Existing models of crowd behaviour  treat moving masses of humanity as though they were fluids. This works, up to a point. But it often fails to predict the changes that happen as a crowd’s density increases and its movement becomes chaotic.

Apparently marching soldiers will automatically break step on a suspension bridge – and over the last 5 years or so I have been fascinated by all sorts of participatory cultures – here is a selection of posts that explores such a fascinating and increasingly important area of investigation

This was never a tech revolution in the same way Gutenberg’s printing press was a tech rev – it was like in Tunisia, Egypt, Libiya, and throughout the western world; a revolt against power, corporate power, political power who has it and who wields it – its interesting to note that Umar Haque although working for Havas struggles with the ethics of living in a world which is unfair. He is I believe representative of many. But the powerful are now beginning the pinch of the powerless, where people sick and tired of the same shit, are learning to get what they need from each other – institutionally American Government has failed, business are failing and we need a new literacy in which people know how to create new and better things. The fact was nobody was really prepared to listen not until it was too late.

Communities Dominate Brands is six years old and yet people still tell me from RIM, to Disney, to startups that it is still mandatory reading. I don’t do it very often but hurrah for us.

You can buy it HERE

Over a matter of days, the code was hacked and made open. As a consequence, (Inside the race to hack the Kinect)

The hackers’ success has unlocked what promises to be a revolution in robotics research. At robotics company Willow Garage in Palo Alto, California, researchers have bought around 20 Kinects. “We’re losing count,” says engineer Ken Conley. He and colleagues have shown that multiple Kinects can be combined without generating interference and are currently integrating the device into the company’s PR2 robot.

At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, engineer Philipp Robbel has already run a proof-of-concept experiment in which he used the Kinect to provide vision for a robot. He says the Kinect could one day help produce cheap robots that could scour disaster areas for victims.

All amazing stuff – of course the story questions orthodox issues around IP, the nature of value creation, innovation and entrepreneurship – what is shared or what be shared to kickstart innovation and what is not. Commonwealth in the networked society [3] Big Pharma

As this video shows Kinect controlling Windows 7

And body dysmorphic disorder

Body Dysmorphic Disorder from flight404 on Vimeo.

Patrick and I met earlier this year, when he overheard me. discussing the No Straight Lines project with someone in a coffee shop in Cambridge. So Patrick contacted me, and this is what he had to say.

What you seem to be talking about runs in parallel to much of the social theory being used within archaeological theory today. Basically, many archaeologists are now beginning to realise that the behaviour of people (I am referring to stuff that was going one about 20,000 years ago when mobile art, figurines and parietal – cave – art largely first appeared in Europe) had much to do with building and maintaining networks, not just with people but also with other elements of the world). Of particular interest is that some archaeologists are now discussing the role of possessing and interacting with mobile (e.g. animal) figurines as a means of creating and maintaining human identity. Much of the ethnographic data suggests that these people actually thought of these objects, and other things in the world, as actually being part of them in a very real way. Thus, when objects such as these are exchanged, it is not simply that they represent the identity of a person (e.g. relative): they actually are part of the person. Archaeologists are also beginning to employ social theories such as Actor-Network Theory to explore such concepts.

What I have now realised is that the way that people engage with objects and media (e.g. mobile phones) in the Western’ world today is not so different to 20,000 years ago. I am not saying that people thought about the world in the same way. But what seems to be apparent, especially with the enormous rise of social networking today, is that human identity is embodied with in the very objects (real and virtual) that people use, and when people communicate with each other it is not simply a matter of communication, but it is in a very real way part of themselves that is being sent/communicated. This is very interesting, because human identity then becomes something which is not confined to the immediacy of the person and the immediate surrounding world, but is distributed throughout the world in the form of pictures, emails etc. Interaction with these things (both real and virtual) then becomes a matter of necessity, as it did during the Palaeolithic, as their identity or personhood is embodied within these things. No longer can be people be socially secure (i.e. interact with important elements of the known world on a regular basis) through normal modes of communication: in order to maintain a sense of social cohesion people must now continually interact with elements of their identity that are distributed throughout the globe via objects (e.g. phones). Social cohesion becomes a matter of remote rather than direct interaction.

My simple observation is that if we are are designing a society and world that is becoming more inherently social through connectivity, this has to relate to identity, and meaning. How we create meaning. We cannot ignore that for many people modern life is rubbish, or that the shopping mall really is Van Diemens land. As I wrote in that post

For me this is the backdrop to perhaps some of the biggest, and perhaps intractable problems of our current society. Loss of identity, belonging, and community – with all its subsequent fallout.

In the issue of identity in a post modern world, psychologist Sandra Harilld points out

Until postmodern times, we dealt with problems that had their origins in relation to the other or the outside in a concrete way and in imagination problems tended to come from people with psychosis or personality disorders. We are still getting those problems but what has changed for some people are the triggers to illness, in so much as people who do not have a strong inner sense of self tend to feel more fragmented more easily and the idea of self construction is very threatening to these types of people.

They seem to need more direct human contact to help them to define themselves and years ago would have been defined and lived within the confines of their families, villages, social classes or friends, with daily personal interaction reinforcing that. So, for instance, we see a lot of phobias and depressions, particularly problems such as social phobia that are linked to this fearfulness of how to be in the world and whether one is acceptable or not.

And in my post human nature and the need for social connection, I point out using the work of John T. Cacioppo and William Patrick, that,

Looking more deeply at the invisible forces that link one human being to another helps us see something even more profound: our brains and bodies are designed to function in aggregates, not in isolation. That is the essence of an obligatory gregarious species. The attempt to function in denial of our need for others, whether that need is great or small in any given individual, violates our design specifications.

Indeed, violating our design specifications in a profound way, “I” needs “We” to truly be “I” was the maxim of Carl Jung, as told by Charles Handy in The Hungry Spirit. The industrial age has done some fantastic things for us – but it also has stripped away for many of us what makes us human n the first place. In this context, I am frustrated with the word, “social media” as it just cannot describe the true reality of what is going on in the world we live in today. This perspective is I argue as relevant to business as it is organisations, as it is to education, and lastly to each and every one of us. Because, I think it alters the way we make things, and get stuff done. These are the drivers to the networked world where as Jan van Dijk explains,

In a mass media society, the basic units are the large collective ‘masses’. In contrast, a network society is based on individuals who form voluntary connections with other individuals regardless of location. In a network society, the network becomes a basic unit of organization at all levels (individuals, groups and organizations). Online social networks, media networks and technology networks act as the catalysts for a networked society

Didier Marlier writes,

Daniel relates an interesting study run by the famous M.I.T. seeking to understand the impact of financial incentives on employees’ motivation. Participants were offered low, medium or high financial reward depending on their results in a series of tasks going from physical, mechanistic (boring and repetitive) to more highly cognitive  (interesting) ones. The results showed that people tended indeed to perform better when offered higher financial rewards on physical/mechanistic jobs but that higher financial compensations were in fact counterproductive for cognitive, “intellectual” tasks.

Pinks discussion reminds me of my posts The craftsman and the special human need to be engaged, and The craftsman and modern society. He talks about peoples need to be self-directed (Gen-C don’t live to work), which is very much a part of the values of our networked world. Pink argues for a more human approach to organisations that understands how and why people work, something that I explored in Modern life is rubbish.

80% of the growth in the UK is created by SME’s, yet these companies are the ones that often have the least access to high quality resources that will enable them to establish a true path to economic success. And yet the pressure is on.

As Liam Byrne declared last year, “in the next decade we need to be radical about power, realistic about money and relentless on innovation”. And of course it gets ever more challenging as economic power shifts to Asia, technology migrates us towards a global level playing field. And the implications according to Economist Hamish McCrae are these:

1. The fight for economic survival
2. The fight for resources
3. The fight for talent – and for the best-educated young
4. The fight for the space of mind of consumers

Against that backdrop, Government initiatives to foster regional development via the delivery of advisory services necessary to enable businesses to be successful have been patchy at best, and poor at the worst. Even high profile organisations have failed to live up to expectations. Moreover, one could argue that entrepreneurship, the very commercial lifeline for this country is being held back by an entire eco-system and mindset. some have waived manifesto’s, others have got on with the job in hand.

Relentless on innovation – its a great sound bite or byte, which leads us on nicely to GrowVC. And within that context, one wonders whether venture has become an acronym for safe, non-venture or destroy value, because we don’t really know what we are doing? In fact writing this reminds of a piece of work I did recently for a political party in looking at rapid learning systems for SME’s which I plan to run as a series of posts in the near future.

Mike Butcher writes @techCrunch

Grow VC is a new community funding model for technology startups. Here’s how it works: Grow VC will pool 75 per cent of membership fees into a community fund that gets invested back into ‘promising startups’ which are members of the platform. The fund is managed by Grow VC but all the investment decisions are left to members who determine how to invest their portion of the fund into other startup companies that they feel have the most potential. The most successful decision makers get financially rewarded when the community fund begins earning a return on investment. So, if you promote the best companies you make moola.

Joining Grow VC, and the basic features such as building a person profile, are free. Premium features come with subscriptions ranging from $20 to $140 per month, depending on how much money the startup company is seeking or how much the investor is looking to invest. For unlimited service investments, the monthly subscription fee is $90 per month. The fund is aimed at startups that need $10,000 to $1 million USD.

The service claims to include the tools needed for building a startup from the ground up, to getting funding at the seed level. Yes, that’s quite a claim, but it’ll takle a few startups to kick the tyres to see if this platform holds up. There are other playing in this area, such as the recent Sprouter.com but Grow VC is possibly the most ambitious I’ve seen to date.

Go and check it out – it might just be the panacea you are looking for?

Cambridge produces some extraordinary technology. So I am glad to celebrate that.

Its engagement as technology even into the automotive industry. Is it a disruptive technology? Minority Report springs to mind. And its twitter and wifi enabled.