The importance of being wrong

What if it's more important to communicate - and be thought wrong - than it is to be right? (I guess this is another way of saying "no publicity is bad publicity".)

I was thinking last night about social networking and Metcalfe's law (as you do). And I got to thinking about being thought to be wrong about something, which happens to me sometimes.

And then I thought about what would happen if I spoke to someone who disagreed with me about something important, and if that was necessarily a bad thing - from a communications perspective, at least.

This is something that happened recently. I'm cultivating a blogger for work - she's articulate and interested in what my organisation does. Interested enough to want to talk about it with her professors and friends.

Because I'm a filthy environmentalist, her professors haven't always taken too kindly to what it is she has to say about what it is I have to say. In short, they think I'm as wrong as anything.

So wrong, in fact, that they go around telling their friends just how darned wrong I am.

Intuitively, you might think this is a problem, if I'm supposed to be recruiting people to the cause. But the more I think about it, the less certain I am this is a bad thing.

These people who go around telling their friends and colleagues how wrong I am are bound to bump into someone who disagrees with them about me being wrong. I imagine the conversation would go like this:

Questioner: "Who do you day is wrong, again?"
Jerk-who-disagrees-with-me: "That Paul asshole, he's the guy who's wrong."
Quesitoner: "Uh-huh."

Because of that exchange, the questioner will know who I am and where to find me. I'll have successfully connected with someone, even though the linking person thought I was wrong.

Sure, it would be better if they had thought I was right - then I'd be connected with two people instead of one, and I'd have someone evangelising for me instead of telling everyone what a doofus I am. But it's still a darned sight better than nothing.

It may even be that this is the best way to deal with these people who think I'm wrong - the chances of me convincing them I'm right are about zero, at least in the short-term. So they might as well go around telling people that I'm wrong - at least they're doing more than nothing.

As a concluding leap too far, there is a tie-in to Foucault here (kind of). Discourse isn't shaped by an instinct for truth - it's shaped by social forces. The social forces can't act on silence, so to give yourself any chance of winning an argument-at-large (meaning, getting society to go along with you rather than your opponent) you have to hang it out there and be thought of as wrong.

At least that way the discourse is happening and the conflict begins. Whether or not it ends up resolved the way you want - well, maybe that is where convincing people becomes more important. But I don't think it's enough to be right.