Heavyset

There are some really intriguing underpinnings of an infrastructure meme at the moment, which I’ll attempt to coalesce around some ongoing social media trends. Please bear with me:

Deepak Kumar, a consultant with the ICFAI Journal of Infrastructure, outlines the distinctions between ‘hard infrastructure’ and ’soft infrastructure’ in these terms¹:

(The) infrastructure sector is divided into hard and soft infrastructure. The hard infrastructure includes roads and bridges, ports, airlines, railway, power,telecom while the soft infrastructure includes education, health, tourism,etc.

*****

Consider, in that context, the profoundly interesting presentation by Dan Hill at Lift09 in Geneva last month, Soft Infrastructure Superpowers. Dan is a Senior Consultant at Arup in Sydney, and works in, among other things, the field of Urban Infomatics – the examination of real-time information about the way in which we traverse and use urban environments, as informs urban planning and design. His presentation at Lift dealt with the notion of ’soft infrastructures’ – effectively the systems that allow for movement within and interactions with what we more frequently think of as infrastructure (more appropriately ‘hard infrastructure’).

A case in point: the introduction of something like the Velib bicycle rental service into this environment changes radically the scale of the city, without modifying the hard infrastructure (for extra fun, take a look at Fabien Girardin’s visualization of Velib use in Paris for a single day here).

*****

Christian Verschaeren, over at Zeppelin Repair, posts on a particularly engaging piece of soft infrastructure: a digital roadsign that responds to the speed of passing vehicles, delivering an emoticon to drivers in response to their willingness to obey the speed limit.

It’s not the classic: communication-> causing an emotion -> that leads to action.
It’s my action (speeding) -> causing an emotion (sad face) -> causing another emotion (guilt, with me) -> causing an action (driving slowly).

So the power of the whole thing is the fact that it’s contextual/interactive.

*****

Noah Brier, in a related vein, posts on Braess’s Paradox – the idea that adding capacity to a network does not inherently (however intuitive it might appear) increase the efficiency of a system. In the Scientific American article referenced, Santa Fe Institute computer scientist Michael Gastner purports:

The solution hinges on Braess’s paradox, Gastner says. “Because selfish drivers optimize a wrong function, they can be led to a better solution if you remove some of the network links,” he explains. Why? In part because closing roads makes it more difficult for individual drivers to choose the best (and most selfish) route. In the Boston example, Gastner’s team found that six possible road closures, including parts of Charles and Main streets, would reduce the delay under the selfish-driving scenario. (The street closures would not slow drivers if they were behaving unselfishly.)

The correlations here to The Nash Equilibrium, made famous in A Beautiful Mind, will appeal to fans of pop economics (myself included).

*****

Doc Searls, in a post on the Linux Journal, wrote nearly a year ago of six tenets of infrastructure to be considered, which tie together nicely the correlations between physical and digital infrastructure:

1. Infrastructure is natural. That is, we try to make it as additional to nature as possible. It sometimes improves on nature, but more often serves as an adjuct to it, altering it in some way, always for practical purposes.
2. Infrastructure is patchy. In computing terms, we patch and debug it all the time. Even terminology changes…Asphalt streets are patchworks of exposed and buried culverts, piping and conduit.
3. Branding is interesting, but eventually anachronistic.Organizations (government bodies, companies) providing infrastructure sign their work, and the signatures — in raised or inset letters on storm grates, manhole covers, fire alarms and service boxes — can last decades or centuries. At a certain point this credit-taking ceases to be promotional and begins becoming archival, historical.
4. Re-usability matters. Pipes and poles made for one thing get used and re-used for other things. Poles that first carried electricity later came to carry phone, cable TV, and fiber optic cabling to carry phone, TV and internet service.
5. Ease of servicability matters. Streets are marked everywhere with red (electric), yellow (gas), green (non-potable water), orange (communications), blue (potable water) and white (planned construction) graffiti. That these are all ugly is of little concern.
6. Infrastructure is vernacular. It’s local, and the expertise behind it is local.

In another, earlier, piece, Doc expounded on infrastructure as related to Craig Burton’s Burton Matrix:

In fact, one of the reasons I coined the expression “markets are conversations” (long before it found a home in The Cluetrain Manifesto) was that I saw the LAN market change utterly, almost overnight, when the whole market shifted its core topic from pipes & protocols to services. The main dude who changed that conversation was Craig Burton.

The arrow is a strategic vector. If you want to create new markets, or disrupt old ones, you create ubiquitous infrastructure. That’s what happened with Linux and the Net.

*****

In the interest of coalescing these ideas of infrastructure around social media, let us define hard infrastructure as the existing networks in place that drive the internet, telephony and word of mouth; and soft infrastructure as the properties, tools and services that exist as an overlay to that infrastructure. Much as the cities of Europe evolved over centuries by implementing structural ‘improvements’ that brought mobility to the populace (as correlates to Burton’s Matrix), the networks which drive social today have evolved to facilitate the very manner of conversation in which people communicate. It is helpful, toward this end, to envision in a model not altogether different from the video used by Hill to close his presentation²:

Through that lens, it’s worth pondering the following:

1. How can the tools for the social propagation of ideas become more natural? The constructs of Facebook and Twitter represent an approximation of the means by which we share information, but are ultimately tools (of varying rigidity) that rarely drive the evolution of ideas (as exist in conversation and real-world sharing). How can the spark of the short form inspire the elegant ideas of the long form?
2. While the patchwork nature of social is clearly effective, how can we improve the process of aggregating the ideas spread through disparate networks? Urban planners explore means by which a combination of streets, sidewalks and public transportation can bring people to common public locations. The world of social operates today very much like bus lines, subways and footpaths that overlap, but intersect with relative inefficiency. Twine, among others, represents a step in this direction, but ultimately lacks the functionality to aggregate the breadth of content that describes something interesting.
3. How can social be divested from brands, without permanently damaging the brands’ value? The proliferation of ideas across multiple broad networks will ultimately lead to a devaluation of each individual network (i.e. the ability to engage ideas, status, etc… on Twitter, Facebook, MySpace simultaneously reduces the necessity to visit a single location for this information). How can each of these evolve to suit a particular human need, without failing in the herculean effort to be ‘the single source’?
4. How can we re-use what fails to more efficiently solve the problem of scale? As properties and tools collapse, be it as a result of the lack of critical mass or a lack of funding (of particular note at the moment), how do we leverage not only the critical functionalities of these tools to improve upon existing properties, but also bring an energized user base along with it to evangelize specific functionalities (i.e. bringing Dodgeball loyalists to FourSquare)?
5. How can social properties and tools provide more useful feedback on the ideas propagated within them? The road sign called out by Christian gives a binary response to an action, but what if, as he writes: they combined the contextual/interactive thing with a message based on reason. For instance the amount of the fine you would get for driving the speed you’re driving? How best could this idea be ported to the social universe. If, as I have suggested elsewhere, ideas have an inherent DNA that dictates their flow through social networks, can we evolve a system of feedback that helps describe not only why ideas they introduce into social circles are not circulating, but also how the ideas might be re-framed in order to flow more effectively?
6. How can the manner in which we engage one another more closely reflect the nature of the ‘hard’ networks? Not everyone with whom we interact is a friend, nor are all of our friends followers. In light of the renewed interest of late in Dunbar’s number, the tools we utilize must evolve to allow users to distribute ideas effectively to circles and networks discriminately. For more on this, read Neil Perkin’s fantastic recent post.

1. from an article in MBA Review, titled Infrastructure in India [↩]
2. Hill actually borrowed this from a Madrid Metro spot, re-cut the video and added in his own soundtrack [↩]

Related posts:

1. Upping the Ante on Interesting
2. Macrotrends 2010-2012: Social Behaviors in Retail Environments
3. Peddling a Commodity One Does Not Own
4. Two Takes on Fandom
5. Two Toys: Trading Up vs. Trending Up