Crowdsourced Network for Analog Tweeting
Can a hand written note find its own way to a specific person by crowd surfing through 400 geeks at the Emerging Communications conference?
I didn’t know where @caseorganic was sitting, I just scrawled this note and handed it off to the person on my right, nudging them to do the same. Watching down the aisle I noticed the passing included more verbal interaction than I had suspected (it would be nice if it caused a little less disruption (friction)). The horizontal passage was an artifact of the physical setup, much easier to pass to the person beside you, unless there was a significant gap (in which case i’d suspect people would hand it to someone behind them).
Five minutes later, voila, the note found her.
I actually was a little shocked, turns out she was sitting in the front right, while i was in the far left. The act of passing a note forward seems pretty disruptive, and i’m surprised that enough people reached forward, tapped a stranger’s shoulder, and handed them a note, that this little experiment actually worked.
A few questions linger:
How many people peeked inside the note as it passed by?
Why didn’t anyone augment the note? Add their own postmark?
Was the first test a success because it was headed to someone with 6,000 followers? (two subsequent tests fail whaled).
What percentage of handlers used knowledge of the recipient’s position to inform their actions?
What kinds of incentives might lead to a higher success rate? or structural changes? or test mechanisms?
Is there any connection to self organizing principles here?
Is this a subtle form of emergence?
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