(upbeat music) >> Hello everyone and welcome to the special Cube remote conversation. I'm John Furrier, the host of theCUBE. We're here in our Palo Alto studio. We do all of our digital events. We do all of our content, original content here in studio. Of course, we can reach anyone around the world through our remote technology. And we like to bring experts in, to talk about some of the cutting edge issues and one of the most important things that I've been really doing a lot of thinking on lately and putting it into practice is, the role of individuals in groups in digital and since we're using software, this is becoming a really critical dynamic for the concept of engagement. Which is the holy grail of digital marketing. And now with the Coronavirus you're going to see a lot of events being canceled. You're going to see new norms being formed around how people engage, how they bond and ultimately, how they get work done. So we got a great guest J Metz, who has got a Ph.D in Communications Technology. Dr. Jay Metz, thank you for taking the time to jump on our remote interview. >> Hello. >> So I got to ask you, you know, we were talking before you came on you've got your doctorate and going back thirty years ago, you were doing a lot of pioneering work with others in academic circles around group behavior, software and you know, for us old guys but you rolled back the clock back then, you're talking message groups, you're talking about, you know, online tech systems. But the world is pretty similar evolved evolution in terms of those same concepts. Now more than ever, you're seeing Facebook breaking democracy, the government wants to try and create an e-democracy model. How do you do voting? All these things now are cutting edge issues and certainly with the Coronavirus, you're looking at people wanting to take content and posting it on the internet. It sounds so easy but it's now, it's going to be different. So, I got to ask you, you know, how do you see this world because you've done a lot of thinking on this? You know networks, you know technology and digital. How do you see the role of content and people and groups forming on the internet? >> Well I think that the role of technology hasn't really changed all that much when it comes to slowest moving piece, which is human nature. When we were, as you pointed out we were talking about this a long time ago way back before there were pretty pictures to look at on computers, you know. We had, we had IRC Chat, we had Bitnet Relay, we had Minitel in France, we've had different places had different forms of communicating through the use of computer. And at the time, they were really curious as to what was going to wind up happening. Were you going to get, you know, a bunch of freaks running things? Or are you going to get people you know, effectively isolated from society? All these questions that we're kind of asking nowadays. We still had them back then and we don't have a new answer. The same problem exists, even if there are prettier pictures to look at on the screen. >> David Vellante put and I put out a post, he actually did an interview, an article, where we talk about digital events and his advice was, "Don't just think about the software, "think about the outcome." So I have to ask you, when you start looking at digital interactions and human behavior, you're looking at stuff from whether it's visualization, Sigchi did a ton of work going back to the 80s to today. You're seeing, you're getting group theory coming in. The outcome is just people either getting something done, finding what they're looking for, making new friends and connecting. Digital is not just the software, there's a human component. Can you share your view about you know, the role of engagement, how content in groups, group social formation, social capital, social organizations can emerge from this new dynamic that is going to be forced upon us as we start thinking about virtual and work remotely and everything else. >> Well, I always felt that engagement was sort of a misnomer, to be honest. I always felt that engagement really had to do with the way that participation was counted. And participation is not necessarily an indication of how closely somebody feels to somebody else. How much of a part of the group they actually feel. And we start to look at group dynamics, as we start to look at the communication part, we look at the actual points on the graph as individual elements of participation, as if that's a good thing or tells us something. It doesn't tell us where the vector spin is going, right? Is it going in a positive way? Is it going in a negative way? And the reality as I've been able to find out over the last several decades and I can't believe I said that out loud. But the reality over time and this was always back to you know, before the radio even, I mean. This is a common theme in human nature. How people form groups through the use of technology is relatively consistent. And it has to go through the nature of the medium as it pertains to making our conversations either delayed by time or increased by time. So that synchronicity makes a huge difference as to what we call engagement and what kind of meaning we can apply to it. >> I want to get with you on asynchronous versus synchronous. Now that's an important concept and you know, the cloud native technologies are all asynchronous and horizontally scalable. These are the benefits of large scale systems now. But i get to your point about participation, you mentioned about engagement. Conventional wisdom says that, "Hey I need a lot of "people in the funnel. "I want more people, "what are the numbers? "We have a million views?." You're kind of saying it's kind of going the other way. That's actually not good engagement in digital or in these kind of group formations. Can you explain that? >> Well I mean, we just don't know. So when I was, when I was doing way back when I was doing my dissertation, I thought the same thing. I thought that if I could find out how much somebody participated in a group, I would be able to determine how closely affiliated they feel to that group. And it turns out, that's just not the case. What I found out especially in the short term, was the participation inside of a group usually was indicating that they disagree with the group, not agree. So if you only stop there, you won't get the full story. And what we'll find out is over time, there is an evolutionary approach to this, more about a fractal way of recursively coming in and an iterative approach to being part of a group, bringing yourself into it, letting the group accept you, that kind of a thing. And it simply isn't true that because I have X number of views or this level of rewatches on my videos, that that means that they were either each participating or even affiliated with what I got. Are they part of my group or not? I can't tell simply by the number of views. That's what I mean. >> Yeah, great great stuff. I want to get your thoughts on, and we, I saw your comments on my LinkedIn post, I just posted on my plane ride back from Washington, D.C. But I want to get your reaction to a couple edits here. So I wrote, "In the age of digitals, "not the individual that makes a change, "it's the group or mob. "Often groups are where "individuals voices are processed, "refined, and validated as a collective. "And then, "New social constructs "emerge in digital, "where we interact as "individuals within groups." With digital now pervasive, and certainly everyone working at home, this is going to be highlighted a lot. Can you comment and your reaction to those statements? What's your thoughts? >> Well think about the way we start conversations digitally versus in person, right? So, our idea and this goes to what you said you want to get to regarding synchronicity. So, when we have conversations in a group, in a face to face environment, it is a lot more dynamic, it is a lot more chaotic. There's a lot more complexity and the adaptive system of the group emerges in it's own particular pattern. That same adaptive system does exist inside of the digital world but it is highly regulated. It's regulated by the kind of software and platform that we use. So we will get different types of that group evolution based upon what the actual software will allow us to do. Just like Twitter has a different engagement level. And I use that in a sense of how we interact. It has a different interaction level than the way LinkedIn does. So for example, I could not have responded to you on LinkedIn the way we did because you couldn't have even posted the message on Twitter the way you did on LinkedIn. And the way that we handle the individualism is going to be handled in such a way that we have a more paced turn taking approach to doing things. So, it's not going to be a complete collective and it's not going to be complete individualistic approach depending upon which platform we're using for communication. >> Yeah, one of the beautiful things about the internet is you've seen the evolution, there has been pros and cons. A lot of value has been created. You got the website, you can self-serve yourself. Social networks, you meet some friends, you get some connections. But as we start to see more digital connection, people being connected together or individually if you will, the progression of learning has been somewhat nonlinear. You go to Google type something in, you pop to a webpage or you and I see each other on Twitter, I jump into Discord, talk to my gaming friends, next thing I'm on LinkedIn. I'm kind of popping around in a very nonlinear way. Creates for a very asynchronous kind of consumption or communication pattern. Could you talk about the difference between or the value or the pros and cons between asynchronous communication and consumption of that content and synchronous. >> Well, I think that ultimately, the concept of time is an underrated approach to evaluating how successful something is or is not. So, the time between the way that we communicate and our expectations of it makes a huge difference. If I were to have a, even a slice of a five second delay between your question and my answer, like we are doing some sort of satellite messaging, it would be very disruptive to our flow, right? We would not be able to bond in quite a way. And yet, if I write something that's five seconds after you posted, wow, that's amazing, right? So, our expectations for how time plays a role in the development of our relationship makes a huge difference. But you also sort of talking about the idea of multitasking and the content switching that we do from place to place whether it be gaming in Discord and whether it be in storage or it's, you know, my background or whether it be networking or whether it be medicine or whatever the concept that we have to involve, that probability to content switch even with the same people in the room, the "digital room", that still winds up being a place inside of our head because we've conceptualized those time elements quite differently based upon where we're actually having the conversation. And so ultimately, at the very end of the day, it's a complex system that we tend to forget that we're even doing naturally. We just, we just do. >> It's interesting. You may talk earlier about adaptive and what not. I was talking with a friend this past weekend, we're talking about the difference in organism and a mechanism. You know, organisms are self healing, they repair. You don't have, if people act as a group, there's kind of that, kind of group feel like a social organism versus a mechanism. Software today feels like a mechanism. I got a chat window open, you can't see me. You're like "Hey you're there?", and I'm like, I could be making coffee, doing whatever. I'm not really present. So, you start to see what organism and mechanism concepts and then the notion of presence and commitment. If I'm face to face, that's value and time matters, and presence matters. I'm looking over there, talking to you. So presence and commitment are also concepts. So talk about those two things. You got being an organism, a social organism, social being versus a mechanism, it's like a software and then, you know, the commitment and presence dynamic. What's your view of those things? >> So you brought up the idea of linearity earlier and non-linearity. And when you look at something called, Complex Adaptive Systems, we take very static rules and they don't have to be a lot of rules, just a couple rules and just like the mechanisms that you're talking about. They can be very simple but, you know, in a stasis way and the human nature is to work around it. So our organistic, (laughs), you know what I mean. >> Yeah. >> That element that we bring to the table, tends to wind up working within that rule set or without that rule set and depending on what our particular needs are. But what happens in that parlance is called emergence. In other words, the process is called, autopoiesis, a technical term that means a pattern self-emerges from the mixture of a static mechanical element, those rules of communication and the way that we dynamically as organisms tend to work within and without those rules. And a pattern will emerge as a result. >> I want to get your thoughts on a digital event building out with the next generation kind of constructs for, how people can actually use the digital network, Zoom, Keynotes, Breakouts and then the other community aspect of it. But I want to get your thoughts on the role within groups, online groups. One is a group that self forms, has roles and responsibilities, there's decision making, there's group interaction, there's a dynamic kind of organism feel to it. Versus a mob, people just kind of gather up, grass roots Where it's just more free and loose. Can you talk about how you see those differences 'cuz you, you know, people could just gather publicly and chat. It could be self governed in some way but there's no real roles, no decision making, it's more mob like. And then, social constructs around decision making and group formation and decision making. >> In reality, it doesn't, if all things were being equal in terms of amount of time they had spent, the human element of forming groups does not change. The social development of groups has been something that's been studied since the 1840s in academia. And when you look back at that, those as basic ground rules of how groups form, they really haven't changed all that much. The facilitation of that may have changed. But have you ever gone to a group where the first meeting will have all whole bunch of people show up, and the second, people a lot less and by the third time it's already dead? You know, that game of life that we're familiar with with the whole, you know, software program, well that's very true. That's a good metaphor for the way that humans form groups in the first place. Just because it doesn't necessarily form in a digital way, it doesn't mean that was the nature of that particular way. It means that, that particular group itself, that participation, that affiliation, didn't happen in the timeframe necessary to keep it going. And I really think and I really believe that understanding the nature of the people involved, the marriage with the content that they are for and the medium that provides that facilitation is what will provide the idea of whether or not the entire group digital or other wise lives or dies. >> That's great insight J. I really appreciate that. You know, final question on this whole digital shift. The Coronavirus is forcing people to stay at home, events are being canceled. And you've been following theCUBE, you kind of know what SiliconANGLE and theCUBE have been doing. We would go to events where people would be there, physical spaces, and we would interview people in our authentic way and face to face and bond and but gather the data from the guests and distribute it digitally to our audiences. We've been doing that for 10 years. Now what's interesting though is the worlds now changed. There's no more venue. But the people running these events still want to take content value but now they got to digitally distribute it to where the people are in digital streams or digital space. Okay, or cyber space. So, this has been a real challenge for us people that are used to relying on the venue to handle a lot of the structural things. Decisions, stage, boom, breakouts, areas for hallway tracks, happy hour, networking. So, the venue handled all that. Now you have a flip of the script where it's still content value but the distribution to digital is chaotic and distributed. There's a group challenge, right? So, the question I have for you based on your expertise, how should people be thinking about the complexity to do a digital event 'cuz you got to have content, you have a digital stage, you need distribution, but you need to have the humans involved because they are the consumers and the actors. What your view of this and if we run a team together trying to figure this out, what we would say to people to help them along? >> I think, so there's a short game and there's long game here. And the long game is that, there are elements to digital forms of communication in asynchronous method just to use the terminology we've been doing. There are realities that cannot be met, the same way that you met in a face to face. And those are ages ago they used to be called, social context cues. But effectively the richness of a face to face just simply cannot be held in an asynchronous format for long. So, the long term game here, the long game is that, this is temporary setback because you still need to be able to do things that you can't normally do just through you know, watch pre-recorded content. Even if it winds up being a recorded content that will be a pre-recorded at some point. You're watching it live, you're still going to view it that way, right? If I watch a webinar live, hell, I have produced dozens and dozens of these things. I'm always aware that this is basically being viewed as if it were a, you know, pre-recorded content. On the short term now to answer your question, what has to happen is that, we have to look at a multi-pronged communication approach. How do I get that synchronicity of communication? How do I get people to feel like they've been heard? That's the problem. When your in a face to face situation in conferences you know you've been heard. In the hallways, in the walkways you would stand up and you would do a question. You know that. That's is one of the biggest problems we have to solve digitally because ultimately, I'm broadcasting something to you and it's a very different communication style than if we're having a interpersonal communication. >> Yeah, and you know one of the things over the years with the internet, the content acquisition which was the primary use case of an event. You go and learn. That can be done online. So, we've seen the progression of the networking peaks, the face to face value, meeting new people. My friends is there, I haven't seen him in a while. Or we work remotely and we see each other and we have beers together or we're bonding. So, is that's just really hard to replicate in software. It really really is. It can be a big challenge. >> Oh, without question. I mean, but at the same time think about reality of how much time you spend with people that you don't normally spend time with at the conferences. Entire friendships had been based on 30 minute conversations spread out over three conferences, right? I mean, you'll go and you'll dinner with one group of people, one conference and then you won't see them again for another three conferences. You go back to that fourth conference and, "Hey we're back "to where we left off "and we're good friends and "that'll never really change." So, we're able to kind of fill in the blanks mentally and emotionally in that sense. The question is, can we do that through the use of a digital technology or to your other point that you mentioned earlier, do other forms whether it be the politics that come out on Twitter or the you know, the other groups we're associated with, but they are worthy, God help us the cancel culture that's coming up. Will that affect everything digitally, that you can skip over when you're actually in a face to face situation. Those are questions that I don't have an answer to. >> Yeah I mean, we're looking at it hard. We think content is key, content value. And again, timing is critical. I like your perspective on timing. There's a time series involved. And there's asynchronous, right? So, it being there. You know, content with, you know, people who are heard or participating, contribution, forming bonds, and interacting. The digital venue that has to facilitate a community loop in, right? So, it's a really complicated but new emerging trend. We're really watching this closely and we really appreciate your insight. Thanks for taking the time. >> My best. >> J Metz, Dr. J Metz here, helping me unpack and sitting back in looking at the philosophy but really the practice of 30 years of internet and online research and sociology around the role of people, individuals in context to groups, this is a big discussion as people start to figure out and operationalize what is the right mix for digital and virtual with physical of spaces. And certainly, we think events will come back soon. But J, thanks for giving us the time and we'll talk to you later. >> Thanks for the invite. >> I'm John Furrier here at theCUBE studios for remote interview with Dr. J Metz talking about the social theory around digital groups. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)