How To Break Anything

How appropriate that this has been sketched as an exponential function.

The world is a funny place. And it get’s really easy to get caught up in that funniness and start dismissing the unfamiliar or the seemingly ridiculous as a waste of time, a threat to the very fabric of society, or just something for other people. If anything, it is growing more and more of a natural reflex as new ideas continue to spew forth into the world at exponential rates, many of which are reaching people that are very different than the people who are the intended audience. And it’s probably a good thing for most people. It helps to filter out the noise. For people that work with ideas for a living, it can be really useful to be good at it, but I think that the truly great creative thinkers in the world, from the greatest planners to the greatest creative people to the greatest entrepreneurs, are unique in their ability to turn that off, suspend judgement, and learn from everything.

I’m guilty of over-judgement in spades. I’ve suspected it for a long time, but it was confirmed the other day when my wife called me a bully after I made fun of someone we saw while driving. It’s sort of my schtick.

But I’ve realized the error of my ways. Moving forward, I’m going to actively try to be less of a curmudgeon. In fact, it might make a swell platform for a weekly blog post series. Time will tell.

 

Before making the switch to Posterous, I had an 'explanation' page describing what 'how to break anything' means to me. Essentially it is this: rules are indeed meant to be broken, but only when you know how the rules work can you break them effectively. The rules governing human behavior are no different.

"How to break anything? Observe everything." is what I was saying at that point. Kevin's thoughts above resonate with the idea I've tried to get across, that if you want to understand human behavior, you have to understand all of it, not just the behaviors you're used to.

It requires a certain level of openmindedness, and one that I'm genuinely not sure many people are able to approach or are even willing to. I think we want to feel we can, until we realize that on a very important level it's quite different from what you might initially expect: as you approach a place of openmindedness, you increasingly leave a place of consistent identity and moral/conceptual/ethical/whatever standards. This is an important idea worth thinking about when considering the idea of "openmindedness" so I'll repeat it in different words: the level at which you genuinely understand other people is inversely proportional to the level at which you can firmly justify your own beliefs. 

Just something to consider. 

I certainly have my share of flaws, but one of the strengths (?) that has led me here today is being able to comfortably approach that level - solely because of my experiences and environment growing up, as evidenced by this more recent interpretation of the "how to break anything" idea: Danah Boyd on ChatRoulette, and myself on exposure and intelligence

4chan is internet is pure form, so it's only natural that 4chan reflects deep insight into human behavior.

My faves:
17. Every win fails eventually
18. If it can be labeled, it can be hated
21. Original content is original only for a few seconds before getting old
34. There is porn of it, no exceptions
40. EVEN WITH CRUISE CONTROL YOU STILL HAVE TO STEER
42. Nothing is Sacred
46. There is always furry porn of it

Evidently there's a poor-quality video of moot's talk yesterday at TED:

Conrad put together a good collection of examples here: The good old days of advertising

(the 'more' part refers to my earlier post re: Tim Stock's The Structure Of Trends)

My favorite slides are 65 and 70. They have a lot to say about the mercurial (arbitrary?) nature of meaning and what matters to us.

As part of Social Media Week in NYC, design firm IDEO hosted the event Humanizing Social Media. Check-in to the event required attendees to leave their mobile devices behind with their coats, setting the stage for an experiment in human interaction. Participants were given a large blank white t-shirt to cover whatever they were wearing, and their choice of a range of buttons with which to express interests and identity. Below are two brief perspectives and insights on human social behavior that team PSFK walked away with:

Kyle Studstill:

The event was framed as an experiment in bringing social interaction back to its basics, in the face of complex digital platforms like Facebook, foursquare, Twitter and the like – the idea being that impersonal nature of these networks take something away from the simplicity of face-to-face interaction.

What I observed reflected the idea that all social interaction – digital or not – is an exercise in individuals using whatever they have at their disposal to say something about themselves. The buttons were an obvious example of this, but it was also clear in the vastly varied ways participants placed their buttons or even wore the blank t-shirt itself. The entire event begged the question “what parallels can we draw between what happens here in this experiment, and what happens in social networks?”; one clear one that emerged is that the expression of identity through carefully (and often subconscious) curated details of one’s personality applies both online and off.

As far as the digital disconnect (no one knew they would be without their phones for two hours until they walked in the door), I don’t think I had that feeling of  ”everyone is paying more attention now” that one might expect. Perhaps the rest of the crowd did. But it has been my experience that we are getting better at dipping in and out of both digital and offline conversations, pulling ourselves away from a casual group to share an idea on Twitter and diving back in seamlessly; I haven’t experienced the feeling that people being connected to their mobile devices has made them any less “social,” even in the physical space.

Francisco Hui:

Kyle makes a good point that the lack of phones didn’t particularly change how we socialized for those two hours. The blank t-shirts, like current social media platforms, placed everyone on the same footing, regardless of their age and what they came in wearing.

Learnings from the discussion alluded to an interesting group dynamic that occurs in real life that hasn’t been  replicated in social media. While you can broadcast messages to your followers, it’s still an individual act that is occurring in on your phone or at your desk.

From another conversation, we learned that current status updates are very much about the past tense; what you did yesterday or earlier during the day, but we’re slowly moving towards the present and future tense, what you’re doing right now, and what you plan to do.