Anthropological perspective on Trust

Image by Dave Duarte via Flickr

I ran across this interesting article written for the New York Times in 2007 that discusses social networks from the perspective of anthropology of tribal cultures. I won't go over the whole article, instead I want to highlight an interesting paragraph.

“In tribal cultures, your identity is completely wrapped up in the question of how people know you,” he says. “When you look at Facebook, you can see the same pattern at work: people projecting their identities by demonstrating their relationships to each other. You define yourself in terms of who your friends are.”

In two previous posts, I talked about trust & measures of trust. The identity talked about in the quote, forms you standing within the tribe. It is derived from what the community thinks of you. PeerIndex is building a way to project that identity at a much lower cost.

"As intriguing as these parallels may be, they only stretch so far. There are big differences between real oral cultures and the virtual kind. In tribal societies, forging social bonds is a matter of survival; on the Internet, far less so."

I disagree with this conclusion, for the simple reason as more and more of our life is online in various virtual tribes, the social bonds formed online will become as important to survival as social bonds formed in the flesh. Granted we are not there yet, I foresee that PeerIndex (and similar services) will become fundamental to building the social bonds that allow you to survive in the 21st century.

Pulling out of recession

Most of the developed economies are facing a slow down if not a recession. Mark Cuban has described his method for pulling an economy out of recession. I broadly agree with his idea but I think that with an addition it address the biggest issues facing startups.

Startups (and small business as well) face two major hurdles or barriers to entry. The first is regulatory and the second is capital. Mark Cuban's plan address the regulatory barrier to entry and some of the capital issues (not paying taxes improves a companies cashflow). But it only goes so far. Not paying taxes is moot point if you don't have any revenue to support yourself.

To address the capital barrier, governments should implement a HELP-style business loan scheme. In this case the government would provide an initial loan that covers a single person's wage for a year. The loan could be renewed for a 1 year extension. The idea is that the load allows a small company to meet salary for initial employees during the launch phase when little to no revenue is available and other sources of funding are not useful.

The loan is then paid back through the tax system. The scheme would have several limits such as being limited to the average yearly wage and a company would only be allowed to ever have 5 employees use the scheme. Individuals would also need to be limited in the number of these loans that could be taken out within a time period (say once in a 5 year period).

The scheme is designed to allow people to take the plunge and spend that all important first year to get of the ground. It is very similar in intent to Ycombinator fund.

With Mark Cuban's plan addressing the regulatory burden faced by startups and small business the loan scheme addressing the initial capital requirements, people will find it easier to start a business and get it through that all important first year.

Economy, Mark Cuban, Finance, Policy

Language and problem solving

In the most recent New Scientist (Vol 197 No 2637) there is an interesting article discussing the issue of language and how it frames problems. The perspective of the article was that English's newtonian way of describing the world failed to frame questions properly for quantum and other similar non-newtonian physics. The article even goes so far to say that the lack of progress in non-newtonian physics is because problems are framed via the language with a newtonian world view.

Does the same problem exist in the world of the internet? While I realise the Internet world is great at creating new words, these are still framed by the overall language. A language that is "newtonian". As Internet shifts to flows and systems as opposed to objects and links, do we need to look at how we frame the discussion via language to open up the problem solving juices of the internet community? New next wave of innovation will be less around nouns towards verbs, the doing rather than the being and yet we still primarily use nouns in discussing the web and its evolution. Should verbs that describe process, systems and flow be the primary descriptors of the next web?

The article describes an example of Montagnais phrase "Hipiskapigoka iagusit". It very, very roughly translates to "singing health", a process, within which a medicine man and sick person exist. However, a dictionary written in 1729 translated into something that emphasised the objects and not the process. The web is shifting to loosely coupled processes as opposed to objects. I wonder whether the discussion of Robert Scoble's recent tiff with Facebook, would have evolved differently if the language emphasised process (say maintaining contacts) as opposed to data (the contacts themselves). The discussion was about who owned what objects (the contact data) rather than what the ins and outs of maintaining contacts. Another example is the current discussion going on about whether data is a commodity or not. Again the language is of objects rather than flow. How would this discussion evolve if it was frame by a language of flow (verbs) as opposed to objects (nouns)?

The same questions can be asked of programming. Everyone expresses the need to ramp up parallel programming to take advantage of the distributed nature of the internet and multi-core processes. However, can any real problem be solve properly while the language used to frame the problem is based on objects rather than flow? Does the conceptual framework that underpins object orientated programming preclude successful problem solving in the parallel world? Yes there are languages that focus specifically on parallel programming but I am also talking about the language used to describe and communicate the problem. These will need to respond to the requirements of a parallel world for people to solve problems and communicate solutions.

A lot of questions asked. I don't have the answers and I expect no one will for a while. It is interesting to step away from objects and consider things from a flow perspective. I even think I need to re-visit my recent post of Data Ecosystems and look at it from the perspective of flow rather than objects

Tags: Data, Language, Programming, Internet, Physics, Data Ecosystems