Snow Crab Legs and the Hive Mind
May 13, 2009 :: Joe LoongThis past Mother’s Day, I was sitting around the table with my family, digging into a plate of Alaskan Snow Crab legs (what I would consider a nontraditional Mother’s Day brunch). And I was having a hard time of it — I was making a mess, and not really having much luck getting the meat out cleanly.
There’s a trick to eating crab snow crab legs. It’s not a particularly tricky trick — as it turns out, you just *snap* one way, then *snap* the other way, and pull — but I’d forgotten, and it took me a few tries to remember how to do it.
So of course that got me thinking about social media and the social sharing of knowledge.
I didn’t push away from the table to do a quick Web search (I considered it, but I ended up muddling through), but afterwards, I took a look around. Even though I’m a fan of the written word, a demonstration like this clearly calls for video. It doesn’t need to be super-fancy, with multiple angles, off-camera narration, or onscreen annotations — one of the best ones was informal, but instructional, shot with a cameraphone or cheap digicam in a busy seafood place. (You can also see fancier versions, including commercial kitchen technique for speed-cracking Dungeness crab that features good use of slo-mo and graphics.)
The crab-cracking videos are an illustration of how people generally like being helpful and demonstrating their expertise, and how social learning makes it possible for people to contribute their knowledge on topics both mundane and esoteric, practical and trivial.
But what does this prove, other than I’m hungry right now? How does the posting of how-to’s, tutorials and videos on cracking crab, carving turkey like a butcher, folding fitted sheets, disassembling Mossberg 500 shotguns, lacing shoes differently, building $14 Steadycams, and any one of a million other trivial things, make the world a better place?
I think it’s an incremental thing — each one of these trivial wins ultimately adds to the storehouse of total human knowledge. Each new piece of knowledge has the potential to help someone, and because it’s placed somewhere browseable, searchable, and findable by others on an on-demand, even mobile, basis, it means that people are more likely to find the knowledge they need, when it will be most useful to them.
What’s more, there’s no incremental cost — the tutorial on how to on iron a shirt doesn’t displace the plans for affordable Third World solar ovens, any more than ridiculously detailed explanations of lightsaber combat detracts from the usefulness of the Web at large.
(I do worry sometimes that the group mind will dumb us down and make us so dependent on the shared hive mind that we’re unable to function as individuals without it. Though that ground’s been covered pretty thoroughly in science fiction and I won’t revisit it now.)
In closing, I do want to call back to my January entry on being useful by sharing your expertise and remind businesses that sharing useful knowledge is good — being helpful can help you. Even if it’s for something “trivial.”
Got your own thoughts on the social sharing of knowledge? Leave a comment below.
Comments are moderated and will appear shortly. See terms.
