10th
I have been thinking a lot about secret societies of late. Yalie jokes notwithstanding, they’re nothing new, really, but this is nonetheless a trend to watch for 2009 for reasons I explain below.
As Seth Godin would argue, we human have operated in smaller groups since the very beginning, with shared objectives in mind: “Tribes are groups of people aligned around an idea, connected to a leader and to each other. Tribes make our world work, and always have.”
We’ve got 2.0 versions of course, everything from Founder’s Brunch or to flash mobs like those invoked by Improv Everywhere to the awesomesauce shenanigans of Larry Chiang. And these are not to mention the innumerable flavors of BOF (birds of a feather) gatherings like Open Coffee Club and Lunch 2.0 and FooCamp (and indeed unconferences generally). Our secret (or not-so-secret, as the case may be) societies might communicate via e-mail newsletter, SMS, or purely word of mouth.
Sometimes, as so often is the case in my own personal experience, we create these societies in an entirely ad-hoc manner, and almost by instinct, cultivating certain sectors of our social graph, seeking high concentrations of desirable qualities, filtering the wheat from the chafe with often nothing more than a knowing conversation and a palatable sense of shared altruism.
The point is that we’re looking for meat on the bone as it were (the signal in the noise, to use an overused term), and these secret societies are all in one form or another “interest networks” that aim to more efficiently and productively put us in touch with the things we care about most.
Why? Because as online communities become more and more mainstream (and crowded), volume navigation goes hand-in-hand with self-preservation. Aggregation and filtering are obviously a huge part of the public-facing version of this task, but it’s the private nature of secret societies that makes them inherently useful for getting things done. These groups intentionally create barriers to entry (intellectual, social, geographic, purely structural) in a world — Web 2.0, namely — where the tearing down of those same barriers has become religion (and in some cases, big business).
Where there’s zig, there’s sure to be zag;)
I’m also noticing that offline, real-world articulations of those communities are becoming more and more important as the online-offline divide disintegrates into something of a continuum. Today’s interactions on the Web are undoubtedly rich, but it’s in the performance of our relationships (and our ideas and beliefs) that they are ultimately made explicit — and therefore real (to bastardize/misrepresent Robert Brandom).
To wit: unconferences are popping up left and right. Tweetups are now common practice. Location-based services allow us to harness the serendipity of geography. These offline interactions serve to solidify and anchor our relationships as “Web meets world” (and indeed, vice versa, as evidenced by the predictable flurry of post-gathering activity on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter.)
Increasingly too, there are more overt efforts at more formally stitching together brain and machine, online and offline, ranging from modest early offerings like Fitbit to more much more ambitious undertakings, all of which portend a new dynamic for the future in which the trust game changes completely, even further solidifying secret societies and communities of practice as the backchannel of choice for a new generation of hyperconnected Web workers.
And make no mistake — it’s all about the backchannel, and always has been — whether in the diplomatic/political sense, or in the merely technological one. We’re just getting better at using them;)
