Crossing the Chasm
...Was a wildly popular
biz book for the tech biz a few years ago, for good
reason. It described the dilemma of tech companies trying to convert early
success into lasting success. It's all your fault. And my fault. And the
fault of most people who know what "blog" means.
We're early adopters and
if a new product or service gets our attention, the company can experience
an immediate flash that doesn't pan out. Their hopes are dashed when the
growth stops and they wonder where the market is. The market heights they
seek are on a tall mountain across a deep chasm which they must cross
in order to climb higher. It turns out that lots of companies can win early
sales and 15 minutes of fame, but few have the will and resources to cross
the valley of the shadow of death that yawns before them.
Certainly if I'd foreseen the chasm dilemma in 1987, I'd not
have been the angel investor behind Dynamac, but what fun would that have
been?
Our nation has a cultural chasm to cross, the rift
between those who applaud our get tough stance with the world, vs. those
who aren't sure that we're tough enough to beat everybody we're now pissing
off with our bluster.
Books of a Feather
Jock Gill pointed
me to an amazing depiction of connections among books. As you've noticed,
Amazon and Barnes & Noble relates books to each other by noticing what
other books are bought by the buyers of any given book. One curious
reader,
Valdes
Krebs, wondered back in 1999 whether
there might be any useful insights by charting those associations. His latest
look at books, Divided
We Stand???, generated
an interesting insight illustrating the echo chamber phenomenon:
If only because he thought to lock down the domain orgnet.com,
you've got to admire Valdes Krebs, but his is a masterful connection of meaningful
dots. All the little squares represent books purchased at the same time as
the other books they're linked to. There
are two
echo
chambers depicted
here:
In the diagram above, two books are linked if they
were bought together at a major retailer on the web. I call these 'buddy
books'. A link was drawn if either book of a pair listed the other as
a buddy. The data made public by the retailer shows just the 'best buddies'
-- the strongest ties. Other patterns may emerge with investigation of
weaker ties. The data was gathered January 2003.
Using snowball sampling
-- following the connections between books -- two distinct clusters
emerge. There is only one book that spans both clusters.
Lightly-connected books, with two links or less, were removed. None of
the removed books played a key role in the network -- they were satellites,
on
the periphery of one of the clusters.
The actual political affiliation
of each book buyer is not known, not even by the web retailer. Yet,
after thousands of data points, this emergent
pattern is curious. Although the data was collected uniformly across
all shown books,
the cluster on the right contains less books. These readers kept selecting
the same few books -- their clique of books is dense -- 39%. Most books
have highly overlapping buddy lists. Slander, Bias, and Let
Freedom Ring are
the most popular buddies in this cluster.
So Valdes Krebs discerns a disconnect between the people who
buy books described as liberal and those who buy books described as conservative.
The only book these
two echo chambers have in common is Bernard Lewis' excellent What
Went Wrong? Lewis is considered our leading Islamist scholar, making him
acceptable to "intellectuals." In What Went Wrong?, he dissects
the failing of Islam, which makes him appealing to whoever yearns to feel superior
to the
presumed enemy of our new perpetual perpetuated war.
Crossing the Classism
It's class warfare. But to me it looks like a war that
started in the classroom, where the compliant, eager-to-please, more curious
kids ran circles
around
the guys in the back row and never got over their feeling of mental superiority.
Since
school, many of those kids in the back row have done much better than the
former brainiacs, for whom they feel nothing but contempt, knowing that clear
purpose, not introspection, is the key to success. Success in business requires
a kind of drive and bonhomie mastered on the playing fields, not
in the classroom.
Intellectuals rarely master the American version of the good
life, which rewards
the
kind
of unwavering,
unquestioning
confidence
that intellectuals seldom possess. Nor is it clear that those who are outwardly
most successful have the will or perspective to avoid the narrowmindedness
of any petit bourgeoisie.
If you don't think there's a civil war going on, here's Newt
Gingrich rallying the troops in 1988:
"The left at its core understands in a way Grant understood
after Shiloh that this is a civil war, that only one side will prevail,
and that the other side will be relegated to history. This war has to
be fought with the scale and duration and savagery that is only true
of civil wars. While we are lucky in this country that our civil wars
are fought at the ballot box, not on the battlefields, nonetheless it
is a civil war."
15 years later, it's the Republicans who are taking no prisoners.
We must cross this uncivil chasm, and this would be a good year to start.
8:13:50 PM 
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