The-Greenman.net

I drank a good bit last night. I drank to forget just how bad my Drupal 5 presentation at Minibar was. After years of public speaking practice I realise that I have just been in a comfort zone - speaking to the same group of people for 3 years does not actually count as public speaking, because they are no longer the public. Anyway, this is not a post about letting myself down, this is about a conversation that happened many hours later when the booze had done it's work.

Dot is a pretty clued up girl. He has been thinking about, and living within, social networking systems for most of her life - and has a knack for buzzwords that work. Some time this morning, in the corner of the pub, we ended up discussing the fact that associations within online social networking systems are (almost) always positive. In the case of EBay, this gets a little blurry because anything less than 100% counts as a slur, but that is a different kind of system. In real life however, social networks are often defined, not by who is in them, but by who is NOT in them.

More choice is not all it's cracked up to be. Too many options end up hiding what is good. In our networked culture, it's not more choice that matters, it's less choice.

One of the foundations of our new networked hypersociety is the limitlessness of options. If we want more possibilities, we just have to turn them on. Less choice is not about the lack of possibilities, it's about distributed decision making. I want to make use of the skill and depth of knowledge in my network by outsourcing as much of the thinking as possible to my peers.

I am no expert, well, not to most people in most things. There are some domains in which I am happy with my judgement, but I am the first to admit that my skills are limited. So, why should I not allow someone else to decide for me if they are more equipped to discern the differences between the options?