So Quora is blasting off right now. Some hyperbolic, breathless suggestions have it becoming bigger than Twitter. I don't know about that, I think that more people are interested in broadcasting than they are in participating in answering questions but I could be wrong. Regardless of where Quora ends up, either as the MySpace or the Facebook of the Q&A world, I think the rapid rise of this site and others, brings up a couple of powerful dynamics that largely go unnoticed...at least not so much noticed given their power (IMHO).
The first difference I see between the dynamic of Twitter and the way something like Quora works is in the Asymmetric Follow.
"Asymmetric Follow is a core pattern for Web 2.0, in which a social network user can have many people following them without a need for reciprocity. Assmmetric Follow is unlike email for example, which tends to be within small groups, with all users knowing each other (newsletters are a clear exception here). If you see a social network where someone has 5000 followers and only follows 150 back – that’s Asymmetric Follow." (James Governor, 2008)
That kind of dynamic is fine if it occurs within a network that accepts modes like broadcasting as well as lurking. I think though that the Q&A dynamic demands reciprocity and active engagement. I have been getting dozens of notices in my Inbox that more and more people are following me on Quora. First I have to wonder why - I assume that like me they are following me because they have seen the questions I follow and we're sort of organically building a community of interests. Secondly though, I began to wonder how many people I wanted to follow back. While I follow over 2,000 people on Twitter and would probably follow more if I just took the time to dig through the wealth of really smart people out there to follow, Quora feels different.
I'm already feeling a limit to the number of people I want to follow...I think because I feel like that could be a lot of questions headed my way and people asking you questions feels like a more significant energy commitment than simply reading tweets and re-tweeting or even replying. So I wonder if Quora does become incredibly large, as an overall community, will it have people who operate at the same scale as Pete Cashmore and Robert Scoble or will it self-limit to smaller communities? ..but wait a sec, I'm just getting warmed up.
I also started wondering about the 'question' dynamic in itself. I mean from a historical/sociological/psychological/anthropological view...what's the Question all about? Turns out that down one avenue, this quickly gets you into discussions of intonation, if questions can exist outside of syntactic structures which leads to Chomsky and discussions of generative grammar and whether or not asking questions is an activity the one cognitive activity that distinguishes human cognition from the smartest of the animal world. Great. One can of intellectual worms opened.
I'm not ready to put these particular worms back in the can yet though because I think this is important. So now I am looking for resources and I am asking questions:
- who is the leading writer/researcher/historian/anthropologist on questions?
- What are the cultural differences in how questions are regarded?
- What is the uptake of something like Quora in non-Western cultures?
- What drives humans to ask questions? Is there a Q&A-focused version of the Dunbar Number?
- Should we as people trying to architect moments of learning, be concerned about having a deeper understanding of this dynamic?
- How has asking questions as an activity changed over time?
- How do things like Mendeley and Zotero play in this space?
- What could we do with the data flowing into Quora et al if there was an open API like Twitter? Could design multiple apps for reaching into that data and displaying questions and answers in a huge variety of ways?
So far I've got:
- Q & A Sites (I know there are more, feel free to add in comments)
- Articles on Quora, Questions, etc (I know there are more of these too :-))
