Da Vinci on change: cultivate your powers and unleash your whole person

Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) was the quintessential ‘Renaissance man’. Leonardo’s life is a testament to human creativity. Over six decades of creative activity, Leonardo showcased gifts as a painter, sculptor, scientist, anatomist, architect, engineer, inventor, botanist, and musician. His contributions are remarkable for their consistent brilliance. Leonardo’s paintings, including the Mona Lisa and The Last Supper, are touchstones for the history of Western art. In his sketchbooks and journals, Leonardo developed a new visual language for representing bodies and surfaces, which fed into his painting and gave his figures an unprecedented realism. Leonardo’s studies of the natural world made a decisive contribution to the embryonic sciences of anatomy, hydrodynamics and physics. His architectural and engineering designs included bridges, irrigation projects, villas and cathedrals. His notebooks brim over with fantastic inventions, including diving equipment, armoured cars, flying machines, musical instruments and more.

As a cultural figure, Leonardo da Vinci sets a high bar for the rest of us. Few of us could hope to match his success in such a diversity of pursuits. Mostly when we dabble in fields beyond our professional training, we wind up conceding that, while we may be happy apprentices, we will never be grand masters. Yet, we shouldn’t be discouraged by this. While you and I may never enjoy the accomplishments of Leonardo da Vinci, we can nurture and explore a plethora of talents and abilities, just as he did. Leonardo gives us an ideal to aspire to, even if we can’t match his achievements. He is someone who cultivated his full potential to think, feel, do and be.

You little genius! How to cultivate your creative gifts

Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will grow up believing it is stupid. — Albert Einstein

‘What is your genius?’ I’d like you to reflect on this for a moment. I find that when I ask people this question, they often don’t know what to say. The G-word can stop us in our tracks. Years ago, when I was first asked: What is your genius? I thought: ‘Genius? What genius? I’m just a guy’.

I am just a guy. But I have come to see that everyone is touched by genius. Perhaps it is just a gentle caress. Perhaps your genius lies in something so uncommon that you’ll have to search the world before you find the opportunity to express it. There may be years of toil, of wanderings near and far, a host of grand adventures in your path before you finally discover your potential. But there is genius in you, waiting to be discovered. This post will explain how to find it.

If everyone is a genius, why is the world so messed up? For creatures who have the capacity for genius, we do a brilliant job of being dumb. Clearly, we are not, at this point in history, living up to our potential. But this is not surprising, since we only put a fraction of the work into cultivating our genius that we could. We doubt ourselves (‘Genius, what genius?’). We aim low (an easy trap to fall into, since that’s where most people are playing). Once we’re out of the education system, few people bother to encourage us to find our inner genius. Can you imagine your boss telling you to find that rare and special thing that makes you great and cultivate it? Not going to happen (‘Get back to work!’). We are the products of cookie-cutter education systems, of ‘knuckle-down-and-conform’ economies, of shallow, hyper-mediated, cultural systems that celebrate cannibalization and incremental innovation over true disruption (Lady Gaga is the incremental innovation of Madonna; the latest superhero blockbuster is the cannibalization of every superhero trope that has come before). Given this, it’s no surprise that we forsake our deeper talent. Really, why should we bother to look for brilliance in ourselves when society as a whole is geared for averageness? Why stick your head up over the edge of the trench? You’ll only get it blown off.

What an appalling waste of talent. Don’t give up on yourself like this. Find that rare and special thing that you do extraordinarily well and make it central to your life. Here’s how you can do it.

Hooked on a feeling: how a chance encounter can change your life

I met a man named AJ Emmanuel as I was walking down the main street of my town. AJ was enlisting supporters for the UNHCR, the United Nations refugee agency. He spotted me coming from a distance and lured me in with a parody of my loping stride. By the time we met, I was laughing and he was laughing too.

‘You are wasting your time with me!’ I told him. I explained how my partner and I give a set amount of money each month to a rolling roster of aid organizations. The UNHCR was somewhere on the list. ‘A good conversation is never a waste of time’, AJ replied. It was a sunny day and I was out for a walk – why not take the opportunity to chat?

I liked AJ immediately. He was confident and upbeat. There was mischief in his eyes, but seriousness, too – a tone of gravity underlying everything that he said. I sensed that I was in the presence of a kindred spirit – a street philosopher, of sorts – a man who had seen suffering enough to know that life has no guarantees, yet who is wise enough to appreciate that the only appropriate response is to celebrate each moment.

Promises to myself: ten philosophical resolutions

Don’t you love the feeling when you realise that your work for the year is done and there’s no reason why you shouldn’t kick up your heels and relax? I woke up with that feeling this morning. I’m off to Vietnam at the end of the week and I can feel myself being drawn towards the plane.

Bon voyage, friends and fellow philosophers, wherever you may venture this holiday season! I’ll see you again in 2014 with more adventures of the cerebral kind.

I’ll leave you with a list of philosophical resolutions for 2014. I’ve lifted them from some of my favourite posts on this blog. I’ll be taking them with me on holiday. Promises to keep.

1. I will say ‘yes’ to life.

‘To complete Nietzsche’s three metamorphoses, the lion must become a child. ‎Maturity, for Nietzsche, means rediscovering the seriousness one had as a child at play.

A child-like spirit is vital to happiness, health, and well-being. “The child”, Nietzsche says, “is innocence and forgetting, a new beginning, a sport, a self-propelling wheel, a Sacred Yes”. The lion becomes a child when the individual who says “I will” ceases to affirm their values contrary to the law of “Thou Shalt”, and affirms them instead “for the sport of creation: the spirit now wills its own will, … its own world”. Life is no longer a reactive struggle to defeat other forces. Life is a celebration of one’s powers – a sustained act of pure affirmation. The child-like spirit knows the joy of life and the innocence of perpetual creation’.

From Nietzsche’s three metamorphoses (February 2010)

2. I will grow collective.

‘Love is a disruptive event that opens people to a new terrain of possibilities and a common vision of what they might be together. I find this aspect of Badiou’s argument tremendously interesting. When people find love, they realise life offers them more together than it does alone. They realise that they can do more together, and thereby discover a tremendous responsibility and risk. Can they be worthy of this common possibility? What level of dedication and trust is required to realise it? Love, Badiou claims, requires that we reinvent ourselves – together. It is a project of co-construction – the kind of event that we need to constantly work at in order to sustain’.

From Life changing love: Badiou and the birth of possibility (January 2013)

The Potlatch and the Panopticon: the yin and yang of social media gift economics

This article was initially posted in the RN Philosopher’s Zone on ABC Radio (Australia). Follow this link for an interview with Tim Rayner and RN Philosopher’s Zone host Joe Gelonesi.

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Paul Krugman doesn’t tweet. The economist and New York Times columnist has over one million followers on Twitter, yet he claims that he doesn’t have time to engage them, and employs a tweet-bot to deliver titles from his blog. Krugman’s aversion to Twitter may have more to do with his dislike of chatter than with time constraints. Krugman, in 1998, famously predicted that ‘[t]he growth of the internet will slow drastically [as it] becomes apparent [that] most people have nothing to say to one another’. Since then, the chattering classes have swept to ubiquity. Twitter has 218 million active monthly users. Facebook, the current king of the social media world, has 850 million active users and is worth about 80 billion dollars.

Tech pundits claim that we have entered the social era, an age of constant, multi-channel, sharing. What drives this frenzy of exchange, and what sustains it, given that, as Krugman notes, most people have nothing to say to one another? One way of understanding these issues is to look at the psychological and motivational dynamics of gift exchanges. The enticements and rewards of tweeting, posting, pinning, and blogging come into relief when we think of this activity as gifting rather than sharing, as contributing to a common pool rather than simply chattering.

21st century giving: how Facebook’s News Feed catalysed a culture shift

Facebook became a gift economy on September 6^th, 2006. Its users got a shock that morning when they logged on to find a News Feed in the place of their Personal Wall, which is what they’d previously seen in logging on. Everyone’s status updates had been routed into a single feed, which was continuously updated as their friends added content to their Walls. We are so use to aggregating feeds on social media today that it is hard to imagine Facebook without one. But prior to 2006, Facebook was a different kind of environment. Users had to visit each other’s Walls to see what their friends were posting. It made for a more private experience.

News Feed killed the privacy. Now everything was out in the open: posts, shares, likes, comments – everything. Thanks to News Feed, you could see everything that your friends were posting, in real time. Your friends could see everything that you were posting too. There was nowhere to hide. The platform was governed by an implacable transparency.

People freaked out. There was a major backlash. Users screamed violation of privacy. Critics called the site ‘Stalkerbook’ and threatened to decamp for MySpace. Zuckerberg offered a half-hearted apology for introducing the changes unannounced and without consultation, which inflamed the situation even more. Still, Facebook refused to budge. News Feed stayed. Contrary to expectations, News Feed turned out to be central to Facebook’s success.

When the wave of new registrations began the following week, few people had any idea that they were engaging a changed environment. For them, News Feed was what Facebook was all about – ‘sharing’. Once the initial furore had died down, people discovered that they liked News Feed. It meant that life on Facebook was never dull. There was new content every time they refreshed their browser window. It also meant that the more people contributed, they more they were able to stand out. Facebook was a time suck, but there was a reward system built into the design. Every contribution earned a tiny hit of egoboo.

Facebook took off. The site had 50 million users by October 2007 and it had doubled that number by August 2008. By the end of 2011, Facebook would have 850 million users, 50% of the total internet population. Just how much of this success can be attributed to News Feed is impossible to say. But the success of the News Feed concept was confirmed by the viral success of Twitter, another major social media company, which launched with a News Feed and nothing else. Since then, it has become standard practice on social media sites to feature an aggregating feed that compiles everything that people are doing on the site in one place. The all-in News Feed has become central to the social media experience.

Given that the News Feed concept hadn’t been tested in a commercial environment, it is remarkable that Facebook chose to introduce it at such a decisive stage in its development. Where did this idea come from, and what made Zuckerberg so certain that it would work? David Kirkpatrick, author of The Facebook Effect (2010), caught a glimpse of News Feed’s origins in a casual conversation in which he asked Zuckerberg about Facebook’s potential to change society. Zuckerberg responded by talking about the Potlatch, ‘a traditional celebration and feast of native peoples on the northwest coast of North America’. ‘Are you familiar with the concept of a gift economy?’, Zuckerberg asked him.

The Potlatch is a gift economy. So too, by implication, is Facebook.

The word ‘Potlatch’ comes from the Chinook language, meaning ‘to give away’ or ‘a gift’. Chiefs would host a Potlatch by gathering their tribe together and presenting them with a massive gift of food, blankets, furs, weapons, canoes, crafts, and more. The gift was dispensed at the end of a long and elaborate festival that involved speeches, songs, and spirit dances that could go on for days. The gifting ritual was the heart of the Potlatch. Everyone waited patiently to see what the chief would give. The bigger the gift, the better.

For the chief, the point of the Potlatch was to display abundant generosity. Any sign of stinginess would work against him. By amazing his tribe with a massive outlay of gifts, he sought to establish himself as a powerful leader, a figure of true status and nobility.

Sometimes, at a gathering of clans, different chiefs would compete to out-give one another. Each chief would seek to offer up a greater gift than the others, seeking in this way to cast the other chiefs in their shadow. Sometimes, this could lead a tribe to ruin. Sometimes, ruin was what was intended. The Potlatch could be used as a tool of war. By compelling the chief of a rival tribe to engage in an exchange that he couldn’t hope to win, a warring chief could force his enemy to impoverish his tribe in an effort to save face.

As the sociologist Marcel Mauss observed in his classic book, The Gift, the Potlatch inspires exorbitant acts of generosity. ‘The man who [gives] recklessly is the man who wins prestige’. The European settlers who moved west in the nineteenth century didn’t understand the Potlatch at all. European missionaries saw the Potlatch as a scandalous waste of time and resources and an impediment to the ‘civilization’ of the native people. One can imagine that the missionaries were offended by the egoistic nature of the Potlatch ritual. Following Jesus’ example, they aspired to the ‘pure gift’, an act of generosity that brooks of no return. In the Potlatch, by contrast, chiefs gave to establish their reputation and prestige.

The idea of giving to establish status was anathema to the teachings of the Church. The Potlatch was banned by the US and Canadian governments in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, contributing to the decimation of the tribes up and down the Pacific coast.

The traditional Potlatch has faded into history. The age of the digital Potlatch has just begun. When Facebook launched News Feed, it created a virtual Potlatch. By establishing a transparent space in which everyone could see what everyone else was posting, it created an environment in which status and reputation accrue to people who add value. In the transparent space of a real-time News Feed, users put their reputations on the line whenever they post content.  If they want to impress their followers, they need to share content that contributes something valuable. This dynamic ensures that most people think twice about their posts before posting them, which works to the benefit of everyone. It encourages people to curate the content that they share, reflecting on how it will add value for different audiences. As people post content that adds value for their audiences, and their audiences reciprocate by posting content that is valuable for them, the exchange of gifts creates an interpersonal dynamic that keeps people engaging with the feed.

This gifting dynamic is what keeps us coming back to social media, despite complaining about the hours it consumes in our day, how it fills our minds our trivia and distracts us from important tasks. Love it or loathe it, it has changed the mindset of a generation.

For a start, social media has made egoboo part of life for the digital generation. The term egoboo originated in science fiction fandom. Egoboo is the pleasure we get from being recognised for voluntary work and contributions. Facebook is designed to deliver hits of egoboo. Every Facebook user has experienced the thrill of posting something popular on the site. Few are immune to the dopamine rush that we get as ‘likes’, comments, and re-shares come flooding in. Facebook is designed as a gifting-egoboo machine:  we insert what we love, what inspires us, our passions and desires; and the platform delivers crowdsourced recognition and egoboo.

Online gifts can translate into real life reputational rewards. Since, on Facebook, every contribution is tagged with a proper name, users earn reputation capital for their gifts. For knowledge workers and other professionals, this reputation capital can bear real rewards.  By consistently posting quality content, users can establish tribal status that they can use to find work and build a career. Social media professionals most often resemble competing chiefs in a Potlatch, engaged in the effort to out-gift one another to build their reputations.

The success of Facebook and other social media sites has made reputation-based gifting part of contemporary life. The scale of it is staggering. Millions of people around the world are playing the Potlatch reputation game right now. They are sharing family photos on Facebook, breaking news on Twitter, design concepts on Pinterest, and comedy skits on Vine. They are expressing their passions, dreams, desires, and inspirations. They are leveraging their personal gifts in an effort to create value for others. The more that people create value through gifting online, the more they stand out, the more egoboo they earn, and the more they stand to receive from their communities. With every reciprocated gift, an emotional bond is forged between strangers and friends. This gifting dynamic brings the world closer together. It makes us part of a common tribe. It is increasingly flowing offline.

It is easy to underplay the influence of culture on people’s behaviour. Culture is ephemeral. Culture concerns people’s outlook on life, which remains invisible until they get a chance to express it in praxis. It has taken us a long time to appreciate the impact of online gifting on our way of life, probably because most of this activity has no practical consequence. It is only once the cultural approaches started to infiltrate productive activities, in co-design studios, co-working spaces, and corporate innovation labs, that we started to pay attention.

This is what is happening today. The success of Facebook and other social media platforms, from LinkedIn and Twitter to Snapchat, Tumblr, and Vine, has given rise to a new conception of how to get things done. We get things done through an open play of contributions. We get things done by engaging as peers and adding value in a generous and transparent way.

We see these cultural changes happening in a range of sectors today, predominantly environments favoured by digital professionals like co-working and tech start-up spaces. It is particularly evident in the design world. In co-design sessions, people innovate by giving everything they have to give to the session, knowing that it might not represent the final solution that everyone is looking for, or even something particularly useful, but that it is an honest attempt to move things forward. We don’t give with the expectation of return. We give because it is a noble cause, one that we want to be associated with, knowing that the social bonds that we forge through our gifts will pay dividends down the line, as our peers return the gifts that we’ve given them us in their own way.

The success of social media has catalysed a gift culture shift. It has given us a new sense of how to organise for innovation. There is a chasm separating this culture from the way that things get done in most organisations. Kirkpatrick reflects: ‘A world in which each individual has a clear window into the contributions of everyone else, potlatch-style, does not dovetail well with how most companies are run’. This is a problem for companies that want to increase their innovation capability. The only way around this problem is for leaders to let loose of the reins and create safe spaces for gifting and collaborative innovation.

Be a meaning maker: Sartre and existential freedom

Stevens was the butler’s butler. At Darlington Hall, where he’d worked his entire life, he exemplified the butler’s virtues of dignity and forebearance. Stevens’ self-identity hinged on his dignified façade. Over the years, he’d become so adept at maintaining this façade, he’d become it.

Stevens was the butler’s butler. Nothing less – and nothing more.

Stevens is the narrator of Kazuo Ishiguro’s Booker prize-winning novel, The Remains of the Day (1989). Anthony Hopkins owned the role in the Academy Award-nominated film adaptation of 1993. The story begins in the 1950s, when Stevens receives a letter from an old employee, Miss Kenton, who was the housekeeper at Darlington Hall in the years before the War. The letter rewakens old feelings in Stevens and stirs a sense of loss. Miss Kenton (played in the film by Emma Thompson) was an exemplary housekeeper. She and Stevens had an excellent professional relationship. At a certain point, Stevens became aware that Miss Kenton would have liked their relationship to be more than this. Something almost happened between them. But Stevens couldn’t make it work. He was so caught up in the business of being a butler, and of maintaining a demenour of dignity and discipline, that he couldn’t figure out how to integrate love into his world.

Finally, Miss Kenton resigned. Even in their parting conversation, Stevens couldn’t bring himself to speak to her in any other way than as a butler seeing off an employee.

Now it is the 1950s and Darlington Hall needs a housekeeper. Mr Farraday, the new owner of the house, suggests that Stevens take his car and visit Miss Kenton, to see if she’d be interested in reemployment. Stevens drives across country, and as he goes, he reflects on his life in the 1930s. With the benefit of twenty years hindsight, he is able to see that, at a certain point in his relationship with Miss Kenton, he almost changed direction. He almost broke out of his professional role and expressed his true feelings. He almost changed path in life. And yet he didn’t.

Lines of flight: Deleuze and nomadic creativity

‘I am not a number – I am a free man!’ Patrick McGoohan cries in the 60s cult-TV series, The Prisoner. McGoohan plays a British spy who is held captive in a village on an island controlled by a faceless authority. The prisoner, known only as Number 6, has resigned from the secret service. It seems to be his crime. In the opening sequence, we see him burst into his spy chief’s office and passionately submit his resignation; he is subsequently drugged, kidnapped, and whisked off to the island. We never find out why he quit. 

The authorities on the island are as perplexed we we are. The prisoner is told that he will remain interned on the island until he has explained himself. But the prisoner refuses to do so. Instead, he seeks to escape. Insistently. The prisoner’s whole tenure on the island (the entirety of two seasons of the show) consists of attempts to escape and flee to the mainland.

Captured by the eerie bouncing balls that guard the island, the prisoner is hauled before Number 2 and issued a sardonic dressing down. ‘In a society, one must learn to conform’, Number 2 tells him. 

‘I am not a number – I am a free man!’ the prisoner replies. The moment he is alone, he is preparing to escape again.

We can see The Prisoner as a metaphor for the sixties counterculture. According to the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze (1925-1995), the counterculture was defined by the many ways that groups and individuals sought to escape the society of normalisation and control that their parents’ generation had helped create. 

The driving impulse behind the counterculture was not just to oppose the status quo, it was to get free of it – to head for the horizon with bloodshot eyes on experimental lines of flight (fuite – this can mean leaking, fleeing, or escaping). 

Lines of flight are bolts of pent-up energy that break through the cracks in a system of control and shoot off on the diagonal. By the light of their passage, they reveal the open spaces beyond the limits of what exists. 

In a series of books written with the militant psychotherapist Felix Guattari (1930-1992), Deleuze linked human creativity to flight. It is our desire to escape the status quo that leads us to innovate. Like the prisoner, we dream of being anywhere but here. We coordinate, form alignments, combine our powers and innovate. We remake the world on creative trajectories.

Deleuze’s idea of lines of flight can help us clear up a common misconception about the sixties counterculture. The counterculture was not fundamentally oriented against mainstream society. It was oriented away from it. 

It is true that the counterculture was defined politically by the rejection of the society that existed at the time. The Free Speech movement and Students for a Democratic Society were opposed to US government policies, especially the war in Vietnam. It is also clear that, in the 1970s, the militant end of the counterculture positioned itself against the state in the hope of creating a popular movement to overthrow it. But the counterculture per se was oriented away from mainstream society. Being against was a means, not an end. 

This is evident in Woodstock generation, which was driven by the desire for another world and way of life, and inspired by the belief that this world and way of life was possible. Having a ‘countercultural’ attitude and outlook does not necessarily imply that one is hostile towards the mainstream. It signals a desire to leave the society that exists, to leave it to its own devices, and to grow creative (with new devices) with other like-minded people.

The Apple I was hacked together on a creative line of flight. So, by and large, was the internet.

One of the best expressions of countercultural line of flight is the the 1960s and ’70s back-to-land movement. Drop City, in Colorado, was the first of many hippie communities that sought to create a new kind of society​. Between 1965 and 1973, thousands of middle class kids, in flight from Mom and Dad, society, the draft, careers, and social conventions of all kinds, came to Drop City and other communes like it in search of freedom and alternative lifestyles. 

The culture got by with a minimum of rules. Everything was set up to enable free-wheeling, nomadic lifestyles, which could be recreated or escaped at a moment’s notice. Nomadism, as Deleuze and Guattari understand it, doesn’t require moving around. You can sit still and be a nomad. Nomadism is a way of being. It involves refusing to be tied down by set categories and definitions. It is driven by a desire to experiment and explore, to learn, grow, and boldly venture forth on creative lines of flight.

The hippie experiment collapsed under the weight of its contradictions. Over subsequent years and decades, the counterculture thrived. Today, the counterculture has been absorbed into the system of society – domesticated, to an extent, yet affirmed and enabled at the same time. The corporate mavericks who shake up markets with disruptive innovations create businesses on lines of flight. Each generation of teenagers is encouraged to define a new line of flight, starting with the rejection of the sounds and styles that have come before. 

Nomadism is a cultural norm. While plenty of people simply want to ‘fit in’, the best and the brightest want to break out and head for the horizon.

When we look into the future, we dream of a world that is radically different from the one we know today. 

We may be stuck in offices, trapped in traffic, tied down by debt or shacked to unhappy relationships. Inside, we are nomads. We are already in flight. The mainland awaits.

Social media as gift culture: building tribes

This is the final post in a series on social media gift cultures. Drawing on indigenous gift cultures, I have sought to understand how social media users create reputations, communities, and identities through sharing (or ‘gifting’) with online crowds. A gift culture perspective highlights the motivations and rewards of online sharing. It foregrounds how we should go about building tribal communities online, making online sharing social.

If you haven’t followed the series to date, I recommend you start at the beginning and work your way through. Like Hegel said, the truth is in the whole.

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In the last post, we considered how hard it is to maintain a reputation across multiple social media sites. Multi-tasking across sites and apps is challenging. We are inundated with information. It is hard enough to keep up with the torrent of information pouring through a single news feed. Keeping up with the traffic across multiple feeds can be a nightmare.

Information overload is only part of the problem. To manage our reputation across multiple communities, we need to tap into the torrent of information and share it in a targeted, strategic, way. Different systems attract different crowds, and each has a distinctive set of values and expectations. To key into crowds, you need to feed them appropriate gifts – content that will appeal to the specific community (or communities) you are addressing.

By filtering content and selecting choice gifts for specific crowds, we create prismatic, multi-faceted, identities. If we are playing the reputation game correctly, the identity that we create on, say, LinkedIn will be subtly different to the identity that we create on Tumblr or Facebook. There is nothing inauthentic about this, assuming that we allow that our identities are multi-faceted in the first place. The real problem is the stress and difficulty of maintaining this activity over time. The challenge of engaging with multiple flows of information and selecting choice content for multiple communities puts many people off. It is not just the time it takes to process the information on various channels. It is the pressure and anxiety involved in figuring out what information to push to different crowds in order to create a specific type of identity. On some level, most users are aware that the crowd is watching them and judging them on the basis of what they share. Their reputation is at stake and they don’t want to make a misstep and feel foolish (or worse!) as a result.

But social media shouldn’t be this hard. Engaging with multiple communities should be simple, fun, and intuitive. The key (surprise, surprise!) is to make the experience social. We need to build real relationships based in common values and interests. We need to build tribes.

Social media as gift culture: the prismatic self

This is the third post in a series on social media gift cultures. The series draws on indigenous gift cultures to examine the psychological and motivational dynamics of social sharing online. The first post in the series, The reputation game, looks at the North American Potlatch to reflect on the enticements and rewards of sharing online. Social sharing involves a reputation game. The aim of the game is to win the favour of your tribe by presenting them with exorbitant gifts.

The second post in the series, Sharing circles and tribes, considers how tribes are formed online. Tribes emerge when participants share with select users, who return the favour by sharing with them. These sharing circles are typically based in common values and interests – hence, so are tribes. I indicate the unstable nature of sharing circles and how an affirmative attitude towards gifting helps sustain them. Imbued with the ‘spirit of the gift’, the gift becomes a token of gratitude for the sharing circle and the tribe it maintains. The more that we cultivate this spirit in our online exchanges, the more robust and fulfilling they become.

This post considers the challenges of sharing across multiple systems online. Active users of social media are often engaged across multiple sites, groups, and activities in real time. Multi-tasking online can be a source of signficant consternation. While missteps (below the threshhold of the screaming faux pas) are mostly overlooked, this doesn’t reduce the anxiety that users (particularly new users) feel when tasked with sharing across multiple channels in real time. It is easy to lose track of how one is expected to behave in different contexts.

When tech journalist Paul Miller returned to the internet after a year off, he was surprised to find how stressful it was to multi-task across services. ‘I had, like, three tabs open and I just didn’t know what was going on’, Miller complains. This is a familiar experience for users of social media, who struggle to keep up with the flow of information on multiple channels.

The solution is to find your tribe. Sharing across multiple channels is easier when we share with our tribes in mind. A thriving tribe gives back more than we contribute to it. Tribes are a living reservoir of cognitive capital and an infinite human resource.