you are on the money

and as for gordon:
i played around with high trust games with kids
and belief is a necessary part of it
and when it works
boy it works well :)

When I say social systems, I am assuming positively functioning social systems. I think we’d agree that a system that has bullying, intolerance and so on is not positively functioning. Those behaviours can be directly put at the feet of a lack of effective relationships and poorly constructed social identities. Broken social systems exist, but that isn’t what we want inside of a healthy business.

Fixing the relational causes fixes the behaviours, which are of course due to the beliefs in the first place – the usual social psychology dualism. Mark shows one half of that dualism in his book, but I think you’ll find that he recognises that the broader academic context supports the other side too. It is a question of degrees and context.

I’d agree “Social media” folk often fail to distinguish between the instrumented relationships found in the work place and traditional friendships (although I worry that the term “social media folk” sounds a little pejorative!). Workplace relationships are different, but they do still fall under the usual work place constructs (both Penn and the University of Surrey have done some good studies).

Social technologies are indeed just another communication channel in some ways. They certainly aren’t inherently democratic (hence my comments about socialism!), and Clay Shirky made some very good observations on that front post US elections. Using the tools is necessary, but not sufficient. There needs to be cultural change along side the deployment of the tools. The amplification provided by social media can be a useful tool to aid that change process. Like all technologies, it is about the execution, not just the tools. Email started out so promisingly!

Then, you say “Social systems require trust, purpose and commonality to persist.” If that were true, phenomena like bullying, intolerance, and gangs would wither away. But they don’t. In many cases, they are sustainable, resilient and contagious. It seems to be a very common failing among “social media” folk that they associate the term with friendship, and trust, and general niceness, but the “social” includes all the ways in which people relate to one another, and organize ourselves into groups.

Social technologies enable us to amplify conversations and reshape communication practices. They dramatically reduce the cost of giving lots of people access to lots of information. But they aren’t inherently democratic and honest, and they need not tip the balance in favour of democracy or honesty.

Patchwork Elephants in the Enterprise Ecosystem On Tuesday night David Terrar and I ran the first Social media in Enterprise session (#smie on Twitter), as part of London’s Social media Week (and Benjamin Ellis took some pictures). We only thought…