I love the news. It’s a giant feast of stuff thrown out you to see what sticks. And while most of it is crap, and we all know that bad news sells because good news is no news, there are some gems that reveal patterns, Gibsonian “nodal points” forming in the fabric of our human universe.
Today’s pattern is that of people gaming the system. This means that when we create a well-intentioned method for handling a situation, someone looks at it and thinks, “I can’t change the underlying mechanics of the situation, but I can make the method think I did.” Kind of like putting a xeroxed dollar bill in a vending machine, or putting a stone in the middle of your aluminum foil ball so you get extra pennies at the recycling place.
Looking at all the various web-based activities and projects, what we can tell is that not everyone is going to have the time to be as heavily involved in social media and we are.
Even those of us at the lower end of the range, offering up only a few hours per day, are still heavily involved with social media when we’re placed on this “real person” scale that Nina provides. ^
The hype is always greater than the reality because for good news to be news, it has to be oversold and imply bad news, or a need. You don’t sell products by pitching inertia. You sell products by pitching change and/or implying a need for fear. Otherwise, why stir oneself from that La-Z-Boy and Battlestar Galactia full season DVD? Social media is a system that games itself.
Google Inc. manipulated a U.S. government spectrum auction by bidding just enough to trigger rules that will open a nationwide set of airwaves to any device and then walking away, Republican lawmakers said.
The rules were a “social engineering” experiment by the Federal Communications Commission that prevented the spectrum swath, known as the C-block, from raising billions of dollars more, he said.
Google offered $4.71 billion for the C-block, surpassing a $4.6 billion threshold that activated the rules. Verizon Wireless later won the airwaves with a $4.74 billion offer. Google, the most-used search engine, said that while it was prepared to win the airwaves, its main goal was to ensure the open-access rules took effect. ^
Google makes its money by keeping systems open, and then selling ads within them to try to control the anarchy of open systems. It was a smart move. We can all learn from this type of gaming, because it could benefit us. Well, scratch that — could benefit us in some ways, I mean. Open systems are nicely flexible, but anarchic. Closed systems are ripoffs but orderly. The internet thrived because of the balance, not the excess.
And finally, a more sobering reminder:
In an article in The New England Journal of Medicine, two leading researchers warn that the entry of big companies like Microsoft and Google into the field of personal health records could drastically alter the practice of clinical research and raise new challenges to the privacy of patient records. ^
As Google showed us above, gaming the system is often good business. Why do companies want health records in permanent databases? They hope to leverage that data for something. Selling it. Using it to reduce risk. Finding targets for advertising. Permanent identification to keep customers honest. Whatever it is, we have to be careful that this system doesn’t get gamed against us.