Role Play and Roles

The roles that I discussed in the last post can be thought of as roles defined in a bottom up fashion. That is, you do something which indicates a role preference and then get suggestions for other things that maybe be suitable to someone who enjoys that role. But, bottom up role definition has some problems.

Let's say that you are a creative, artistic, imaginative person who has for some reason been steered away from being who you are naturally. Let's say further that you have adopted a serious person complete with a set of interests that are appropriate for that serious persona but not really suitable to who you are. If your serious person reads only nonfiction then it is likely that bottom up approach will only reinforce this mismatch. You order dull books on history and the algorithms suggest more history books. How do you break this cycle?

I think one answer may be virtual world role play. I run into endless people in Second Life who are there because they can behave in ways that feel much more natural and yet would not be acceptable for some reason in real life.

Several months back, I wrote a few posts on a concept called StrengthsFinders which was developed by the Gallup Corporation. The premise of StrengthsFinders is that there are certain things that you are hard wired to do and doing those things are virtually effortless for you. I think this idea can be extended beyond business strengths to roles in general. There are things you can do that are virtually effortless and feel natural. If you do those things life is easier and more satisfying. However, for any number of reasons people often get steered away from roles that are natural for them and into roles that are not natural. Role playing in a virtual world allows you to explore different roles and possibly find roles that are more satisfying for you. 

Facebook and Roles

Last time I explained how you adopt roles based upon purchases at places like Amazon or Netflix. People who bought (or rented) Product A also liked Product B. Next let's consider how your role becomes solidified through use of a social interaction technology such as Facebook.

Consider some of the actions you perform on Facebook. You friend people. You join groups. You use applications such as quizzes or play games such as Farmtown. And you post bits of news about yourself and read bits of news that others have posted. Each of these activities refines the role you play as yourself.

First of all, you select friends based on some similarity of interest. Some have friends only from work. Others exclude friend from work. Some select friends that they know for real. Others only have virtual friends. Some people will accept friend requests from anyone while others are very choosy. The point is that you are defined to some extent by the company you keep online and the friends you select will begin to define you over time.

You join groups based upon your interests or based on the recommendation of friends. The groups will in turn affect the advertisements that you see, further reinforcing your evolving role. When you post information about your day "I had a great lunch at a new restaurant" you are suggesting possible activities for your friends. Note the similarity here between the Amazon claim "People who liked Product A also liked Product B" and "I liked Restaurant X so you might like Restaurant X." Postings, obviously, are not limited to restaurants. People post their experiences with books, movies, concerts, and all manner of activities.

This is not, of course, limited to Facebook. Your Twitter feeds or your virtual world avatars have a similar effect. Through mediated social interaction you negotiate and refine your role and the roles of other's around you. Next time, I will take this a step further with role play in virtual worlds and see how that impacts your evolving roles.

Roles and Identity

I am not going to be coy about it, carefully building an argument and then springing the conclusion on you. I am going to go straight to the punchline and then go back and support it. The next era of computer applications following the Age of Information will be the Age of Roles and Identity. This next step is no more obvious given our understanding of information systems than the evolution of information systems was obvious given our understanding of automation. In fact, most people who were in the thick of things in the automation stage of computer applications simply could not grasp the changes that were about to come. And similarly, people who are in the thick of things in information systems will probably have a hard time grasping the shifting focus to roles and identity. So, let me begin with a very concrete example of how information leads to the definition of roles and identity.

Let's say you go to Amazon and order a book. Next time you show up at the website they may very well suggest another book for you based on the previous purchase. You may buy  the recommended book or you may not. If you show up again, you will be offer more suggestions. Over time, assuming that you do buy another book now and then you will have sorted yourself into a de facto category of people who like a particular cluster of books. That cluster of books, to some extent defines you. And the longer you accept this role, the more it becomes who you are.

Another great example is Netflix. You order a dvd from Netflix and then rate it after you have viewed it. Netflix then turns around and suggests others shows you may like based upon the dvds you have ordered and your rating of them. Over time, as with Amazon, you sort yourself into a de facto category of people who like a particular cluster of movies. And, that cluster of movies, to some extent defines you. And, again, as with the books, the longer you accept this role, the more it becomes who you are.

We have seen in recent years that Amazon has tried to extend this idea. People who bought this book liked this music or this video game. Your cluster becomes larger and begins to define you more fully. This is how information leads to roles and identity. Now how about the other direction? The need to define roles (or categories) more precisely will lead to a need for more information. Do people who read Piers Anthony vote in a consistent manner? No? Well how about people who read Piers Anthony, listen to Red Hot Chilli Peppers and watch The IT Crowd? If that still isn't enough, how about if they have Starbucks coffee more than twice a week and go to the gym at least once?

Information gives rise to roles and roles give rise to the need for more information. But, we are nowhere near finished. Over the next few posts we will explore this further. What if you are the kind of person whose doesn't like to be that kind of person? How many kinds of people are there? Matching who you are with what you are. And the value of role play. I think it will get interesting. I hope you stay tuned.

And Then There Was Information

Some time in the late 1970's William Kent published a book entitled Data and Reality in which he provided some philosophical grounding for the design of databases. Although it is still somewhat difficult to get through today, it was totally incomprehensible in the late 1970's. One of the zen koans that he provided was that database design should model information rather than the way information is processed. For database designers of the day, this was no more meaningful than the sound of one hand clapping.

Databases in the 1970's were design to support data processing systems. They were really little more than fancy files with some handy functional features like support for transactions, data independence and the like. The were storage and retrieval mechanisms used to support data processing. In fact, early data bases did not even have query languages.

But  a new idea was emerging in the late 1970s and that was the idea that all the data that was being processed might have a secondary purpose as information about the organization. This information could, potentially be used to better understand and more effectively run the organization. As obvious as this is today, it was a novel observation at the time and it took a  while to catch on.

Of course today well designed databases are designed primarily for information and processing is merely the means by which the information is kept up to data. But as data processing (automation) gave way to information systems there were a lot of entrenched views of data processing systems that needed to be over come.

In keeping with the expanding model I am developing here I would like to point out a few things. First, when automation was the primary usage of computer applications, it was far from obvious that the next stage would be information systems. In fact, it took quite a while for that idea to catch on. Second, as automation systems created information giving rise to information systems, information systems in turn created a greater demand for automation. That is, when you are modeling the organization in information you need more and more automation to provide more and more information.

Now we are in the era of information systems and the question that I started this thread with was - can we see what the next stage of evolution will be. If the model is consistent, it will not be obvious from what we have today and as we evolve into it, it will create an even greater demand for information. But, to find out what that next stage is, you will have to come back next week.

Next Came Automation

By the mid to late 1960's the usage of computer systems in automating business record keeping processes was well underway. Although the machines were still called computers, most people had forgotten about the role of the computer as a computer and thought about it as a data processing machine. At the time, the term of choice for what computers were doing was data processing. In fact, one of the premium professional organizations was called The Data Processing Management Association. And many corporate departments who were responsible for these activities had the term Data Processing figuring prominently in their name.

Over the two decades from the mid 1960's to the mid 1980's most corporate jobs changed substantially as work that had previously been done by people was picked up by the computer in automated data processing systems. And people, who had, themselves, been the data processing system were now users of the automated data processing system.

Early computer systems were often justified on the basis of the number of jobs they replaced in the cost benefit analysis. "If we automate this process, we can get rid of twenty clerical positions." would be a typical claim. Although, as I remember from the time, it is unclear that any jobs were every really lost.The notion of automation required that jobs be lost to justify it. However, the real reason why these systems were being built was that everybody else was building them. And if you didn't keep up you would surely fall behind.

We can make two observations about the relationship between computation and automation that will help us extend this model later. First, computation gave rise to automation although that extension is not at all obvious. One would not look at a computer systems and automatically see an automation system. Second, the increased usage of the computer for automation gave rise to a greater demand for computation. This is, the world demand for computers turn out to be far more than five because data processing dramatically increased the demand for computers.

In the Beginning there was Computation

There is an apocryphal quote attributed to Thomas Watson the head of IBM at the time the computer was invented. As the story goes, when asked about the size of the world market for computers, he replied "I think there is a world market for maybe five computers". Although there is little evidence that he actually said this, the story has taken on the status of urban legend and is also revealing of our understanding of computers at the time.

The computer was not really invented in the 1940's, it was resurrected. Charles Babbage did the foundation work in the early 1800's attempting to develop a machine that could compute the roots of polynomials. That notion of a computational machine stuck in the very name of the device that we still, to this very day, call a computer. Early computers were not seen, as they would be later, as information processing machines. They were seen as computational machines. Hence the name and the misunderstanding of the market implied by the apocryphal quote. If the computer had remained a mega calculator there may very well have been a very limited market for it.

Fortunately, some of the engineers at IBM, at the time, had a little imagination and could see beyond the basic computational capabilities. I can imagine that this caused no end of internal conflict at IBM as their cash cow, at the time, was the Electronic Accounting Machine which processed information on paper cards. Suggesting that the computer be used for this purpose was not only a suggestion that they replace their entire business with a new mode of processing, but it also suggested that information be encoded, not on cards which you can see, but in bits of electricity that you cannot see. So, although this seems obvious in hindsight, it was quite a leap of imagination at the time.

By the late 1960's the use of computers in automating business record keeping systems was in full swing. In fact, computation was, at this point, a fairly minor use of computer power. The computer resources used, for example, to compute your pay check are minor compared to the processing necessary to get the information ready for the computation and producing the paycheck once the computation is completed. If the name of these machines was updated along with their function, they would have been called automaters rather than computers. But, that did not seem very important at the time. So the old name stuck.

The point that I would like to close this piece with is - the computational power of computers led to the use of computers for automation. And this theme of computer usage leading to greater usages will be expanded upon in subsequent posts.

How Long Will The Information Age Last?

Alvin Toffler published a book in 1980, called The Third Wave, which caught the attention of the mass market as well as numerous academics. In this book, he attempted to explain the turmoil we were experiencing in the 1960's and 1970's as the third wave of change for human civilization. More specifically, he saw the evolution of human civilization as undergoing three major transformative revolutions. The first was the agricultural revolution. The second was the industrial revolution. And the third (the third wave) was a transition to a post industrial society. This post industrial society has become known as the Information Age.

I am neither a staunch supporter nor a staunch critic of Toffler's characterization. On the positive side, he provides a thought provoking characterization of the evolution of civilization. It is easy to understand and it got a lot of people thinking about what was going on. On the down side it is one of many, many possible characterizations and I always have a bit of trouble when authors include the present in their historical perspectives. That said, he did popularize, although not coin, the term Information Age.

I think that most people tend to accept the fact, free of critical reflection, that we are in the Information Age. It is not clear to me that this is true. But if it is, we can ask how long will the information age last and what will come next?

The agrarian age lasted thousands of years while the industrial age lasts only hundreds. If progress is speeding up and we can draw on the patterns of the previous ages, then the information age should last only decades. If this is the case, then something new ought to be coming along very shortly. What is it?

I don't want to fall into the same trap that I just criticized Toffler for and provide a historical perspective that includes the present and the near future. I do think, however, we can look at patterns from the past to the present and provide reasonable speculations on what might be coming next. Over the next few posts I am going to look at the evolution of computer applications from the automation of the 1960's to the social interaction technologies of 2010 and see if we can find any useful patterns.