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Jargon Watch: Harris’ Law

In consumer behaviour, jargon watch, online on 31 January 2009 with View Comments

Jason Calacanis has touched on the issue of overconnectivity in a recent editon of his email newsletter. It dealt  with more certainty about the adverse social effects that connectivity brings which I first heard raised by Eric Benhamou of 3Com when he spoke about a decade ago in a keynote at Networld+InterOp in Paris.

Key to the mail was a concept that Calacanis called Harris’ Law (after his friend Josh Harris):

At some point, all humanity in an online community is lost, and the goal becomes to inflict as much psychological suffering as possible on another person.

That sounds excessively harsh in most circumstances, since most social networks mirror life and society, but I wanted to end this post on a timely reminder which I have taken from Hugh MacLeod of Gaping Void fame’s twitter feed:

“People matter, Objects don’t”. That’s all you need to know about social media.

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