It’s been one of those months where several ideas seem to congeal all at once. Last year I conducted usability interviews with students where I asked them if they were worried about the authority of the documents they were finding. 100% of that sample said they were not. That made little sense to me until this month when I received my copy of Weinberger’s Everything is Miscellaneous and also stumbled upon the idea of Social Proof.
I vividly remember learning in Library School that everything is not miscellaneous. That point was brought up repeatedly and emphatically. But if that’s true, why is the rest of the Internet blithely ignoring us? It seems that Librarians have lost the authority to assert the claim because the users have routed around us and built their own structures based on miscellany.
From Everything is Miscellaneous:
[The business value of content organization] creates a conundrum for businesses as they enter the digital order. If they don’t allow their users to structure information for themselves, they’ll lose their patrons. If they do allow patrons to structure information for themselves, the organizations will lose much of their authority, power, and control.
The Paradox is already resolving itself. Customers, patrons, users, and citizens are not waiting for permission to take control of finding and organizing information. And we’re doing it not just as individuals. Knowledge–its content and its organization–is becoming a social act. [p. 133]
Our users aren’t waiting on Information Scientists to organize their world because they are their own authorities. For a vivid representation of this zeitgeist, see this photo of street art found via StumbleUpon:
In Cialdini’s book Influence: the Psychology of Persuasion he talks about the enormous influence of Social Proof. Here’s the cartoon version found on page 120 (it reminds me strongly of how Digg, Del.icio.us, and other tagging systems work) :
In that cartoon, I love how even the Gods (Angels, whatever) have to start paying attention eventually. This type of behavior is happening all over the place. Take for example the ongoing effect the internet is having on Journalism. Old-school journalists are being forced to start paying attention to the opinions and reporting of bloggers, their own opinion pages are losing authority, their classified advertising model is basically dead, and it’s all because of the phenomenon addressed in that cartoon. It’s simply more profitable for a user to pay attention to their peers than to traditional authorities.
According to Cialdini, what’s going on is the “awesome influence of the behavior of similar others” [p. 152], i.e. Social Proof. By now we all know the drill for finding “similar others”: in order to find anything on your topic, consult with others similarly interested (usually via wikipedia, the popularity indexing of Google, Digg, Technorati, etc., maybe even a bibliography.) The technique is so successful, why worry about the authority of what you’ve found?
It seems clear to me that some type of social similarity ranking mechanism needs to be made available by librarians for their patrons. Either that or we wait around for them to build their own, because they will and they are.
Afterwards:
DoshDosh has a good writeup on Social Proof from a marketing perspective.
Researcher Nikhil Bhatla has a highly technical (but fascinating) take.
Columbia professor Duncan Watts appears to be researching in this space.
Another business-related writeup, this time from Take Back Your Brain!
3 Comments
Hi,
I stumbled upon your blog when searching for info on GEMS. Yours is a refreshing voice for information specialists and educators. I’ve grown weary of the K-12 blogosphere dominated by librarians desperately in search of the next big thing. You’re asking the big questions in a humorous, intelligent way.
As a library media specialist (yes, I have both an MLIS and teaching certificate resulting in a mildly split personality), I too read Weinberger’s piece and tried to rouse the interest of my colleagues by posting on a listserv. There was little interest; this concerns me. How does the revolution change the role of the librarian? Do we begin to teach tagging? Shouldn’t I teach how to use Google instead of Boolean logic in a world dominated by KWOC searching? Does it even matter what I teach?
As you point out we need a social ranking system: “…we wait around for them to build their own, because they will and they are.” Postmodernism, where everything and everyone is relevant, meet information “science”. It’s a future, a now, where everyone is relevant but us.
Thanks for the comment Laura. I’m still optimistic enough to think that Librarians still have relevancy, but what I’m not sure about is the breadth and depth of it. My guess is that our relevancy is tied very closely to our users (which may be a redundant thing to say …)
cool site
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[...] I outlined earlier, Social Proof relies on the “awesome influence of the behavior of similar others” in a way that’s illustrated in this cartoon from Cialdini’s book Influence: the [...]
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[...] Library with the Lead Pipe has inspired me to try and expand on some thoughts on the importance of social proof. I especially like their third category of learning objects: CATEGORY 3. Provide students with MORE [...]
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