Social Media and Simplicity, Part 6: Context

Muhammad Saleem is a social media consultant and a top-ranked community member on multiple social news sites.

This post is part 6 of 10 in our groundbreaking series on how freelancers can use social media and the principles of simplicity to build their business.

Day 6 – The Sixth Law of Simplicity: Context

What lies in the periphery of simplicity is definitely not peripheral.

Here’s something you don’t hear very often: context is King. Let’s look at an example from The Tipping Point, an increasingly important book by one of my favorite authors, Malcolm Gladwell. In the book, Gladwell presents the following situation:

Imagine there is a deck of cards which has letters written on one side and numbers on the other. In addition, there is a rule that any card which has a vowel on it, must have an even number on the other side. Knowing these circumstances, if you are shown four cards on the table, labeled A, D, 3, 6, how many, and which cards do you have to flip before you know for a fact that indeed, the rule mentioned previously holds true.

Now consider the same question, but this time in a more contextualized form. Imagine that there are four people in a bar. One of them is drinking juice, one of them is drinking a beer, one of them is underage (a teenager), and one of them is over 25. Knowing that no one under 21 can consume alcoholic beverages, how many and which of the four people do you have to ID before you know that no illegal drinking is taking place (i.e. the no drinking under 21 law is being upheld)? Continue Reading