Can’t See The Woods For The Trees
I long, long time ago, while doing my A Levels working for the Coop (a supermarket chain in the UK) the manager of the store (Mr Harrington (who actually was encouraging me to become a future Coop manager…..) said to me “Ken, we are not going to put all those horrible poster in the front window. I want people to see from the outside in….or they won’t be able to see the woods for the Trees”.Over the last two or three, you were probably sent an invitation by friends to be part of MySpace, Hi5, Tagged, LinkedIn, YouTube, Bebo, etc, etc, etc and you had no way of saying no, because you genuinely liked the people that sent the invitation. So you clicked the AGREE BUTTON, and managed to send some cool stuff for about two days…..then slowly but surely, the interest wandered. You began to realise that there is no real fun in the constant recirculation of banal jokes that wasn’t even actually funny the first time round.
The more I look, the more I can’t see anything. There is interesting contents in these Social Networking websites I am certain. But they are buried so deep in the woods that I have to spend hours looking for the one thing that actually interests you…..I don’t actually spend hoursdoing that of course…..I just give up and move on or out as the case is.
This recently actually coincided with me reading The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell (which is a book I recommend you read). Gladwell asks “Is there a simple rule of thumb that distinguishes a group with a real social authority from a group with little power at all? As it turns out, there is. It’s called the Rule of 150, and it is a fascination example of the strange and unexpected ways in which context affects the course of social epidemics” He goes on to explain, in detail as he does throughout the book and concludes “The figure of 150 seems to represent the maximum number of individuals with whom we can have a genuinely social relationship, the kind of relationship that goes with knowing who they are and how they relate to us.”
With millions of people globally using Social Networks as a way of communication, I started to think, wouldn’t it be really cool if instead of trying to create mega Networks we actually looked to create Meaningful Networks. Wouldn’t it be really cool to create the potential for smaller Networks of like minded people, discussing specific themes of interest that would actually be contributing content and not merely recycling garbage.
All of the projects detailed in Projects Being Developed will aim to explore this principle and I will be developing these as we go along.
By the way, thank you Mr Harrington for helping me to understand Can’t see the woods for the trees…..
