in progress) to provide brief explanations of each of these, along with a few dos and don’ts.

But extrapolating my leadership word count to all human performance factors, I’m going to exceed 10,000 words – roughly five additional articles to give human performance its due.

There’s another factor people who write in business settings have to contend with: What we know exceeds our audience’s reading appetite. Whenever we leave something in to reduce the chance of misunderstanding we also motivate our audience to scan our deathless (or, in many cases, lifeless) prose instead of reading it for complete comprehension.

For this, two tips. #1: When you do decide to provide in-depth information, use bolded headings or paragraph labels so readers know what to expect. That puts them in a position to choose whether to dive deep or be satisfied knowing you dived deep.

#2: Keep paragraphs short to give your audience’s eyes a break. Ten lines is a practical maximum. Five is better, two to three is better yet.

Bob’s last word: Editing is harder, and more painful (for the author), than writing. Trimming, not just fat but a fair amount of muscle and connective tissue hurts.

As evidence: The first draft of this essay was about a hundred words longer than what you’re reading, and I was quite fond of every one of them.

Bob’s sales pitch: The holidays season approaches. What could be a better gift for your favorite business and IT professionals than one of these beauties? (And yes, that was a rhetorical question.)

Comments