Relativity and Society; Street Vending, Spam, and the Social Universe

Before I dive into some work, I wanted to write about something I was thinking about as I was walking down High Street yesterday. That I was thinking about it when I was operating only on relative time is interesting, but completely unconscious.

Polygamy of Attention

I was watching humans interact on a busy street, even as I was a part of it. There were a variety of dances going on; I think a good analog to a busy street is polygamy. When surrounded by a few people, the degree of polygamy is low - the more people, the higher the degree of polygamy. Take the street vendors, for example. When you think of a street vendor, you probably think of a '1 to 1' relationship between customer and vendor. But the vendor sees a 'many to one' relationship - so the vendor is polygamous. And if you're a typical customer, you check more than one vendor - so the customer is polygamous as well. Toss in the fact that the street vendors have to deal with police (they aren't supposed to be there, so they move everything when the police show up), you have a different relationship that the street vendor is involved in. They are always on the lookout for customers, and they are always on the lookout for the police..

To help with dealing the police, the street vendors have a network established. They have lookouts, which alert the rest of the network when the police are coming. Thus they have a third relationship, which is with each other in a sort of cooperative. In the same manner, they keep an eye out for people who would steal from them (which looks insanely easy to do were it not for the network).

The street vendors spend most of their day keyed up to make sales, to move everything before the police arrive, competing with each other while working with each other... It can get complicated really quickly when a race condition comes into play: A sale with the police coming, a thief when the police are coming (and you can't report the theft to the police because then you are admitting having sold where you shouldn't be selling), a thief when there is a sale happening.

Thieves know this stuff. They will wait for a form of race condition within the attention span of the vendor, and find a way to leverage it to take something. Maybe there will be a fight or a staged fight. Maybe when the police are coming, the street vendors will have things fall off of their boxes and cots that they can swoop down and gather.

Polygamy of attention. I suppose all the bras I saw on the street had me thinking about that; there always seems to be a large number of bras involved in street vending on High Street in San Fernando. Ugly things, really, that are baked with ultraviolet within the concrete oven of High Street, but it's interesting that vendors have so many of them. In an odd way, it's heartening to know that there might actually be that many breasts in Trinidad. I digress (as usual), but that points to another thing - successful vendors know their market, and pay attention to what people buy and at what price. When they go to their suppliers, they don't necessarily look for quality; they look for what people will buy and find it at a price where they can make a profit and where they can also make a profit in selling the product. If people want bras that look like two polyester bags sewn together with a harness, sell it to them.

Oh, and then there's the 'hot ting' factor. If the vendor is male, and a 'hot ting' passes, that's another distractor which forms a real bridge towards polygamy.

A Pool Of Attention

Everyone has a certain amount of attention that they share out amongst various things. Generally speaking, the more people involved, the less attention everyone gets. But like most things commonly spoken of in quantity, there's also the quality factor. Quality of attention is a different matter altogether. 5 minutes with a friend is probably more quality attention than 5 minutes with a street vendor. Each person has a relative value system when it comes to attention. There are generalities, of course, but each person is different.

Marketing focuses on the generalities so that it can sell more things to more people. Some people confuse this with democracy, especially on the internet, but marketing and democracy are separate. Democracy is supposed to be about thoughtful choice, marketing is about creating a need and filling it with things. In marketing, like democracy, the majority rules - but not for the same goals. Marketing is for people who think that they are smarter than you to sell you stuff. Democracy as it is practiced is not too different from marketing, but it's not supposed to be the same.

But every day, every person has a certain amount of time they spend paying attention to things. Out of that pool of attention, they decide how they will pay attention, even if the decision is not to decide. Marketers study things that will catch attention. They'll use bright colors, loud music, sex, and whatever else works to get their product within reach of your wallet - and if you can't afford it, there's a stress for some people there as well.

Tieing This to the Internet

Blogs are interesting in this regard. They have a tendency to have huge accumulated blogrolls, that are simply humanly impossible to keep track of. Nobody here can tell me that Doc Searls keeps track of everyone in his blogroll every day. I've seen the man check email as well, skimming a sizable amount of unread messages for things that leap out at him - maybe he looked at who sent it, maybe he looked at the subject, maybe it was a combination of both - but based on how he skimmed, he selected certain messages he would read. That stands out in my memory, the volume of messages and his selection process. To date, I haven't gotten a response from Doc even when I worked with him. Maybe I didn't rate, and maybe my subject lines sucked.

To help us with this - with email - software packages have email filters that are set up that stick things in different places so you can find messages easier. Why do that? Because you can skim at a glance who has written and decide how you will use your relative time. Your attention.

If you go to a page with 5 hyperlinks, which do you click on if you click on one? The one you value, of course.

The Email Issue

I do it this way (it didn't look like Doc did it this way), but I put weight on *who* writes. I have rules and separate folders for everyone I correspond with. No kidding.

At a glance, I can see who wrote and based on who wrote, I prioritize who I read. Some people who are known 'broadcasters', who never read responses when they are writing, get checked when I have a dull moment. One guy has 18 unread messages in one of my folders simply because he annoys the crap out of me though he does nothing really wrong. He just never seems to have something to say that I value, so he's the red headed stepchild of my inbox. Other emails from people I have dialog with get answered almost immediately because I value their communication. Family always gets read, but responses aren't always done quickly because they may be long and involved, and keep me from doing other things that are also important.

Funny how that all works. People who I have discussions with come first, people who broadcast and don't seem to read responses that they are sent come last. It gets further subdivided. And reading all of these emails takes attention.

Dragging it back to the street - the street vendors have a sense of who will buy, and who won't buy. Who will have a monetary dialog with them and who will not.

Back in the world of the internet, certain companies send out Spam in volume, steal not only bandwidth but also attention, in the hope that someone will buy whatever they are peddling. It's like playing loud music at 3 a.m. when everyone is sleeping. A poll of people who are awake at 3 a.m. where the music is playing will tell you that they don't mind - but they are a minority. The majority, who are harder to poll, don't like it.

Social Relativity

As all of this had me thinking about 'social gravity' yesterday - and it's something I'm going to spend more time thinking about. With 'social gravity' come 'social vectors', 'social orbits' and all this other weird stuff. If anything, it will be an interesting exercise... but what I probably will never be able to explain is the phenomenon we saw here on this planet centuries ago: Where people on a planet think that they are the center of the universe. For some reason, people think the same of 'social planets'. When planets collide, we get stuff like this whole Middle East problem.

Perhaps the answer is that we need someone to play Galileo in each 'social planet', and go to jail for saying, 'we are not the center of the social universe'. Even popular things aren't the center of the universe, much less the solar system. The center of the solar system is what we all orbit around, the sun, and we don't believe that there is life there. That's sort of convenient, isn't it? :-)

Definitely worth more thought, but I have a prototype to toss together. I have a feeling I'll revisit this.

Stay sane.

Image at top is of a [t:Great Kiskedee] and really doesn't have much to do with this except, perhaps, being something looking back. You can see the original image here.