Reinforce, Refine, Reject
(image via smoont.com)
Reading this piece on comments, and this one talking about disruption vs random drift, and the “Social Media Country Club” thing from yesterday got me thinking about the types of reaction information gets when you let it into the world.
(As ever, my apologies for any wheels I’m reinventing here - I’d be surprised if these kind of models weren’t already common.)
People can publically do three things with a piece of information: reinforce it, refine it or reject it.
Reinforcing information includes praising it without adding to it, sharing it, “liking” it on Facebook or Tumblr, recommending it, etc.
Refining information includes adding to it, drawing on it to create your own information, correcting it, asking questions about it.
Rejecting information includes flaming it, drawing negative attention to it, dismissing it, demolishing its arguments.
You’ll of course notice there are grey areas here: sharing with some minor adjustments, or refining to such a degree it pretty much constitutes rejection.
So why do I think this kind of model is useful?
First off it creates a slightly more nuanced way of understanding systems based on “trust”/”social capital”/”whuffie”. If you look at what participants do with information, you can understand which strategies get rewarded when. You could also build hypothetical models and see how well they describe real social spaces.
And this leads to a second useful thing, which is that you can design a social space to reward particular actions depending on what you’re trying to achieve. Say you’re doing some idea generation work: initially you want to reward REFINE and to a lesser extent REINFORCE. But after a certain point you might need to reward REINFORCE and REJECT - the time for “well I like this bit not this bit” reactions is over.
The way you design for this might be structural, or incentive-based, or via setting a good example for people to copy, or via policing.
The point is, though, that all three of the actions can be useful or non-useful, sometimes simply depending on where and when they happen. Reinforcement which gets the information out to different audiences is useful - reinforcement that simply creates an impression of consensus (“WOW! Great post!!”) might not be, as it could discourage refinement. Rejection which opens up new arguments or defines points of difference feels a lot more useful than “FAIL”.
If pushed I’d say that you should reinforce via networks (sharing stuff), refine at the original site of the information (commenting), and reject by creating a new site of information (your own blog post).
