As long as people-rating (social media) is used as the benchmark, the volume of collective intelligence (of true value to the enterprise) will remain muted in the noise.

Enterprise 2.0 platforms need to be designed and built from ground on principles that factor in specifics such as collection, processing and broadcasting of enterprise knowledge - they simply cannot evolve from social networks.

btw, really like your blog — thought provoking, very insightful

Interesting point you raise there. You highlight the fact that I conflated individualist in terms of opinion/groupthink/agreeableness vs. individualist in terms of uncooperative.

As successful wikis show, the lead users are both individualist in terms of how they think, and cooperative in terms of how they participate in group process.

So I don’t think it is necessarily recognition that motivates people (though that is part of it, bigger in some technologies like blogs, smaller in others like wikis). To the extent that it IS recognition, you should ask, “recognition by who?” That could be broad public, an aspirational elite, bosses, celebrities, other opinion leaders etc. You should also ask WHAT constitutes recognition. Prizes and medals are for collectivists mainly. Individualists might find recognition in things like influencing a decision to go their way, having people fear their wit, etc.

What you want is support for processes of contention within the group where people are competing for recognition, in whatever form or from whatever source they want. MediaWiki naturally supports that of course, with its ‘talk’ pages that allow people to furiously debate articles, and admins to dictatorially clamp down when necessary. Other wikis, if they don’t have that, should be augmented by things like bulletin boards.

Essentially, some way for individualists to establish opinion leadership based on credibility and ‘whuffie’ capital AROUND collaborative projects with respect TO the source of any recognition they crave IN the form they want.

Other tools will require their own context-specific thinking. I don’t believe in secret sauces in this space, so the orchestrator of a social media effort will basically have to sit down and think things through with the core group of right people.

Very interesting perspective! Thanks for sharing.

Considering these individualistic motivations of social media, do you have suggestions for implementing tools like a wiki and balancing the need for a collective output with a respect for individual contributions and desire for recognition?

- Chris

I agree that individualism is critical to good social media. My expectation is that I’ll be able to see some creativity out there given the number of people who will contribute their points of view, as you have done.

My belief is that an individual who feels comfortable with his or her unique voice is someone who is more willing to hear that of another.

One minor adjustment - wolves don’t battle for the carcass. They operate under a very defined hierarchy. They know who their leader is at all times.

Cheers!

Thank you for writing this.

Venkatesh, I can’t help, but this brings G. Bush’s crap-talking about “good and evel” into my mind. We both know that the issue of being social is far more complex.

But you are right in that we have, in the world of enterprise 2.0, to maintain former discussions about society. There are many theoretical frameworks (sociological, philosophical, psychological, managerial) that could be adapted - be it ‘racional choice’ or ‘principal agent’ for those who want to play towards individualism, be it Bourdieu about Social Capital or feminist theories for those who are rather critical, be it Amitai Etzioni an his view of communitarism, or be it systems theory for those that who it very very abstract. :-)

I think we’ll still have to wait a while before we see some interesting results from these (and other) research streams. However, I am confident that some of them will be marvelous.

In this broad sense, tigers and grizzlies are social just as lions and dolphins are. Individual and social identity have a chicken-egg relationship. One does not derive from the other. Social identity also could not exist without individualism. If the individual-social tension did not exist, you and I would be cells in a Borg-like multicellular creature. Or non-interacting uni-cellular creatures in the primordial soup.

And the link you posted, to Mead’s bio, doesn’t actually prove anything. The individual-social debate is one where you can stack up as many experts on one side as on another. Radical individualism is an existential/metaphysical concept, useful for some sorts of debate (like this one), but not a concept that can be meaningfully invalidated. Saying individualism doesn’t exist is like saying ‘culture’ or ’society’ doesn’t exist.

Venkat

A human being is an output of society. Without society you would not even have the ability for being a “hermit”. You wouldn’t be able to think about anything. You would not think at all but act like a strange animal (not even a higher-ranked one because these are social, too) with a seemingly much too large brain. (No offence, I mean human beings in general ;-) )

“Social” in the context of social software means that the output is being made by a crowd - whether the crowd-members act selfish or not.