However, I look at your chart and it seems like we’re moving(or is it you?) towards slicing and dicing everything in our lifestreams. Like we’re keeping score, because that’s what we do. and you know what? We do. We keep score. I keep score of your shit and you keep score of mine. We keep score of theirs.

We are a metrics driven people. And sadly we let it define us.

Unfortunately metrics should not determine or enable human relationships and yet it seems that certain elements of social- do just that.

Keep thinking Sam. it’s good for all of us.

Kiva founder Matt Flannery recently wondered whether Kiva was “commoditizing rather than dignifying” their loan recipients. (http://www.socialedge.org/blogs/kiva-chronicles/archive/2008/06/23/catfood-and-commoditization) While he wasn’t discussing metrics in particular, this seems to me a potential byproduct of massive scale in social initiatives, and one that must be countered with more qualitative metrics that ensure our efforts to do good don’t, in the end, dehumanize those we intend to help.

This “bigger is better” phenomenon is particularly American. We routinely forgo quality for quantity in our zeal for overconsumption and supposed efficiencies/economies of scale.

It seems to me that many of the measures we use in the offline world are more subjective and qualitative than the objective and quantitative. I don’t really focus on the number of kisses so much as the degree to which the last one made my toes tingle Regardless of what my weight is, am I happy with it? I think more subjective, human-input likert-scale responses may be the bridge you’re looking for to make it possible to arrive at metrics that enable human relationships. Like the old corporate balanced scorecard approach, a blend of subjective/objective and qualitative/quantitative metrics may help ensure participants in systems don’t optimize for a particular metric by neglecting another…

Not only will I gladly trade a score of sycophantic hangers-on for one true friend, I’ll trade the whole self-styled rat race for a life that has true impact on a larger, longer, wider scale. How does one “measure” the good one does, at that scale? One doesn’t, because one is more focused on the act of doing than on the back-patting process of claiming credit.

“It is only the great-hearted who can be true friends. The mean and cowardly, can never know what true friendship means.”
- Charles Kingsley

“Weird heroes and mould-breaking champions exist as living proof to those who need it that the tyranny of the ‘rat race’ is not yet final.”
Hunter S. Thompson

Fausty | http://www.cultureghost.org