Collectives Collaborate, Connectives Cooperate ⇢

Fascinating distinction between collaborating and cooperating, the parallel notion that collectives collaborate, while ‘connectives’ cooperate:

cloudhead:

We often use these words interchangeably, but they represent fundamentally different ways of contributing to a group and each comes with its own dynamics and power structures that shape groups in different ways…

When collaborating, people work together (co-labor) on a single shared goal.
Like an orchestra which follows a script everyone has agreed upon and each musician plays their part not for its own sake but to help make something bigger.

When cooperating, people perform together (co-operate) while working on selfish yet common goals.
The logic here is “If you help me I’ll help you” and it allows for the spontaneous kind of participation that fuels peer-to-peer systems and distributed networks. If an orchestra is the sound of collaboration, then a drum circle is the sound of cooperation. 

For centuries collaboration has powered most of our society’s institutions.
This is true of everything from our schools to our governments where we have worked together through consensus to build systems of increasing complexity.

But today, cooperation is fuelling most of the disruptive innovations of our time.
In virtually every aspect of our culture, the old guard is being replaced by cooperative, self organizing, distributed systems.

Collectives collaborate. 
Collectives are part of the machinery of the previous era. They give priority to the group over the individual and encourage members to adopt a joint identity that unites them around their shared goal. 

Connectives cooperate.
A connective doesn’t give priority to the group or the individual but instead supports and encourages both simultaneously. There’s no shared sense of identity in a connective because each member is busy pursuing their own goals.

Collectives are breeding grounds for hierarchies and power struggles.
Even with the best intentions, collaboration often encourages pyramids of power and authority. The higher up the pyramid you are in a collective, the more freedom you have to carve out your own individual identity and direct the group’s efforts towards your own goals. The conductor is famous while the tuba player remains unknown. But if the tuba player gets up to leave someone needs to step in to replace her.

Connectives are self-organizing and self-sustaining.
No master architect, conductor, or blueprint is needed. You can join or leave a drum circle at any time and the beat goes on with or without you.

Wikipedia is a collective. Delicious is a connective.
Hence the brutal hierarchies and old school power structures that govern Wikipedia. Delicious on the other hand doesn’t have the same problems; No consensus is needed because people aren’t collaborating. Each user is free to use Delicious for whatever they want.

Since connectives support individual goals, they create value even when a group is small and growing.
Wikipedia is pretty much useless as an encyclopedia until it contains thousands of articles which requires a huge collaborative effort. But the very first person who used Delicious was able to get value from the system right away. As the system became more popular new kinds of value emerged.

By linking selfish yet common acts together, connectives are able to empower individuals while creating new kinds of group value.
Moving your bookmarks from your own computer to Delicious enhances their value because you can access them from anywhere, but the kind of value you get from them stays pretty much the same. Once bookmarks are shared and interconnected though, an entirely new kind of value is created … one that transcends the original act of bookmarking and yet fuels it at as well; bookmarks are no longer just about remembering but also about finding. And this illustrates the real power of connectives: they’re able to support individuals while encouraging the emergence of new kinds of group value.

Nature is a connective not a collective.
In a forest there is no script that all of the organisms follow. There is no conductor. Yet there are countless levels of interdependence and cooperation at work in which selfish goals intersect to sustain each other and create larger, unpredictable, organic patterns. 

Networks are fundamentally natural and organic processes. Although you wouldn’t know that by looking at the corporately controlled internet we have today. Today’s internet inherited the political and technical baggage of broadcast era networks whose mechanical architecture is completely out of tune with emerging logic of our connected culture.

Connective is a synonym for network in a sense, but I like the opposition to collective, and it relates to the distinction I have long made between group and ‘grouping’.

Stowe Boyd, Facebook Groups versus Groupings

Groups — addressable collections of people who become associated by invitation from the group’s owner, and who have symmetric relationships with each other — are as old as the web. You have them in Yahoo Groups, Flickr, and all over the place.

One of the most interesting and exciting advances on the social web have been ‘groupings’,  where people are spontaneously members of free-form and ad hoc associations without invitation.

For example, all those people that follow me on Twitter are in effect members of a Stowe Boyd grouping. Or all of those people that use a given tag, or follow it (I wish Twitter would implement that, by the way). Or all the people that have liked the same artist in Ping.

Consider Last.fm’s ‘virtual neighborhoods’, based on people’s music play. Wandering around in my Last.fm neighborhood introduced me to more great music in a few hours than all the people I know had played for me in years.

If I were only connected to people on Twitter that I already knew — that I invited to be friends with me — my world would be much much smaller.

Don’t get me wrong: groups have their place, especially when privacy or secrecy is needed, as in many business situations, or when planning a surprise party. But openness, transparency, and serendipity are more interesting as general principles than closedness, opaqueness, and knownness.

And now I should make the case that groupings are connectives, more about cooperation and less about about collaboration, which is more the province of collectives or groups.

5 July 2011 58 cloudhead
collaborationcollectivesconnectivescooperationgroupingsgroupshierarchiesnetworksxl*

Notes

  1. piclinjustine reblogged this from cloudhead
  2. gthebolt reblogged this from emergentfutures
  3. zuloarkcollective reblogged this from pacogonzalez
  4. prettybratinela reblogged this from emergentfutures
  5. caradinley reblogged this from emergentfutures
  6. thenagainmaybeitsme reblogged this from emergentfutures
  7. super-novah reblogged this from emergentfutures
  8. naifosak reblogged this from emergentfutures
  9. namosays reblogged this from emergentfutures
  10. pacogonzalez reblogged this from cloudhead and added:
    Thanks to emergentfutures and wildcat2030 to discover me cloudhead
  11. trendsmodern reblogged this from emergentfutures
  12. lgroy reblogged this from emergentfutures
  13. starrglimpse reblogged this from emergentfutures and added:
    Collectives connectives cooperation
  14. lennoxmeldrum reblogged this from emergentfutures
  15. jmarbach reblogged this from cloudhead
  16. greenidea reblogged this from cloudhead
  17. nosuchthingasnever reblogged this from stoweboyd and added:
    Interesting post on...differences between these terms. Been thinking
  18. collectivect reblogged this from stoweboyd
  19. kiteza reblogged this from stoweboyd
  20. wildcat2030 reblogged this from emergentfutures
  21. mickyates reblogged this from cloudhead
  22. emergentfutures reblogged this from stoweboyd

← Previous Post Next Post →

About

Web anthropologist, futurist, author. My focus is the future, and the tectonic forces pushing business, media, and society into an unclear and accelerating future. more.

Working on longer format projects, Sign up for the newsletter.

GigaOM Research analyst and curator.

Also writing beaconstreets.com.

Contact me. or ask me a question.



My Vizify profile.

Socialogy

  • John Hagel | John offers up some great insights, like the fact that passion is lower the larger that businesses get.

  • Euan Semple | A chat with my old pal, and the author of Organizations Don't Tweet, People Do

  • Will McInnes | The author of Culture Shock and managing director of Nixon/McInnes

  • Jennifer Magnolfi | An interview with the woman who said, 'Work is not a place you go, it's a thing you do'.

    • Hot Now

  • What Drives Us? | A draft chapter of my book, discussing motivations, Maslow's hierarchy, and fluidarity.

  • Socialogy: Interview With John Hagel | I Speak with Joh Hagel about the innovation at the edge.

  • Complex organisation arises from webs of interaction among causal factors | So, it turns out that DNA is, in fact, a great metaphor for business culture, but only after you realize that DNA is not a few hundred off-on switches, but instead a universe of unknowable complexities, that we can interact with, and understand at some abstract cartoonish level, but not control, and never fully comprehend.

  • Bitcoin May Be the Global Economy’s Last Safe Haven | Paul Ford

  • Innovators Get Better With Age | Companies make a mistake by relying too much on the innoations of the young, because Nobel laureats don't come into their prime until their 50s.

    • Oldie

  • Infodemics | 2009 | Passing incomplete or inaccurate information about some risk event can make people take actions that increase the damage of the event itself.

    • Lynx theme created by Andrew Stichbury for Tumblr.