The Strength of Performative Ties...(8/9)

In the recent issue of Knowledge @ Wharton, Sheen S. Levine shared his research on "performative ties", one way of how the staff acquires knowledge in the organisation and strengthens one's competitive advantage. The research looked into MNCs including Boston Consulting Group, Bain & Company and IBM. The way people look for information can be surprisingly effective when they "talk to strangers", meaning colleagues or contacts that they do not have regular contact...the study falls into the field of organisation structure and knowledge management. To me, the same is equally important in the scope of community and clans. In the modern world, we claim that our present way of communication is far more diversified and "accessable" between people, and with the impact of Internet and email, the game of performative ties does alter a lot. What we did not have before...from basic email to online chatroom, ICQ, Messengers, VOIP, SMS, MMS, sharewares, blogs, online community (has read about the virtual marriage society in China yesterday...) provide us not only all new forms of information and knowledge, but also different forms of performative ties, and definitely I see that these kinds of channel need a much lower transaction cost. Think about when we were young, what did we do? We wrote letters, we collected stamps, we had penfriends, we spent time on the old style art-deco telephone; we encountered expensive bills for overseas calls interrupted by the dizzy voices. How does we improve, or at least adapt, with the new method of performative ties? This is an interesting question. We have more close friends from all over the world, and the spirit of distance transcends the status it used to be. However, our perspective to the world and the demand to human network and web alter as well. This is cultural change, not only to commerce but sociology. People will tell you that blog makes business, chatroom gains profit, VOIP is the nowadays killing application or MMS is not only an orange no more. What we can say is we are in a dynamic world, and the way to find a life in the society can be somewhat more challenging, yet interesting...