TheCapitalClinic

I would like to expand on my blog [and related blog threads] on the notion that Social Capital Wants To Be Measured [check it out] to develop our thinking about how to find the SIMPLE parameters to frame Clif's notion of SocialBuxx™ [check this one out too] as a workable score-keeping unit [i.e. to make SocialBuxx™ an effective currency to measure how web-values are created, stored, and exchanged]. One of the objectives of this exercise that is going on simultaneously in many places on the fuzz site is to help artists and music fans to understand what is going on when they upload songs, fix their profile pages [and continually update them!], write reviews, make blog comments. For power laws [the all important multiplier effect] to take hold on this web-activity, the web participants need to know more about "Sweet Spots".

I believe Maureen, editor-in-chief, of The Fix will be publishing my brief essay on the subject of "Sweet Spots of Web-time", tomorrow [April 2], but here is a preview [this discussion may provide some background for the article to come].

In my column for participants at the Nightschool for Entrepreneurs, I expand on the notion that what "wants to" be "measured", will be measured. This is a take-off on Stewart Brand's decades-old aphorism to the effect that "what wants to be, will be" in our digital culture. The digerati have embraced the "sound-bite" and now purport to apply it in many contexts to demonstrate self-fulfilling prophesies in the age of technology - not least being the sound-bite/aphorism that "Music that wants to be free, will become free."

To be sure, I have adopted the new-age tech-speak myself because of my intuition that nature's tendency to self-organize has reached a new order of magnitude in the digital era of communications for free and, THEREFORE, an accelerated process of self-organization is finally at work. Besides, truth to tell, I liked the quick take-away, "Social Capital wants to be measured" as much as I liked Clif's [one-word-says-all] sound-bite "SocialBuxx™" and I tried it out on an close friend with a brilliant mind and a PhD. in communications theory, who just smiled brightly at the notion which was all the encouragement that I needed. With these sound-bites, taken and applied together, I think we can advance both the scholarship and practical application of the powerful notion of Social Capital.

To my knowledge, no-one has developed or, more importantly, has been able to CAPITALIZE social values based on the premise of ACCELERATED self-organization and active manipulation of quantitative parameters to achieve measurable qualitative results. I suspect this is so because, while the theory may have been floating about for some time, the practical ability to observe accelerated self-organization at work in a real-time setting has only recently obtained in the context of a globabl critical mass reality of "communications for free."

If this is the current state of affairs in our digital culture (and, as I say, I think that is what is happening), by cognizing and thereby initiating what are the elements of value (here "social capital") that are amenable to quantitative "benchmarking", the benchmarking will indeed happen based upon the web dynamics of replication through supernodes of those things that are most easily replicated. I argue that these simple rules of repetitive behavior in human society {at least in our window of digital time and driven by our pop-culture - like it or not] are the "sweet spots" of time, content, and connectivity in cyber-space that takes things in 3 and a half minute "web-units". The selective filtering by supernodes of what are considered "sweet spots" and "non-sweet spots" is what causes the power law dynamic that is necessary to transform social capital to operate [we will explore "sweet spots" and "power laws" on another occasion].

I recognize that some of what I have just said, parsed out, may seem to be at first glance based on a bit of circular reasoning. [But, watch this space and tomorrow's Nightschool column and then let's test out my hypothesis on the fuzz platform itself in the coming months.]