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We have tools now that enable us to engage with others as never before. I think it is a new world, and I find it very helpful in exchanges like this to explore the emerging new landscape.
We’re looking for:
n a better understanding of what motivates people to participate in groups
n ways of using these tools to promote interaction, either for its own sake or toward some other end (say, a conversation that supports marketing)
n key principals or ethics to keep our exchanges honest and productive
If we were to collectively answer all of these questions and click “Agree” as though this were some sort of universal Terms of Service document, I think we will have delivered on the challenge that Elizabeth has set before us.
Elizabeth has started us off with one of the most thoughtful and insightful pieces of PR commentary I've yet seen either on the Web or in books. I think she has created an outline for a treatise that is every bit as worthy of attention and publication as Scoble's Red Couch.
Shall we also auction ours on eBay? Yes. Why not? We have a new corporation to manage the collaborative development and publiction of wiki-based works. Let's try it. I propose that shares be awarded by the ONC board according to some formula that fairly takes into account orginality, extent and quality of contribution.
Our working title (proposed, if the group agrees): A Universal Terms of Service.
As Neville noted, the root issue is motivation. In that arena, we must turn to psychology and then, going down a few floors more, neurology.
In researching my wiki-based novel and screenplay about a PR guy who, in 2024, is charged with rolling out the most advanced neural implant of its time, I’ve attempted to familiarize myself with the language of PR as it is likely to be practiced in 20 years. As a result of this assignment, I've acquired just enough of an understanding of brain function to fake it. (Via ProfNet, I hope we can recruit the real experts in this.)
This much I can tell you:
First, we all have a small almond-shaped collection of neural circuits that has evolved to monitor and protect us from danger. Called the “amygdala,” it goes back to the time of the dinosaurs and so is commonly called our “reptilian brain.” Our capacity for reason, which is situated in the cortex, is no match for the amygdala in the face of perceived dangers. As Charles Darwin discovered when he put his face right up to the glass when viewing a snake in its cage, he was utterly unable to keep his head still when the snake darted at him. Involuntarily, his head snapped back.
That's the power of the amygdala. There are more circuits going from the amygdala into the cortex than the other way around, and so the amygdala rules.
Second, we have no single repository for memories; they are stored both as factual events in our cortex and as emotional and often fear-tinged events in the amygdala.
Finally, our ability to form symbols, which enables us to represent our world and to reason about it – and all of the great intellectual accomplishments that build upon this – has an unexpected origin,
which Stanley Greenspan and Stuart Shanker describe as follows in The First Idea:
In order to develop symbols, we must transform our basic emotions into a series of succeedingly more complex emotional signals. This human capacity to exchange emotional signals with each other begins in early life during an unusually long practice period and leads to symbols, language, abstract thinking, and a variety of complex emotional and social skills that enable social groups to function.
Greenspan and Shanker describe the biological underpinnings of group formation. If from a PR perspective we want to understand human behavior and motivation in groups, there are no two more knowledgeable experts to consult.