This blog is an ad. If you don’t like advertising then you might want to go elsewhere.

This blog is an ad for – well, for me actually.

I’m not a journalist and I never claimed to be one. I don’t particularly have any answers and, further, I very rarely claim to have any.

Sometimes someone will spoon feed me information ahead of other people, or I’ll luck out and notice some little blip of news that seems relevant and I’ll post it because I also find it interesting. This makes me a flak. Someone “spins me” and if I buy the spin I reprint it, and I usually do so because it benefits me and my beliefs.

Sometimes I “get” my own stuff. I broke the story on the launch of Web.Alive, for example, but that will hardly go down in the annals of history. I also made Mitch Kapor’s life insanely difficult by being the first to pounce on his “The frontier days are over” comment but what did that really do other than create a moment of slightly hysterical hand-wringing?

I don’t write much that’s particularly new and I recycle memes and information from elsewhere. If I were to track down the sources of all those memes I typically find they’re based on, well, some Tweet, or some video, or some report from some other blog.

It surprises me when someone posts something in the comments of this blog such as this: “Actually Dusan Writer Metanomics is nothing more then a paid infomercial which makes you part of the weak link.”

And it surprises me not because I get all huffy and defensive but rather because I wonder: “Well, what did you THINK it was?”

Of course this blog is a paid infomercial. It’s entirely paid for by ME and my motivations are to sell myself and to promote things that I believe in and work in and have a vested interest in promoting. Did you think this was the New York Times?

I’ve spent about 4,000 hours writing this blog (the equivalent of two working years, written almost entirely at 5 in the morning and at midnight, but I’m not complaining) and have written the equivalent, now, of a book the length of TWO editions of War and Peace, and War and Peace was a bloody long book.

The investment I’ve made is my own and you, in return, make a significant investment in reading what I write.

I don’t usually get to the point. I don’t usually contribute any startling new fact. My opinions are biased and loosely formed. And my influence is negligible: I don’t create memes that other people link to. I don’t shape policy or technology investments, all I really manage to do is shape your opinion of me a little, for better or worse.

So your investment in me is, well, pretty stunning: for someone who doesn’t give you much in return for your time in terms of tangible, actionable information you make a pretty steep payment of your attention.

Broken Social
Social media is broken. And it’s broken because our definition of the form is increasingly driven by commercial interests who are trying to figure out how to ‘monetize’ our attention to each other.

The truth about social media is this: the Internet gave us a powerful means by which we could access information, and then it gave us a new tool set for connecting with each other. In paying attention to each other, we stopped paying attention to brands and, at some level, to the physical communities around us or to the report we’re supposed to be finishing while we poke each other in Facebook instead.

Corporations don’t like it when we don’t pay attention to them. I don’t like it when people who work with me spend more time in MSN than responding to my e-mails or dropping by for a chat, so I know this is true as both the person who isn’t being paid attention to and as the person who isn’t paying attention.

“Social media” however, has become the wrapper term not for “online connections” but rather the hope that corporations can still get a hand in the game. Social media holds out the promise that all of this socializing we’re doing is really a form of media like, say, television.

“Media” is a reassuring term.

Media has never been defined by its content but has always been defined by the channel by which that content is delivered. The medium is the message, the content is peripheral.

Companies hold on to the dim hope that if we call our online connections “media” that they’ll somehow still be able to participate in the channel and that the content itself can again become peripheral.

This view is reinforced by another thing that companies like, which is measurement and validity. Companies are built, industries maintained, stock markets operated on the core assumption that we can assess and predict the future based primarily on what has happened in the past. This creates a mind-set whereby we look for patterns, data, and algorithms to inform our choices and investments.

Social media comes along and wraps our online connections in both the term “media” (reassuring, and content-neutral other than as an audience aggregator) and in the promise that CODE can act as the new predictive technology. Forget Lotus Notes or financial accounting models: Google knows better now, it can even predict the next flu outbreak.

As a result, code itself starts to play a far greater role in informing our social connections because the companies who want to treat this as “media” need the reassurance of predictive math. And so, we find that our social connections are increasingly mediated by algorithms.

Facebook is one giant algorithm. Your relationship status is an algorithm. The choice of friends it suggests is driven by an algorithm. The ads it serves up are based on algorithms. The folder, descriptions and sharing conventions on photos are an algorithm.

Twitter is also an algorithm, but one that’s more subtle: it hasn’t been forced to try to make any money yet, although when it does, its algorithms will become increasingly evident, just as they’re becoming evident in those annoying Tweet feeds off of Google Buzz or search.

Google is, well, one single, giant, hungry, growling, take-no-prisoners algorithm.

Beyond the Algorithm
So let me ask you a question: would you say there’s a difference between how you interacted with people before and after you discovered virtual worlds?

Are you more tolerant? Do you feel more protective now than you did before about things like identity, privacy and commerce?

When Linden Lab does things that feel like they might upset your cultural frame of reference of what makes a “world” do you get anxious? Do you think about the implications? Do you complain or feel as if your world view is threatened?

Do you think about things like open source or content protection in new ways because of your participation in virtual worlds?

I’m curious. I know for me, everything has changed because of virtual worlds and Second Life in particular.

When I give presentations I often say the following: “Look, I could have come to my understanding of our lives online by simply blogging, or posting videos to youTube, but instead I found Second Life. It doesn’t matter where I came to my understanding, what’s important is that I was forced to think about things that I had never thought of before.”

But this statement is false. Because it neglects to say the following:

“But let me tell you something: what I discovered in a virtual world is NOT what I would have discovered on youTube or Facebook. What I discovered is that technology can still be in the service of our capacity for deep humanity. And I’ve come to believe that while we stumble around searching for the perfect algorithm, humanity may in fact be more evolved than we believe.

The techno totalists might claim that we’ll eventually all be subsumed into the algorithm of the machine, but virtual worlds shows us something different: our humanity, perhaps, has evolved past the constraints of our latest tools.

There are people who discover, in a virtual world, things that they don’t easily discover on Facebook: spirituality, self-awareness, their individual capacity for creativity, the meaning of connection, prejudices which were informed by physicality or geography, and their desire to both live outside the box and to maintain their voice WITHIN it.

Now I might either be a techno-utopian or simply deluded: maybe it’s too late, and the algorithm will have us all. But I’m going to hold out some hope that our capacity to be human still exceeds the capacity of machines to partition us, measure us, aggregate us and locate us.”

The Sociable Avatar
Now, this blog is an ad for me. Your comments are your own ads, your own memes, as it were: you’re sending signals about how you’d like to participate in this economy in which we pay attention to each other.

There are conventions, however, which drive this economic exchange between you and I, and yesterday I made a point, and it was a very specific and intended point: because I’d propose that the rules and conventions which drive much of social media (including the nearly pointless and uninformed recycling of other people’s content which comprises most of ‘blogging’) have a particular set of conventions as they’re associated to virtual worlds.

When those conventions are threatened, the community either discusses it quietly in back channels or, on occasion, pushes it out into the open, there’s a sort of swarming effect, but at the end of the day everyone pretty much nods politely and moves on.

The economic exchange for attention which you and I share through this blog is greatly informed by our shared understanding of BOTH virtual worlds and the conventions of blogging (and trolling and SEO optimizing and all the rest of it).

What’s intriguing is that I have many of the same conversations that we have on this blog in-world. And the tenor and flow of discussion has an entirely different feeling.

You see, I think there’s something about how we connect and communicate with each other in a virtual environment that reminds us that we don’t NEED to buy into the view that our social connections need to be so highly mediated by both commerce and algorithms.

We’ve discovered something unique, and what’s unique is that there is still room on the digital landscape for venues and interfaces which allow us to contribute to a more humanistic view of connection.

I don’t LIKE it when those conventions are interrupted by mass media’s (or other media, for that matter) attempt to codify or simplify this very human exploration of the power of technology. I don’t like it when people try to sap the power of the ambiguous from landscapes which are less driven by algorithms, and more by the ability to create new heuristics (which by their nature are not yet codified).

I’m of the belief that we’re at a unique inflection point: virtual worlds are about to become a lot larger a lot faster than people realize. And in the rest of the digital landscape, the algorithm hunters are trying to aggregate you, codify you and geo-locate you.

But because of our place as viewers of the rest of the world FROM a virtual world, maybe we can contribute something to the larger dialog about how our interface with technology can be in the power of our humanity and can remind us that it’s not the channels or the code, it’s the content and the connections that will help us to chart a course from the fierce urgency of now to the place where, as Cube said, “I see you.”