How Can One Change Their Present Situation? Part III — Online Communities

Datcode, Coursera, verysmartbrothas, and Twitter. What do all these have in common? They are online communities that help bridge the information gap. Datcode in particular is a community that I think is pretty sweet. They define themselves as a community of “black coders serving as a place to share knowledge, collaborate, and meet new people.” If you’re a black coder or want to learn how to code, then be sure to join now. No, for real. Stop reading and join their slack channel right now. Slack.datcode.io. I’ll wait one Andre 3000 Solo Reprise for you. Alright, now that you’ve returned, back to the topic of online communities. In the previous post, I talked about the information gaps that are pervasive amongst communities and the importance of information nexus. I define information nexus as one’s proximity and access to information. As I’ve previously said,

Information nexus is not provided by merely telling a person of a given opportunity. It is instead fulfilled by the myriad of daily interactions that lead a person to have more than just a passing awareness of certain opportunities, but to have lived, witnessed and understood from beginning to end, step-by-step, the presence of any given opportunity and how to take advantage of it.

Benefits of Online Communities

One potential great equalizer in the fight against information gaps has been the Internet, specifically the proliferation of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) and online communities such as those mentioned above. Now, before you go rolling your eyes at another techie droning on about the transformative power of social media, hear me out. In some sense, I’m with your eye rolling. I, like you and probably everybody close to you, have my Facebook stories. Heck, on every social network you can find people complaining about social networks. However, there needs to be some balance in how we discuss online communities. On the one hand, some reverently talk about social media as some revolutionary Messiah that has come to save us all. And others talk about social media, specifically social networking sites, as if they’re some new drug that would make an otherwise productive member of society sluggish, lazy, stupid, and unconcerned.

I don’t think social media is the end all be all. But their potential to materially increase information nexus cannot be understated. The great benefit of information nexus isn’t just mere awareness of options, but the daily reinforcements provided by your environment, and being a daily witness to the action-outcome feedback loops involved in attaining a specific skill. Social media can act as a daily reinforcer. As many brands have learned, we’re glued to our Facebook，Snapchat, and Twitter anyways, we might as well use it to reinforce certain ideas. Similarly, social media in the form of learning communities can act as a wonderful skill learning tool. Slack communities can serve as the good guy uncle who can give you pointers on basketball, or the ever helpful auntie who can tell you which internships to apply for in order to someday work for The State Department.

MOOCs, Spontaneous Goal Pursuit & The Problem With Self Chosen Communities:

MOOCs have been one of my favorite inventions of the internet. Sites like Udacity and Coursera provide anyone with an internet connection with open access to courses taught by Ivy League professors. On Coursera you can learn how to make complex front-end skills such as combining pink plus white to achieve a gradient background. On less formal chat based communities, such as the Datcode Slack channel, you can learn where to find beautiful typefaces like Baron San Serif and Futura, free of charge. But these communities that I love so much come up short in one key aspect. Three words — Spontaneous goal pursuit. Spontaneous goal pursuit. Spontaneous goal pursuit. I’ll say it until I’m blue in the face, spontaneous goal pursuit.

Why is this concept so important when talking about information nexus and bettering one’s position in life? Well, because there are very few people growing up in inner cities who spontaneously decide to become data scientists. Similarly, very few people in rural villages spontaneously decide to lace up their Nikes and try to become the next Lebron James. In fact, from big city skylines to rural villages, there are very few people anywhere who spontaneously decide to pursue any endeavor. That is because spontaneous goal pursuit isn’t so spontaneous. If choosing what options to pursue was an entirely spontaneous decision unrelated to environmental factors, then self-chosen learning communities such as Coursera and Slack would be much more beneficial. Instead, what we choose to pursue is highly dependent on what we are exposed to, how often it exposed to us, and in what context.

Twitter & Stream Focused Communities

This is where Twitter, Facebook, and similar communities excel. Although they are a bit less focused on productive endeavors (okay more than a bit), they still have their value. Let’s take a second to contrast Twitter and Coursera. I know, I know. The difference is obvious. On Coursera you can find educational material, and on Twitter you can find Arthur memes and keep-up with yesteryear celebrities like Siegfried and Roy. But again, hear me out. One less obvious difference is that when people use Coursera they already have a goal in mind. Their use is purposeful. They might already have discovered that a particular goal, say learning JavaScript, is worth pursuing and then seek out a course on Coursera. On the other hand, on Twitter people do not necessarily have a goal when they go there. They might just want to check out what’s trending, their stream, or other twitter communities. To be clear, these so called stream based communities still have a strong self-chosen quality to them since the content you see is in large part dependent on who you have chosen to follow. However, they provide a much greater possibility of spontaneously discovering options that one previously was not adequately exposed to.

To illustrate the randomness of Twitter, I am reminded of one of many great moments in Black Twitter. A Twitter user became notorious for exposing racist user’s public information in attempts to curb Twitter abuse. Whenever bigots tweeted her threatening, racist, or abusive tweets she would do some Internet sleuthing, uncover the user’s personal information, contact their employers, and provide the receipts of their employee’s racism. On more than one occasion her work led to a quick firing of the abusive Tweeter user. She quickly became a hero to some in the Black Twitter community. One user in particular said that his girlfriend was switching her major to computer science due to being impressed at the user’s “hacking” ability. Now, I am not advocating for this type of behavior, I’m just using this as an example of the type of spontaneous discovery of options that is missing on Coursera.

Twitter + Cousera

It goes without saying that Arthur memes probably won’t change anybody’s life in a way that allows them to go from driving a hooptie to a white Ferrari. But what if we can combine the stream based communities that allow people to spontaneously discover and be exposed to new options, with educational communities like Coursera? How can we add the focused, resource driven quality of MOOCs and like-minded communities like the Datcode Slack with the spontaneous stream driven quality of communities like Twitter?

That is the challenge of our generation. However, I believe that whoever or whatever can solve this challenge will be transformative. One point that I would like to stress is that any such community that combines the spontaneity of Twitter with the productiveness of Coursera must exist as a casual, daily part of people’s life. It cannot be a place exclusively for people who already have a specific goal in mind. It has to exist as a community where you can be yourself, a community where you can go on boring summer nights and mindlessly surf for hours. I don’t know about you, but Coursera is not a daily part of my life. Even as much as I love MOOCs, I don’t find myself spontaneously surfing Coursera forums. In other words, what we need is a Coursera with the swag of Twitter.

In part IV of this series I will discuss Effort and it’s relation with economic mobility. If you haven’t already please read part I and part II of this series. They’ll each take approximately five Andre 3000 Solo Reprises to read.