itsasickness celebrates interesting people – the most interested people in the world: the sick.

When I met my wife, it struck me that she was the most interesting person I had ever met in my life.  When we talked, she geeked out about her current obsessions.  At the time they were Django Reinhardt, her friend Frankie Manning, John Donne, the chemistry of nutrition.  And I geeked out about my then-current obsessions which were the math of classical Indian ragas, politics, film.  We talked all night and into the morning. I would have married her that very day.

Everybody knows somebody who is the most interesting person they have ever met.  These people are interested.  The people who are obsessed with stuff are beyond interesting, they are sick!  Such people make the world less boring, and I believe, 100% more awesome.  itsasickness is about them.  The sick.

Maggie is obsessed with Jazz.
Barnaby’s obsessed with Apple products.
Alan’s obsessed with his dogs.
My mom is obsessed with tomatoes.

Interesting people are interested in stuff. 

But are you sick?  That’s the question.

This branded content, the term for products figuring prominently without being overtly sold, is reminiscent of “The Hire,” a series of short films by BMW that featured its cars. Produced in 2001 and 2002, the films had directors like Ang Lee and John Woo and included actors like Clive Owen and Don Cheadle.

The story is about how this website called Massify (where amateur filmmakers vie for the chance to shoot artsy commercials for products) teamed up with an Oscar winning production company Killer Films who chose the best script.

“This is a model that Massify is trying to replicate,” said Jon Kaplowitz, co-chief executive of Massify, which is based in Manhattan. “Nobody watches commercials anymore, and it’s cost-prohibitive to buy ads online, so we approached Ace [Hotel] with the idea that if we created branded-entertainment pieces, then the content itself would be a marketing vehicle for the hotel.”

First, Dunbar’s Number is a network theorem that states that individuals can sustain meaningful relationships with 148 people.  Beyond that point, network salience becomes much too difficult to sustain strong ties among nodes in the network.  Some neurologists and primatologists postulate that our threshold for juggling social connections is directly related to the size of our neocortex – which is bigger in women. I digress.

The other clue is my continued rumination about Jyri Engeström’s great post from back in the day about object centered sociality, and the subsequent research I did about Scandinavian Activity Theory as it relates to the sociology of information systems.

People don’t just connect to each other, they connect through a shared object that resonates with them both.  Shared objects are the reason why people affiliate with specific others and not just anyone.

The way those new ideas gelled with my undergrad studies of Communities of Practice in educational psychology class really are what led to the formulation of itsasickness: the obsession network.

Whatever the case, beyond this Dunbar’s Number threshold, people become disoriented in conversation – they literally can no longer relate to the object that brought about the conversation in the first place.  The very exchanges of conversation, the “likes”, the LOLs, the emoticons, only serve to further distance us from the object because more and more participants in the ‘conversation’ are from outside of the user’s immediate circle of friends.

Quite often, I have a hard time accepting that strangers (whose senses of humor I don’t know) could possibly be talking about the same thing in the same way in which I’m talking to my friends.  Homophily gives us tunnel vision sometimes.

Another clue:
How many people an individual communicates with probably exists somewhere between their total network size and their support network. Some research by Gueorgi Kossinets and Duncan Watts observing all email communication at a university shows that the number of ongoing contacts hovers somewhere between 10 and 20 over a 30 day period.

Another clue:
The average facebook user has 130 friends which is too close to Dunbar for comfort.  This helps explain why facebook is pushing Pages so hard. FB Pages can be sponsored.

So, it makes sense that I’m disoriented by the size of our networks on facebook. The feeling that I increasingly can’t relate to what’s happening around me is akin to boredom.

If objects are what we talk about with people, then is the number of objects we can simultaneously socialize around also 148?  I would hypothesize: probably. Actor Network Theory talks about the the interoperability of objects and people in complex networks, and in my experience, this is true.  This is why memes like David After Dentist are so resonant in our internet culture: they provide the long strands that connect geographically disparate and socially removed circles of friends.  These joke memes garner tens of millions of views (DAD has 62,436,953).  Who watches the video? Probably half a million circles of friends.

If half a million people, reaching out to their immediate friends will result in 20% of the country getting touched, then facebook may be the most effective free delivery system ever.

But what can be delivered effectively online? Things like “David After Dentist,” I assume – specifically, portable and permalinked objects that have a temperament which is immediately understood: “this is funny”, “this is gross” , “this is beautiful.”

This also makes sense when looking at the array of successful “defined-temperament” community websites; sites like Wonkette.com or TMZ.com or CollegeHumor.com. These can maintain conversation threads of thousands because the temperament is constant: it’s always a story of “conservatives are nuts” or “celebrities are nuts” or “laugh at this guy getting kicked in the nuts.”

Objects can connect more people than people can.

Itsasickness keeps users oriented toward the objects of obsession.  The objects themselves exist in a worldview temperament that is constantly reiterated all over the site.  Once again, for good measure: “This is sick” = your sickness makes you extraordinary.

Many internet theorists speak of social networks online as a ‘map of the relationships between individuals.’ Politech thinkers and online organizers like myself, have taken these principles and used them to inform the social software we built for campaigns and political advocacy organizations with mixed success.

We strategists messed up.  The way users relate to social networks is now more refined and purposeful.  And today, in a post-Facebook world, if the purpose of your online network is definite: like ‘winning an election,’ or successful commerce, you had better NOT build an interpersonal network – Facebook is going to be the interpersonal network King for a long time.  Get yourself object-oriented.  As I said last year:

Social networks that are object-centered are a better match for politics online than most of what we have seen previously – which has been mostly based on an understanding of ‘social as interpersonal.’

Good social networks are NOT the most personal networks. My old adage “conversation is king” left aside the object – the subject of conversation – the meaning. It’s all about object-centered networks and actor-network models for me now.

The difference between how we design software for these two kinds of networks is vast.

Flickr got it right. Flickr makes photos into the objects of sociality on its network. YouTube similarly facilitates video clips as objects of sociality.

Basically, it’s not about encouraging discussion. It’s about owning the object of discussion.

Since quitting politics, I’ve gone to work architecting an object-centered network Advomatic built that I’m really proud of.  The way it owns the object of discussion is by placing the object within a clearly branded temperament and point of view. itsasickness.  Your obsession makes you interesting.

Currently, the user profile page on social networking sites is loaded with pictures of your friends. That’s because a friend-centered network is a glorified inbox.

What itsasickness.com creates is NOT friendships and easy communication – that’s been done and won by FB.  The success of our site hinges on the individual’s passion for her obsessions.  People don’t just connect to each other, they connect through an object, a thing they both have thoughts and feelings about.  If they’re obsessed with it, they talk about it a lot with feelings of ecstasy.

In addition, the incentive for participation, the surrogate object which over-arches the user-generated obsession groups, is the potential for a bit of stardom on film.

The portion of the website which we’re still building is a WebTV show starring Alan Cumming as host.  Mix Antiques Road Show with Metafilter crossed with The Gong Show plus early Carson, lace it with acid and shoot it out of a circus cannon.

One last thing:  The MacArthur Foundation Report from November 2008, entitled “Living and Learning with New Media Summary of Findings from the Digital Youth Project” features a chapter called ‘Genres of Participation with New Media – Geeking Out.’  Geeking Out really summarizes what my favorite kind of people do on the internet.

In my opinion, Geeking Out is what makes the whole interwebs worthwhile.

Commodity fetishism is not unique to capitalist societies, since commodity trade has occurred in one way or another for thousands of years; but in Marx’s opinion, commodity fetishism became pervasive especially in capitalist society, because this kind of society is based almost totally on the “production of commodities by means of commodities”.

That means that market relationships influence almost everything that people do, something which was not the case in pre-capitalist societies, where commerce was much more restricted. Marx was talking about object-centered sociality elevated to religious power.

In a hyper-capitalist society that is saturated with marketing distribution channels, commodity fetishism is also understood as reification, the “thing-ification” of relationship forming boundary objects.

Boundary objects are the objects at the periphery of two different clusters of non-intersecting peoples.

In other words, what we love connects us. Marx wanted that thing to be the collective, but in the most countries, that thing is the stuff (money/products/fame) we covet. Building a personal network under a single banner – a collective forming banner – based on the stuff we covet is a backdoor to Marx by way of Madison Avenue.

Some network theorists would tell you that you need to genuinely reach a maven and thus achieve that elusive tipping point.

Key:

Clients sometimes ask folks like me how to get a lot of people to love their [whatever] so that they can fork over $.

Well, strategists like me can quack about actor network theory and post-ANT, and clustering along shared affinities all we want, but let’s be honest… as evidenced in the above clip, rule #1: Your shits gotta be good.

Things are going to have to change.

The ways in which Obama for America (OFA) 2.0 is phasing in it’s reinvention should serve to teach politech strategists that we all must rethink our orientation to social networks… but it won’t.

Barack Obama’s social network was an outlier whose success will likely not be replicated despite a multitude of copycat campaigns, pushed by uncreative and dishonest strategists who convince the bosses that they can bring back the Obama lightning.

Consider: a social network named MyBarackObama – clearly built around enabling personal affinity for Barack Obama – one that encouraged users to write about how Barack Obama made them feel even, was able to convince the nodes of the network and those outside the network (press / non-active citizens) that it wasn’t actually about promoting Barack Obama.

The campaign was instead about “us”… and if you really needed to be reminded, it was quick to point out that Obama was a different kind of candidate, so then, at it’s most base, MyBO was a different kind of cult of personality.

Some suggested it was a cult of personal empowerment and self-help.

But really, who cares? It was everything it needed to be for everyone it needed to touch in order for the principal to win. And he did. Importantly though, I don’t think the voice and thrust of that internal Social Network can be duplicated any time soon for a few major reasons:

• The ‘different kind of candidate’ card has now been played for the entire nation to see and digest.
• Obama, with his astounding celebrity status, and high favorability back in 2006 didn’t need to orient his SocNet into getting his message and name out. This is NOT common. Most candidates will have the opposite problem and will need to orient their operations into combatting that problem.
• The whole ‘candidate as a movement’ thing is exceedingly rare and increasingly difficult to sustain in our cynical age.
• Apropos to LinkedIn’s reorganization, the way we relate to social networks is becoming more refined and purposeful.

I am rethinking political social networks heavily considering LinkedIn’s example, because I believe that the failure of most social software to deliver hot networks to the polls or to the barricades outside Congress, has less to do with poorly architected software (although much of the successful political software is janky and stupid) than it has to do with a fundamental misunderstanding of what politics requires in relation to how network-centric systems can serve politicking.

Successful politicking is about action not conversation. I used to be all about how Conversation was king. But what was the point? In my strategic frameworks, the object came later, at the end of pre-planned conversation sequences that were scripted to “arrive” at the object. Maybe the object was a vote, or a civic action, or the purchase of a butter substitute, didn’t matter.

It was a fine idea for reluctant activists with a great deal of time for kevetching. But ROI was too low. Whatever the object eventually was, the fish ladder of greater participation was wrong.

Social networks that that are object-centered are a better match for politics online than most of what we have seen previously – which has been mostly based on an understanding of ’social as interpersonal.’

Good social networks are not the most personal networks – if it were, Friendster would still rule. My old adage “conversation is king” leaves aside the object – the subject of conversation – the meaning. It’s all about object-centered networks and actor-network models for me now.

The difference between how we design software for these two kinds of networks is vast.

Network sociologist Karin Knorr Cetina, activity theorists, actor-network theorists like Arthur Tatnall, and post-ANT academics, all write about ’socio-material networks’, or ‘activities’ or ‘practices’ instead of ‘networking’. These folks correctly make the case for object-centered sociality. Actor-network theorists consider the action of the network itself as an object central to any system.

ANT maps relations that are simultaneously material (between things) and ’semiotic’ (between concepts). It assumes that many relations are both material and ’semiotic’ (e.g. the interactions in a bank involve both people and their ideas, and technologies. Together these form a single network).
Actor-network theory tries to explain how material-semiotic networks come together to act as a whole (e.g. a bank is both a network and an actor that hangs together, and for certain purposes acts as a single entity). As a part of this it may look at explicit strategies for relating different elements together into a network so that they form an apparently coherent whole. wiki.

How these scientists understand what nodes in a network Do and How they behave carries valuable lessons for those of us who create social software or communication strategies for communities of political action. Especially in a post-MyBO online world where the old tricks won’t work.

Actor-centric networks and object-centered theory is an evolution from how most online politicos understand social networking and the read/write web. The goal previously being encouraging discussion (and maybe investment in the idea of the collective’s strength) but not ‘to the barricades’ level direct action. We have to reorient our networks.

That LinkedIn’s clever construction caused an early crisis of purpose – namely, users competing for rank as the grand poobahs of sociality – is indicative of how common this misinterpretation of ’social network’ was and remains even among the brainy experts. LinkedIn’s hooks for increased participation (e.g. ranking users by number of connections) worked for a while as users substituted ‘the game’ for an actual object.

But because the “surrogate object” was not designed into the funding of the website, LinkedIn scrambled to re-orient users around a new object: their actual jobs, resumes and all.

We see a similar re-orientation on OFA 2.0. The object is no longer our BO, it’s our Healthcare Reform, our EFCA, our Education Reform, our Energy Bill. These things are branded with Obama’s headshot but they are things, finally.

Flickr got it right. Flickr makes photos into objects of sociality on its network. YouTube facilitates video clips as objects of sociality. Eventful.com, Upcoming.org, focus on events as central objects.

The nascent social network frameworks that tried to have “place” as the object of sociality (e.g. iFob, brightkite, Nokia’s Plazes) are all susceptible to the common traps of social network facilitation: self-promotion, stalking, avoidance but they are on the right track.

As PDA’s increasingly track our proximity to physical spaces and each other, this is going to be extremely interesting from an online organizer’s perspective. In addition to what killed Dodgeball, this is also one of the more clever and value-added usages of Twitter that I’ve seen; Checking in on who from your buddy list is currently in a specific bar or other ‘third place.’ Relatedly, Jaiku application ideas are on my whiteboard right now.

Facebook’s public Wall, with it’s displays of hooks into a multitude of social interactions, most centering on objects: photos, videos, events, ambient awareness alerts, whatever you wanted – that was the key to FB’s success in my opinion.

Basically, it’s not about encouraging discussion. It’s about owning the object of discussion.

So, where do political social networking sites fit into this world? Largely, they don’t and it’s our fault:

• We need to construct more social networking systems for politech that are not based around building an army of fans.
• We should never encourage a circling of the wagons.
• We need to architect our networks outward.
• We should not use our network to so obviously build our email list.
• If your supporters are talking to each other about their feelings – even if they are feelings that you inspire – they are not helping you win.
• Our systems should facilitate subtle evangelism into thousands of object-centered networks.

For example, we don’t need to build “Lindy Hoppers for Candidate Jones” be it a group in our internal SocNet, or as a nicely-branded subsite. No, what Advocacy2.0 needs is fewer internal SocNets and more full-time network weavers. We need human staffers who use a websystem that helps them spread and track the pings and the status of the objects of the conversations.

A campaign’s network weavers should be empowered to find a few good candidates in niche social scenes to be surrogates. Network weavers should help these surrogates spread your message, and recruit for your events while leveraging their own hard-earned social capital inside those external object-oriented social networking websites.

One forum post by a respected dancer in Yehoodi that spreads your message and drops a few links is worth more than the money you’ll waste on “Lindy Hoppers for Candidate Jones” vaporware subsite or SocNet hobby group.

What used to be built as your internal social networks should actually be a tool that your weavers use elsewhere.

This has been blogged before, but it needs to be repeated because as somebody who designed social networking systems oriented in opposition to MyBO, I’m seeing a class of candidates and advocacy organizations falling for the ‘do what Obama did’ pitch. It will not work.

I believe that while this is a strategy that can win some primaries, it fails my test – a litmus inspired by Howard Dean. It doesn’t expand the voter pool enough beyond the grasstops and therefore it doesn’t markedly grow the Democratic brand. It doesn’t aim to increase civic participation among disaffected and disenfranchised. A class of campaigns built on last cycles’ technology doesn’t democratize political systems sufficiently with large infusions of fresh blood and new ideas.

Ultimately, I fear that internal Social Networking cult-of-personality systems with old online community-building strategies based in blogger ethics of conversation generation will feed into a political force that ensures safe incumbents for years to come.

That is not what I fight for. Not even when the incumbent is a Democrat.

[For a much more elaborate academic argument about object-centered sociality, see the chapter on 'Objectual Practice' by Karin Knorr Cetina in "The practice turn in contemporary theory"]

Robert Poe writes:

Advomatic application lets advocacy groups wage calling campaigns using an online interface.

…The recent battle over FISA (Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act) bill provided a perfect example of how VoIP can be a political-advocacy tool.

Enter Advomatic

…To pressure legislators to vote against the bill, Blue America turned to Advomatic LLC, a Web-development firm that had previously built a VoIP application for the presidential campaign of Sen. Christopher Dodd. Advomatic subsequently “abstracted” the application and turned it into a more general political-advocacy tool, according to Aaron Welch, a partner at the company. The Blue America FISA campaign was a trial run for the generalized application.

The application is a click-to-call service hosted on Advomatic’s platform, drawing on data that is customized for each campaign. Individuals who want to use the service click a link to a page that prompts them to enter their phone number and ZIP code. The application uses geolocation data to determine whom each individual should call, using a database of target legislators, and typically matches callers with officials who represent their particular areas.

A campaign-specific on-screen help script tells callers what they can say when they are connected. The application then initiates a call to the individual’s phone number. When the person answers, a recorded message says that they will be connected shortly and reminds them to be polite. The application then connects the two parties via a commercial VoIP service to the target phone number.

After the call ends, callers can fill in a reporting form, which lets them note, for example, whether the target supports or opposes the measure in question (or whether the person is uncommitted). There’s also a field for comments. The reporting provides data that the group running the campaign can use to follow up or change its strategy as appropriate.

Making the various elements such as phone numbers, geographical information, on-screen guides and reporting forms work together would be either impossible or impossibly cumbersome using conventional telephone technology. The fact that the calls are going out at VoIP rates is an added bonus.

So far this is a pretty good, albeit slightly techy encomium to our software. And then Robert Poe gets into our politics – which is where I am happy to read:

Advomatic will make the tool available for other progressive campaigns, according to Welch. With some further development, he added, the application could also support an online phone-bank effort that would allow volunteers to contact voters on behalf of candidates or parties. Such use would be more complicated because it would have to draw on large databases of voters, rather than limited lists of legislators.

Advomatic plans to carefully control which organizations and people it provides the service to. For one thing, Welch observed, unscrupulous individuals could use it for “dirty tricks,” calling citizens and delivering objectionable messages while pretending to represent someone else. Also, the company doesn’t want to see the application used in support of conservative candidates and causes. Blue America’s campaign against FISA, of course, ended in failure when the bill passed. But for click-to-call VoIP as a political tool, it was just the beginning.

Using the internet to distribute political power and decentralize levers of decision-making from a tiny clique of elected representatives to millions of real Americans is revolutionizing our civic life.

It would make as much sense to use this democratic webtool in order to advocate for undemocratic policies as it would to use a bomb to build a bridge.

That’s why Advomatic will never assist advocates for destruction.