The hierarchical organization that we see today was invented in the last century, and it is an incredible invention. It can direct and coordinate the actions of thousands of people making and selling thousands of products or services across thousands of miles, and do so effectively, efficiently, and profitably, week after week after week. If you had told an average citizen in the year 1900 what this structure and those sets of processes were accomplishing everywhere today, they would have thought you daft.

But 20th-century, capital "H" Hierarchy (a sort of hardware) and the managerial processes that run on it (a sort of software) do not handle transformation well. And in a world with an ever-increasing rate of change, it is impossible to thrive without timely transformations. The data, case studies, and personal anecdotes to this effect abound

I've written about the history of the hierarchical-organising model and organisational chart the before. Wikipedia has a brief overview of the historical development of management. This is important background for the social business design conversation.

Hat tip to Samuel.

Tom Standage’s book The Victorian Internet was a revelation when I read it. As a cub academic, one of my colleagues in the psychology department - a woman who’s been doing fascinating research on smart homes - recommended it as an “airport read”. I’m very glad I did (although my book group didn’t find it nearly as fascinating and worthy as I did). It felt like stepping into an Infinite Perspective Machine: the hubris that we experience during the hysteria over a contemporary “new” technology often has parallels with previous periods of innovation. Standage places the Internet and the Web in this context.

Briefly, it describes the social changes that we attribute to the online environment, but as they were observed and practiced during the era of the telegraph. One of the phenomena he examines is love “over the wires”.

...

“During quiet periods… the online interaction really got going, with stories, jokes and local gossip circulated over the wires. According to one account, ‘stories are told, opinions exchanged, and laughs enjoyed, just as if the participants were sitting together at a club.’” (p. 124)

The Victorian Internet is one of my favourite books too (I can't quite remember when I read it) and this quote that Aleks Krotoski highlights is one I've reflected on a bit over the years. I often mention it in presentations about social technology and society.

• Firstly, the telegraph users were utilising slack in the system to communicate with each other. Remember that the telegraph was charged by the letter and its primary purpose was to transmit information that was delivered to other people, not as an n-way communication channel.
• Secondly, despite what people say, even just using morse code people were able to create deep and meaningful relationships 'online'.
• Thirdly, the community (and particularly the bosses of the telegraph operators) were worried how this technology was corrupting employees.

If this interests you, also think about the humble postcard as a social technology.

Straight from the horses mouth, how Twitter came about. Love the fact they were sitting on a slide at a kids playing, eating Mexican food, when Jack first pitched the idea to his team (and I never realised the 140 character limit was imposed to reduced their SMS bill).

Also from the past, Michael Arrington wrote at that time:

"There is also a privacy issue with Twttr. Every user has a public page that shows all of their messages. Messages from that person’s extended network are also public. I imagine most users are not going to want to have all of their Twttr messages published on a public website."

Really...? ;-)

Hat tip to Jordan Willms.

When Danny Canal starts to speak, conversations at other café tables around him fall silent. Canal, a young man in his early twenties, is doing something that looks almost like magic -- he's talking on the phone without even opening his mouth... Canal, a shipbuilding student from Hamburg, is deaf and he's currently experiencing a revelation. Since he communicates with his friends mostly in sign language, until recently he didn't have much use for mobile phones, unless it was for sending text messages.

...

Even the most skeptical are starting to recognize the magic of video interactions. Grandparents play with faraway grandchildren; divorced fathers do homework with kids who live with their mothers; long-distance couples check in before they go to bed, read to each other or fall asleep with their laptops next to them on the bed.

We're still not quite at a utopian moment for video calling and video conferencing, but we've clearly crossed a chasm. Video calling as a technology is (almost) getting boring, which means for society its about to get interesting.

Of course, as this article highlights, we shouldn't underplay the importance of technology convergence - such as the Internet, mobile networks, mobile computing and software, like Skype and FaceTime. This explains why its taken more than 70 years for video calling to get anyway near going mainstream.

Hat tip to the Putting People First blog.

Joseph Reagle, author of the excellent history of Wikipedia, Good Faith Collaboration (review coming soon) sez, "When I wrote my book on Wikipedia's culture and history, many sources, such as emails from founders, Nupedia-l archives, and (most sadly) the early days of Wikipedia contributions were lost to bit rot. But thanks to a recent discovery of some old log files by Tim Starling, I've been able to roughly reconstruct the first 10,000 edits to Wikipedia (about 6 weeks)."

There is probably some good behaviour data to mine here, for those wanting to kick off their own encyclopaedia-style or knowledgebase wiki to imagine what their first 10,000 edits might look like.

Looking at the entry for Australia I was reminded of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

To wiki is obviously human.

I've used Question Box in some recent presentations as a example of appropriate technology. I've just become aware of this Australian innovation from the early part of the last century - the pedal radio. Invented by Alfred Traeger with the encouragement of the Royal Flying Doctor Service, it overcame the challenge of communication with remote homesteads that lacked a telephone or radio link. Traeger later improved this idea by creating a Morse keyboard.

The pedal radio solved three problems for users in the Australian bush:

• It didn't require a battery;
• It could be operated by one person; and
• With the Morse keyboard, it didn't require knowledge of Morse code to send a message

I have to admit that picking up Cyburbia was a bit of a random act - and I almost didn't. But if you can get past the title and bizzare introduction, this book turns out to be a rather dense, but interesting history of our online society and cybernetics.

Norbert Wiener, the originator of cybernetics, is a constant feature through the book along with a cast of other familiar people, places and online things. The famous Ebbsfleet United crowd management experiment even gets a mention.

Once you are past the introduction, the books works through a logical sequence of chapters titled The Loop, The Peer, The Tie, The Network Effect, Peer Pressure, Non-Linear, Multiplicity, Feedback and Network Failure.

As I said at the begining this book is pretty dense, so its hard to pin point a particular insight or seminal moment. As a result, I think its fair to say that there aren't a lot of answers in this book, although the general tone is both a little sceptical whilst also being ultimately optimistic. The author, James Harkin, eventually manages to pull together his thesis into a satisfatory conclusion at the end of the book.

Its worth considering that cybernetics has its origins in Wiener's attempts to create a better anti-aircraft gun, through the use of feedback loops. However, human-computer interaction has evolved to become much more importand and influential. Harkin's writes in his final few pages that:

The system is certainly self-steering and running on autopilot, but only because it has us as its automations, darting around through information clouds in response to an endless stream of instruction and feedback.

Part of his point here, I think, is that we shouldn't forget that both the message AND the medium are important. Of course, what we shouldn't underestimate is the value of the message these new Web mediums create.

He also makes some good arguments about the strenghts, weaknesses, oppourtunties and threats of the weak ties that the Web medium enables.

I wouldn't make this my first or only book on this topic, but I found it provided me with another perspective on the history of technology in society. As someone once said (or something similar), a nation without a history is like a man without a memory. And in the respect, Harkin has added a little more richness for me to that history.

Wired magazine's Steven Levy says the 'Hackers' of the late 20th century set the philosophical base for the digital information age of today -- and he says their mind-set will shape our future.

I remember reading an electronic copy of Steven Levy's Hackers book downloaded to a PDA (I'm pretty sure, if I recall correctly, I had a Psion Series 5 at the time) during my daily commute across Sydney harbour back in the later part of the 1990s. I remember it feeling quite subversive just to be reading an electronic text, while everyone else had their heads stuck in a newspaper! Of course, the beauty of this book is that it challenges the common view of what hacking culture is all about - less about being illegal and more about being collaborative, through open technologies and an open and experimental culture.

In this radio interview with Levy, he comments:

There were so many people who read my book and told me it changed their lives, and this was then a fantastic experience. For me, to see so many people who have read my book saying it had an effect on them.

I'm not sure this book changed my life, but it certainly was very influential. It really must rank along with other books like Cluetrain (which Euan Semple reminded us about in his workshop at Headshift yesterday) and Being Digital as one of the classics of the digital era. BTW It appears that Hackers has recently been re-released as an updated 25th anniversary edition.

PS. What other *classics* of the digital era would you recommend? Feel free to add your suggestions to the comments.