Two weeks ago, I published a concept on this blog called the Internet Hierarchy of Needs, building on Maslow’s work. Now Communispace has come out with research supporting this concept.

Communispace’s hypothesis: people are looking to fulfill six essential social needs online, and the organizations that understand this and build the right kind of social networking opportunity are more likely to create deeper emotional bonds than usually exist between companies and customers.

Here is the map that Communispace created to show how different social needs are met with different social networks:

The basic concept behind Maslow’s work, and my Internet adaptation, is this: lower-level needs must be met before higher-level needs will become apparent. For example, in Maslow’s model, basic life needs such as air (level 1) must be met before a person will focus on security (level 2).

I suggested that the evolution of the Internet follows a similar pattern, with the needs ascending as follows:

1. Existence Needs
2. Connectivity Needs
3. Organization Needs
4. Semantic Needs
5. Self-actualization

Here again is the diagram I created:

Communispace’s research demonstrates the power of following such a model:

Communispace tapped its other research on social networking behavior and found that when companies meet the full range of social needs, they gain trust and deep insights into their consumers and community members – marketing nirvana.

Don’t you think that trust and deep insights into your customers and community members is something worth striving for?

Hello my dear readers and friends,

Tomorrow is Christmas here in New Zealand, and I will be spending the day celebrating with family. On the following day, we’re getting in the car and heading off to a beautiful lake to spend some time with friends. So there will be no posts tomorrow or the next day.

I hope you are having a wonderful time, whatever your holiday plans or religious inclination may be!

Have you read the book ‘Leading through Values‘?

It’s the followup to the 2003 book Values at Work, by Kiwi authors Michael Henderson, Dougal Thompson and Shar Henderson, and it’s in so much alignment with the VortexDNA message that I had to share some quotes with you:

We say that values are predictive of behavior. They say:

Paul Ray and Sherry Anderson, authors of The Cultural Creatives: How 50 million people are changing the world, have written a phenomenal book on the scope, power, depth and breadth of new values sets emerging in the United States. They credit values as the most effective way to truly understand a culture and human behaviour. They write: “You have to go far beyond opinions and attitudes, because those shift as quickly as a summer wind. You have to dive down into the values and world-views that shape people’s lives — the deep structure that shifts gradually over decades or generations. Once you catch sight of these deep changes and track them, you can discover a lot about what matters most to people and how they will act. Values are the best single predictor of real behaviour.”

(Emphasis mine.)

We say human intention is governed by the mathematics of complex systems. They refer to a document written at the University of Barcelona called Organisational Values as “Attractors of Chaos”: An Emerging Cultural Change to Manage Organisational Complexity, and quote from it:

Business organisations are excellent representations of what in physics and mathematics are designated ‘chaotic’ systems. Because a culture of innovation will be vital for organisational survival in the 21st century, the present paper proposes that viewing organisations in terms of ‘complexity theory’ may assist leaders in fine-tuning managerial philosophies that provide orderly management emphasizing stability within a culture of organized chaos, for it is on the ‘boundary of chaos’ that the greatest creativity occurs.

…Complexity theory deals with systems that show complex structures in time or space, often hiding simple deterministic rules. This theory holds that once these rules are found, it is possible to make effective predictions and even to control the apparent complexity. The state of chaos that self-organises, thanks to the appearance of the ’strange attractor’, is the ideal basis for creativity and innovation in the company… The attractor is not a force of attraction or a goal-oriented presence in the system; it simply depicts where the system is headed based on its rules of motion.

(Emphasis mine.)

‘Strange attractors’? I’ll re-publish here the picture from Hugh McKelvey of the Lorenz Attractor (I also published it with the first ‘complex systems’ post):

One thing that has held true throughout the ages is that, when an idea’s time has come, it will start to appear everywhere, independently. Just look at the birth of the car.

I see the VortexDNA messages in books like Leading through Values and The Search and Built to Last, and I can’t help but be encouraged that ours is a message whose time has come.

Isn’t that EXCITING?!?

Nowadays, we can start an Internet company in the course of a couple of days, and grow it to a global community in the course of a couple of months. But we forget that we are all standing on the shoulders of giants. Here’s a quick recap of everything that’s happened until now.

1962: J.C.R. Licklider of MIT envisions a “Galactic Network,” a ‘globally interconnected set of computers through which everyone could quickly access data and programs from any site.’ Unsurprisingly, given his ability to see the future, he was appointed head of DARPA two months later.

1965: Lawrence G. Roberts and Thomas Merrill connect the TX-2 computer in Massachussetts with the Q-32 computer in California via a low-speed dial-up telephone line. The first wide-area computer network is born.

1969: The first host computer is connected to ARPANET, at UCLA, in September. An early Internet bubble ensues—albeit one that proves to be sustainable—with 300% growth in the number of host machines hooked into the network in the first three months of its existence (for a total of four hosts).

1972: Email is born.

Sometime in the late ’70s/early ’80s: William von Meister’s idea for selling music on demand is rejected by Warner Brothers. More than 20 years later, WB still doesn’t get it.

1983: The Domain Name System (DNS) is created.

1990: Tim Berners-Lee hooks up a NeXTcube as the world’s first web server. He also writes the first web browser.

1991: The Internet Society is formed under the leadership of Vint Cerf. That same year, Al Gore’s bill, the High Performance Computing and Communications Act, is passed.

1995: The Federal Networking Council passes a resolution defining the term ‘Internet’ as “the global information system that — (i) is logically linked together by a globally unique address space based on the Internet Protocol (IP) or its subsequent extensions/follow-ons; (ii) is able to support communications using the Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) suite or its subsequent extensions/follow-ons, and/or other IP-compatible protocols; and (iii) provides, uses or makes accessible, either publicly or privately, high level services layered on the communications and related infrastructure described herein.”

2000: The first dot-com bubble bursts.

2006: VortexDNA releases the mywebDNA Firefox plug-in (had to get that in there!).

2007: There is no second dot-com bubble.

Thanks to the Internet Society Brief History of the Internet, as well as Wikipedia on DNS and WWW for the info in this piece!

Rob Garner has a disease. I diagnosed him after reading his Search Insider piece from last January, If Search Engines Could Talk: Confessions Of a ChaCha Clickstream. In it, he describes a bass-searching encounter with one of the ChaCha Live Guides:

ChaChaGuide: Welcome to ChaCha!
ChaChaGuide: Hi.
RG: Hi.

ChaChaGuide: What can I search for you today?
RG: I need to search for ‘bass.’

ChaChaGuide: Bass fish?
…RG: No.

ChaChaGuide: Shoes?
RG: No.

…ChaChaGuide: Please be more specific as to what you’re looking for on this topic.
…RG: Okay. Let me refine a little. A musical instrument–a Fender bass.

In the end, Rob achieved the holy grail of used Fender Jazz bass searching, which is evidently one from 1960. So exciting!

Some people may have trouble figuring out what term to query, but I presume Rob is a highly capable searcher. No, his experience instead revealed the source of the problem: he appears to have succumbed to that pervasive and insidious beast, Search Laziness Disorder. I know, because I’m afflicted as well.

SLD is characterized by a disconnect between our expectations from search engines and the amount of effort we’re willing to put in to achieve those results. The outcome is that we begin to devalue the results themselves, convincing ourselves that we didn’t want the information anyway.

SLD’s primary symptoms include one-word search queries, the failure to find relevant results, and the throwing-up of hands in disgust, before stomping away to watch whatever reruns network television has dragged out of the box while they staunchly sit on their extra 4 cents a DVD or whatever it is.

Sufferers of SLD also spend inordinate amounts of time yakking, gossiping, wailing, moaning, and complaining about why search engines suck, and urging, encouraging, threatening and entreating search engines to disambiguate queries and get with the semantic program, already.

“Why do I have to go to ChaCha at all?” a Sluddite—as they’re known—might bemoan. “Why can’t Google simply read my mind?”

The outbreak of SLD, which didn’t exist at all prior to Archie, is growing to epidemic proportions, and doesn’t seem to show any signs of slowing. It is highly contagious, and exacerbated by successful one-word queries. “They knew who I was talking about when I typed ‘Britney’,” complained one Sluddite. “How come they didn’t know who I was talking about when I wrote ‘Jack’?”

Treatment for SLD consists of installing the mywebDNA Firefox plug-in immediately, or turning off your computer.

There’s been a lot of news recently about personal genetic testing, along the lines of 23andMe. A post from Dr. Hsien-Hsien Lei, though, raises some of the ethical questions that could arise from DNA testing, particularly in countries where it would be legal to require such tests as a prerequisite to hiring. As Dr. Lei points out, the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act (GINA) passed the House last month, which should provide some measure of protection in the U.S. Unfortunately, the same consideration doesn’t hold true for Trinidad and Tobago, the UK, or Australia.

Here are some ways DNA from job applicants, including police recruits, can be used:

1. To predict current and future health status as it affects fitness for the job.
2. To determine insurance liability both for the job candidates and their families (since genes are inherited).
3. To assess personality traits, such as the MAOA gene which is associated with violent behavior, the D4-7 gene variant associated with risk taking, the stathmin gene associated with fear, and the CHRM2 gene associated with performance IQ, so that candidates can be matched with the appropriate job.
4. To make sure the candidate isn’t a crime suspect by comparing his/her DNA with DNA databases. According to another interview with Noel Perry, Assistant Commissioner of the Ethical Standards Commissioner in 2003, gang leaders and members of organized crime have joined police forces before (remember that horrible movie starring Matt Damon and Leonardo DiCaprio, The Departed?).
5. In the case of police recruits, DNA can be keep on file for comparison to samples taken at crime scenes as a safeguard against police involvement in criminal activity.

This post raised some big issues, one of which was picked up on by more than one of the commenters:

If DNA is predictive, what are its appropriate uses?

Lei mentions Gattaca (I hadn’t picked up until now the connection between the movie title and the DNA bases G-A-T-C, but it’s a good one); to me, these questions are more along the lines of The Minority Report. If you could see the future, what would you do with it?

The question gets even trickier when you consider probability: if you could see one possible future with no guarantee that it would be accurate, what would you do about it? If someone has a 40% chance of committing a crime, should we put her in jail preventatively? If someone has a 70% chance of committing a sex offense, should we castrate him in advance?

Those are questions related to punishment, but what about reward? It’s common in most societies to want to affiliate with perceived success. What about predicted success? Jumping on the bandwagon? What if the prediction is that you won’t be successful—who’s gonna hire you?

These are important questions: important for deoxyribonucleic acid testing and important for VortexDNA intention-mapping, but there’s a fundamental difference in their significance. When applied to physical DNA, the probabilities are assumed to be fixed and deterministic: this DNA gives you this likelihood of this outcome.

With epigenetics and the DNA of intention, on the other hand, there is infinite opportunity to choose another outcome. If you choose to believe this, you are likely to get that result; if you change your beliefs, you can achieve this other result.

It’s clear that the two approaches would provoke fundamentally different reactions, and that there are tricky ethical questions that arise from both—I’ll be discussing them further over the coming days. What are some that occur to you? Would you want people to know your DNA? How about your core beliefs? Why or why not?