 Hello and welcome to this 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, using software. This has become 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've got a great guest, Jay Metz, who's the PhD 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, we were talking before we came on, you've got your doctorate, and going back 30 years ago, you were doing a lot of pioneering work with others in academic circles around group behavior, software, and for us old guys, but you roll back the clock back then, you're talking message groups, you're talking about online tech systems. But the world is pretty much similar of all evolution in terms of those same concepts. Now more than ever, you're seeing Facebook breaking democracy, the government wants to try to create an e-democracy model. How do you do voting? All of these things now are cutting edge issues, and certainly with the coronavirus, you're looking at people wanting to take content and post it on the internet. It sounds so easy, but it's now, it's going to be different. So I got to ask you, 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 the human nature. When we were, as you point out, we were talking about this a long time ago, way back before there were pretty pictures to look at on the computer screen. You know, we had IRC chat, we had BitNet Relay, we had Minitel in France, we've had different places, 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. I mean, the same problem exists even if there are pretty good pictures to look at on the screen. Dave, a lot of the time I put, and I put out a post, he actually did the interview on 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 in the 80s to today. You're seeing, again, 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, that's not just the software, there's a human component. Can you share your view about the role of engagement and how content and 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 as 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 it tells us something. It doesn't tell us where the vector spin is going, or 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, I can't believe I said that out loud, but the reality over time, and this goes all the way back to 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. That's an important concept. And the cloud native technologies are all asynchronous. It's horizontally scalable. These are the benefits of large scale systems now. But I'll 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? Do 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 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 that 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 we'll find out is over time, there's an evolutionary approach to it. There's more of a fractal way of recursively coming in and iterative approach to being part of the 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 participating or even affiliated with what I've got. Are they part of my group or not? I can't tell simply by the number of you. That's what it means. Yeah, great stuff. I want to get your thoughts on, and I saw your comments on my LinkedIn post. I just posted on my plane ride back from Washington DC. But I want to get your reaction to a couple of edits here. So I wrote, in the age of digital, it's 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 that we stack conversations digitally versus in person. So our idea, and this goes to what you said you were going 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 its 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 the sense of how we interact, has a different interaction level than the way that LinkedIn does. So for example, I could not have responded to you on LinkedIn the way we did because you couldn't have 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 this. So it's not going to be a complete collective and it's not going to be a 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 has been pros and cons. A lot of value has been created. You go to 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 connections, people being connected together, or individually, if you will, the progression of learning has been somewhat non-linear. 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 in a moment, LinkedIn. I'm kind of popping around in a very non-linear 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 even a slice of five-second delay between your question and my answer, like we were 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 post it, wow, that's amazing. So our expectations for how time plays a role in the development of our relationships makes a huge difference. But you also started talking about the idea of multitasking and the context switching that we do from place to place, whether it be gaming and discord and whether it be in storage or in my background, or whether it be in networking or whether it be in medicine or whatever the concept that we have to evolve, that ability to context 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 conceptualize 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 do. It's interesting, you talked about earlier about adaptive and whatnot. I was talking with a friend this past weekend, you're talking about the disorder in an organism and a mechanism, you know, organisms are self-healing, they repair, you can have people act as a group. There's kind of that kind of group feel like a social organism versus a mechanism. Software today seems 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 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, social organism, social being versus a mechanism. It's like 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 of 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 organism is, 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 depending upon what our particular needs are. But what happens is in that parlance, it's called emergence. In other words, the process is called autopolysis. 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 roles. And a pattern will emerge as a result. I want to get your thoughts on a digital event, on digital event building out with the next generation kind of constructs for how people can actually use a digital event with Zoom, keynotes, breakouts, and then the community aspect of it. But I want to get your thoughts on the roles 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 kind of feel to it, versus a mob, people just kind of gather up grassroots where it's just more free and loose. Can you talk about how you see those differences? Because people can gather publicly and chat, it could be self-governed in some way, but there's no real roles, there's 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 are being equal in terms of the amount of time that's 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 those 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 been to a group where the first meeting will have a whole bunch of people show up and the second people a lot less and then by the third time, it's already dead? You know, that game of life that we're familiar with with the old 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 doesn't mean that that was a nature of the way. It means that that particular group itself, that participation, that affiliation didn't happen and the timeframe necessary, keep it going. And that, I really think, and I really believe that understanding the nature of the people involved, the marriage with the actual content that they're for and the medium that provides that facilitation is what will provide the idea of whether or not the entire group digital or otherwise digitized. That's great insight, Jay, 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, but gather the data from the guests and distribute it digitally to audiences. Been doing that for 10 years. Now, what's interesting though is that the world's 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 people that are used to relying on the venue to handle a lot of the structural things. Decision, 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 is to digital, it's chaotic and distributed, is 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? Because you got to have content, you have a digital stage, you got to need distribution, but you need to have the humans involved because they're the consumers and the actors. What's your view of this? And if we run a team together, we're trying to figure this out, what would we say to people to help them along? I think, so there's a short game and there's a long game here. And the long game is that there are elements to digital forms of communication and asynchronous method, just to use the terminology we've been doing. There are realities that cannot be met the same way they can be met in a face-to-face. 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 a temporary setback because you still need to be able to do things that you can't normally do just through watching pre-reported content. Even if it winds up being a recorded content, it will be pre-reported at some point. If you're watching it live, you're still going to view it that way. If I watch a webinar live, I have produced dozens and dozens of these things. I'm always aware that this is basically being viewed as if it were a pre-recorded content. On the short-term, though, 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 you're in a face-to-face situation in conferences, you know you've been heard in the hallways, in the walkways, if you stand up and you do a question, you know that. That is one of the biggest problems that we have to solve visually because ultimately, I'm broadcasting something to you and it's a very different communication style than if we're having an interpersonal communication. Yeah, and 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 piece, the face-to-face value, meeting new people, my friends there haven't seen them in a while, or we work remotely and we see each other and we have beers together or we're bonding. So that's just really hard to replicate in software. It really, really is, and it's a big challenge. Well, without question, I mean, but at the same time, think about the reality of how much time you spend with people that you don't normally spend time with at the conferences. Entire friendships have been based on 30 minute conversations spread out over three conferences, right? I mean, you'll go and you'll have 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 then that's never really changed. 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 other groups that we're associated with or the 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 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 then there's asynchronous, right? So being there, content with people who have heard or are participating, contributing, forming bonds and interacting, the digital venue then 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. Jay Metz, Dr. Jay Metz here helping me unpack and just sitting back and looking at the philosophy but really the practice of 30 years of internet or 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 spaces. And certainly we think events will come back soon. But Jay, thanks for taking the time and we'll talk to you later. Thanks for the invite. I'm John Furrier here in theCUBE Studios for a remote interview with Dr. Jay Metz talking about the social theory around digital groups. Thanks for watching.