Social Media, Emergence, and Telos

MIT's Sloan Management Review recently published an interview with Anthony Bradley and Mark McDonald about their new book "The Social Organization: How to Use Social Media to Tap the Collective Genius of Your Customers and Employees."

I was encouraged to see them emphasize the need for Purpose in the creation of effective social media-based communities.  There's a lot of money being thrown at corporate social media with a "build it and they will come" / "emergence magic" mindset.

Social media with no coherence, boundaries, and attractors is Chaos.  Internet-scale chaos works for socialization purposes where individuals form their own informal communities.  But, even the largest companies will probably find the intersection of "bottom-up" communities and the company's key exploratory activities relatively small.

Within a company, purposefully working to "manage the emergence of beneficial coherence within boundaries, within attractors" would seem to be an essential partial constraint on social media.

Seems like we prefer mindless solutions: an algorithm at one extreme or "emergence magic" at the other.  Managing complexity (and complicatedness) requires intention and mindfulness ... drones need not apply.

Identity as a Learning Disability

Two recent articles on identity's effect on learning caught my eye.  Both seem to lean toward the possibility that Identity inhibits learning when it focuses more on what I am (we are) than on what I do (we do) ... ontology vs. action/telos.

• "Why Do Some People Learn Faster?" - Wired blog post discussing a new study showing that academic accomplishment is increased by praising effort and inhibited by praising ability.  My reaction: seems like more fallout from a century-old societal shift  from Christian skepticism about fallen humanity to secular optimism about human perfectability.  For more, see Freud , John Dewey, the birth of modern progressivism.  The therapeutic mindset, so strange barely a 100 years ago, is now so pervasive as to be invisible.
• "Can Everyone Be Smart At Everything?" - KQED covering much of the same ground.

This is one of those topics that quickly becomes a lightening rod for all kinds of noise. I suspect it's  not productive to allow culture war issues associated with identity to detract from the task at hand.  As someone who loves to create stories (and despite my antipathy towards pragmatism as a worldview), I liked this quote from a recent Peggy Noonan column:

"Here's the problem: There is no story.  At the end of the day, there is only reality.  Things work or they don't.  When they work, people notice, and say it."