Sameness-izing

The tongue in chic moments...

Do you find that you spend a lot of time making sure that everyone around you is on the same page as you these days? Are you attending meetings, jumping on calls, blogging, tweeting and generally communicating out an infinite volley sameness for the masses - doing your best to attain and maintain consensus and deliver a root understanding that will ensure you can boldly go where everyone else has already proven you can go? How are you differentiating yourself while doing this at the same time? What makes you special or unique or ensures you add additional value if you homogenize everything around you to a level playing field?

I would seriously consider whether or not it is even possible to completely sameness-ize without considerable effort (or the right lack thereof) and if instead your attempts might result in just giving up any visible leadership you had just to have your ideas and needs be a little more palatable to those around you. To support this I thought it might be prudent to think about examples of good efforts at sameness-izing that are going on around us all the time.

How to sameness-ize your life with five easy repeatable activities:

1) Read as many top ten, twenty, thirty, forty ways to do XXXX as possible (this is a top 5 list so it will not count towards your overall score).
2) Follow every link that everyone sends you always - make sure you check that everyone else around you has followed or seen the link as well.
3) Comment on every post where everyone else is commenting. Either debate and object, or if possible just get your l'il old brown nose right on in there.
4) Re-post, re-tweet, re-link, re-share and re-hash as much as possible.
5) Make sure you find out what everyone else is attending and go there too (then write about what you saw that everyone else saw too).

This moment of unacceptable sarcasm and trite bitterness has been infrequently brought to you by "The Un-Coalition to Retain Individuality" - an exclusive club that now has billions of chapters worldwide, BUT each with only one member.

Ask yourself this. Has the crowd, in fact, been crowd-sourced? Or are a few of us still playing solitaire in the back row in a last ditch attempt to have an outcome all our own.

Scaling conversations infinitely still not possible

In almost every medium, in every space, across every generation it would appear that one common trend eventually surfaces.

Conversations don't scale infinitely.

Scaling conversations is achieved through two primary methodologies both of which will eventually degrade the conversation into a monologue, a free-for-all or an asynchronous experience.

In method 1 for scaling conversations, digital and analogue communication devices are utilized together with practical geographic and architectural gathering centres into forums known as meetings. These degrade for a variety of reasons including apathy, empathy, tardiness and even practical reasons such as schedules and task completeness.

In method 2 for scaling conversations each person, being, voice or messenger acts as their own epicentre, gathers bits of information over time and even during the conversation through a variety of means and then scattering, displaying, vocalizing or dispersing this through their various channels. Examples of this include webinars, instant messaging, micro-blogging, marketing and advertising. Feedback, comments, and requests to intervene are achieved in either real time or with some latency and are met with varying degrees of openness depending on the epicentral being. Network and software configuration issues also result in tons of side conversations during the conversation and can often delay or completely destroy the conversation.

As you can see, real-time conversations just don't scale. Sad.

Perhaps this is why Twitter works so well. It gracefully and immediately accepts its asynchronous nature, and its most avid users actually work with this in mind, gathering followers and friends who have their own lists of other followers and friends and randomly participating in hundreds or even thousands of conversations over an extended period of time.

Now the question is, when will Twitter scale? And if and when it does then will my hypothesis herein be proven wrong? Will I finally finish that other post I have been asynchronously writing called "When is this conversation about scaling conversations ever going to end?".

;-)