|
Commentary by Ralph Grabowski on Eugene Wei
|
|
Social media was first known as Web 2.0. Whereas the original Web connected us directly to corporations (recall the “No intermediaries!” rallying cry of 2000), the second generation would directly connect people to people. And it did.
And by doing do, we ate the apple.
At least corporations had to maintain a veneer of civility to keep customers attracted, and so living under Web 1.0 we all got along pretty well with one another. Other than the justified snarking that the Wild West of the Internet had been corporatized by intrusive advertising, how angry can you get in having pet food delivered free to your front door?
With Web 2.0, we are in a new micro-era in which even government is woke enough to worry about the impact of social media -- not only in how damaging the impact could be to the populace, but how it might keep politicians and hangers-on from getting into government and staying in power.
Now that we’ve had Web 2.0 under our belts for enough years, the questions of interest become:
- How do people become addicted to a social media outlet?
- What causes them to leave an addictive service,?
That we assume social media is addictive is now a given, supported by papers in the last year revealing the extent to which the facebooks of the world go to lure users psychologically into visiting repeatedly. To those who run social media sites, there is no virtue higher than finding newer and more insidious ways of locking users in their dungeons. (I feel that ‘dungeon’ is a better term than the less-innocuous-sounding ‘walled garden’; dungeons are indoors, gardens outdoors.)
People need to be addicted to return frequently during the day, instead of just occasionally, so that they are confronted by as many advertisements as possible, the lifeblood of the Internet.
- - -
Eugene Wei spent 20,000 words answering the questions, admitting that his blog entry “Status as a Service” probably needed an editor, which he did not have. I printed out the 26 pages and settled in for a long read.
Mr Wei used to be in charge of video at Oculus, was product head at Flipboard and Hulu, was employed by Amazon, worked briefly as a filmmaker, and graduated from Stanford, which is considered to be the Harvard for Silicon Valley. He now gets to pontificate, which is a fine place to be in life.
Here I co-mingle his thoughts with mine, and instead of taking 20,000 words I’ll do it in 1,200.
- - -
Mr Wei calls us “status-seeking monkeys.”
For most of our lives, we seek status. The younger we are, the more we seek it as we strain for a leg-up, surrounded by seven billion competitors. “Am I your favorite?” is the first status-seeking question we wonder about, even if it goes unasked.
The top users of social media are those who crave status the most: teenagers and twenty-somethings. The older we get, the less we need it as we attain our own status through our history of having a loving spouse, wonderful children married to great spouses, a nice home, good job, sufficient assets with which to retire. Assuming life went pretty well, we achieve sufficient status in the real world to satisfy us.
Status is craving a higher place in life. Rejecting vaccinations is a form of status seeking; making predictions for five years hence is a form of status seeking; getting coffee at Starbucks instead of McDonalds is status seeking.
The best social networks are the ones that do the best job in allowing we monkeys to gain digital status. The very best social networks, says Mr Wei, make you work for your status, whether it is clicking likes, mimicking dance moves, editing Instagram photos to perfection, selling yourself as an influencer, or being slave to YouTube productions. The most notorious may well be gaining elite status with airlines, as it requires spending a lot of money and consuming a lot of your time.
Working for status makes it more valuable to you, and makes it harder for your competitors to get it. This is intuitive to us, because we were designed for work that gives us purpose. About two billion people find purpose in working for status inside the ephemeral environs of Web 2.0.
No surprise then that government is turning working-for-status into a tool of suppression, as we are hearing these days out of Communist-run China. Some 23 million apparently can no longer travel, because a computer program determined that their status was insufficiently patriotic. That government records statistics such as 6.7 million individual GPS coordinates a day (in one province alone).
We now understand how social media corporations make their services addictive: it’s only partly the network effect (i.e., lots of members). It is also the status effect: working towards a status to stand out from others. When I post a brilliantly-composed photo on Instagram, I get 1 like; when my daughter posts light-leaked images, she gets 85 likes, and I grind my teeth in impotent irritation and vow to outdo her -- until I remember my vow that I will not be a points whore.
The kinds of photos that get likesWhat Causes the Addicted To Leave?
Users try a social media service because their friends are on it; they join in as they become addicted to gaining status, and then stay because it provides utility. This the central thesis to Mr Wei’s paper.
Utility means “providing something useful.”
Mr Wei says that the breakthrough for Facebook came with the institution of Live Feed, which collects everything from everyone you know (and don’t know) into a continuously scrolling feed that displays updates all day long and all night long. This is Facebook’s utility, its padlock on the mental dungeon. Attempting to grab the contact info of your friends and friends’ friends -- legally or otherwise, it doesn’t matter -- is only about adding utility to the feed and making it more addictive.
 Growth of Facebook in MAUs (monthly average users; source statista)
If social media depends on a scarcity of users attaining high status and also in providing utility (usefulness), then a collapse comes about when a service lacks sufficient scarcity and utility. Jealousy takes over when you see everyone else getting the same precious gold ring; this feeling is followed by disdain, which is why MySpace collapsed.
Besides experiencing huge growth or collapse, social media offerings can become stagnant, Twitter being the best example. It boasts status scarcity (you have to be good at expressing thoughts in fewer than 281 characters) and utility (fast breaking news; trains of thought; witty comments). But it cannot grow above its 400 million, because its structure makes it hard for late starters to gain large numbers of followers (high status). Mr Wei says, “The number of people who enjoy crafting witty 140 and now 280-character info nuggets is finite. Every network has some ceiling on its ultimate number of contributors, and it is often a direct function of its proof of work.”
 Twitter's stagnancy in MAUs
Proof of work is the streak of effort you make to attain and maintain high status, like pounding out a lot of tweets or posting a lot of dance moves.
"We are so wealthy that we have become bored enough to turn to status-seeking as a form of entertainment," is my wife’s contribution. "We are appalled when the Gap closes its stores.” Facebook will not collapse until a government forces it to disband Live Feed. As Web browser inventor Marc Andreessen noted, the network effect is devastating when it operates in reverse.
https://www.eugenewei.com/blog/2019/2/19/status-as-a-service
|
|
| Here are some of the most recent posts made to the WorldCAD Access blog:
- - -
Hexagon Manufacturing Intelligence holds its 3rd Manufacturing Intelligence Leadership Summit during HxGN LIVE 2019 at The Venetian in Las Vegas.
Also at the conference is Hexagon PPM, which acquired Bricsys last fall. I'm booked to attend June 11-13. hxgnlive.com/2019/about
- - -
Too many user conferences on at the same time, and there is overlap between people who would attend all three:
- LiveWorx from PTC is June 10
- Realize Live from Siemens PLM is June 10-13
- HxGN LIVE from Hexagon is June 11-14
- - -
ANSYS reports Q4 revenue of $415.4 million, and FY18 revenues of $1.29 billion, up 11% YoY. 50 years ago ANSYS brought the first structural solver to the market; since then they are working on simulating every physical process.
- - -
Open Design Alliance: is writing tutorials for programmers. The latest is: How to use Microstation .dgn line styles in a DWG file: www.opendesign.com/blog/2019/february/using-dgn-line-styles-dwg-file-part-4-4
- - -
Samsung begins mass production of 512GB embedded Universal Flash Storage for smartphones, with speeds of up to 2,100 MB/s.
- - -
Nemetschek Group division Bluebeam is to drop support of Revu for Mac soon. The reason: the cloud. Anthony Frausto has the details at architosh.com/2019/03/exclusive-bluebeam-dropping-mac-platform-pushing-saas-model-instead, including comments from Bluebeam.
- - -
A reader was puzzled as to what happened to Autodesk's A360 Desktop, as AutoCAD's help files say it exists, but he cannot access it. Turns out cloud software makes the best vaporware: knowledge.autodesk.com/search-result/caas/downloads/content/autodesk-360-desktop-download-and-release-notes.html
- - -
A drawback to most VR goggles is that they weigh a couple of pounds. Ocutrx Vision Technologies has a set that weighs 200 grams, less than half a pound, and uses cellular connectivity and has eye tracking.
- - -
Bricsys ships BricsCAD v19.2, the major mid-release update with
- Blockify command now handles 2D entities like text, mtext, solids, traces, hatches, leaders, multileaders, and block references
- The manipulator widget now rotates, moves, copies, scales, and mirrors polyline segments
- More point cloud commands, additional BIM functions, and 3D modeling capabilities
|
|
Re: Varjo Targets Industry With its VR-1 Headset
I really liked your first sentence. Having been head of design in the 80s, it's interesting that such still hangs true.
- Lloyd Philpott
- - -
You wrote, “Today Mr Lanier warns about the abuses of technology. 'The solution is to double down on being human," he now says'.”
Trouble is, that pioneer’s idea -- that everyone should get micro payments as the solution to big tech’s expanding theft of our data -- simply legitimizes the hideous use they’re making of it. The goal is to automate us. (See theguardian.com/technology/2019/jan/20/shoshana-zuboff-age-of-surveillance-capitalism-google-facebook.)
Douglas Rushkoff's Team Human is the latest book in this new field. It is a manifesto aimed to wake us up to notice, understand, and legislate before the trap closes on us all. See rushkoff.com/books/team-human-book.
Shoshana Zuboff's The Age of Surveillance Capitalism shows examples of the future construction site, a mixed machine-human environment to demonstrate big tech’s aim to nudge, peer-pressure and reputation-rate us humans into somatised, predictable machine-conformity. See profilebooks.com/surveillance. Smart cities would be another.
The 2036-predicting 100th issue of AECMagazine is full of such scary covert visions from our familiar CAD companies (see https://www.aecmag.com/pdf/, after registration). Technology can manifest itself as super pro-human, but stock valuations mandate lucrative new anti-human directions for it. I wonder, for example, how cuddly BricsCAD’s so-far pro-human pioneering AI will fare now that it has been acquired by large-corporation Hexagon?
- Tom Foster
Tom Foster Architecture, England
The editor responds: I've been re-reading Byte magazine from the early-to-mid 1980s, and back then it was all about figuring out the uses for technology. It was all was beneficial, except for the cost (which was expensive). When I bought my first personal computer (1983), I saw it as a relief from the bondage of manual calculations and manual typewriters.
Now that technology has been around long enough for the dark side to emerge as a powerful force, I wonder what the next generation will make of it?
With regards to peer pressure, I see it most in the area of BIM. With regards to smart cities, Google is getting much push back from citizen and government agencies to its proposals in smart-city-fying a portion of the waterfront belonging to the city of Toronto.
I'll be attending the Hexagon annual conference in June, and so will be looking for clues of the place of Bricsys in Hexagon.
- - -
Nothing on scanning and point cloud processing into CAD?
- CADman
The editor replies: The folks at Business Advantage who run the survey tell me that they are open to additional topics, and so you can write the contact listed at the end of the article with you suggestion.
- - -
I like the work that Business Advantage does about technology adoption. Some of the models and questions they use are very similar to work I did at the Software Engineering Institute back in the 1980s.
I agree that their work can suggest trends. But it is important to note that they do not have a "panel" to whom they can ask the same questions over time. All they can do is to assure that the survey respondents in a given year are similar demographically to a previous year. Then you have to assume the group is progressing through their knowledge and adoption processes in a similar manner. Good, but not optimal.
- Stan Przybylinski, vice president
CIMdata, Inc
The editor responds: I always wonder how seriously survey repliers take their answers. There is, after all, no penalty for answering wrong.
- - -
Thank you for the write-up and your practical perspectives on CAD Trends, really appreciate it and hope it brings value and interest to your readers!
- Bill Gordon, vp of business development
Business Advantage, England
|
|
Should you wish to support upFront.eZine through PayPal, then the suggested amounts are like these:
Should Paypal.me not operate in your country, then please use www.paypal.com and the account of grabowski@telus.net.
Or mail a cheque (US$ or CDN$ only, please) to upFront.eZine Publishing, Ltd., 34486 Donlyn Avenue, Abbotsford BC, V2S 4W7, Canada.
|
|
"It's always awkward writing your own bio. I know you're supposed to brag a little, but I always want to brag a lot."
- jon gabriel (@exjon on Twitter) |
|
|
|
Recent Comments