Many people, introduced to the concept developed here under the tuka ecosystem model, have asked, “So, what makes tuka different?”

Cribbing from Socrates, we would answer that question by posing two of our own:

1. Why do people use the Internet?

I believe we can come up with a lot of different reasons people have embraced the Internet, despite the fact that sitting in front of a computer screen or thumbing a smartphone for hours is bad for the eyes, the hands, the posture and the back! But, one gains access to the world’s information at one’s finger-tips. We can be much more efficient and productive by having access to more information at much lower cost than in the past.

But those reasons just beg the question as to why having access to more and more information is important. Well, yes, information can be valuable, especially if it makes us more productive with our scarce resources of time and energy. In other words, information is valuable because informed knowledge empowers us to do more of the things we want to do, at less cost.

So, what is it we want to do? [That’s really a rhetorical question because there are literarily billions of valid answers.]

Let’s move on to question #2 and maybe it will become clear what we’re getting at.

2. Why do so many people use Facebook?

I think the answers to this question are quite different from the answers to the previous question. I doubt Facebook makes anybody more productive, unless one is running viral ad campaigns. Facebook and its fellow social media platforms actually seem to be the biggest time-wasters since the advent of the Internet! But apparently users are not only attracted to social media, they become addicted to it. How and why?

I believe the answer is found in psychology and the human need to be connected to others. As Aristotle wrote, “Man is a social animal,” (and woman perhaps even more so?). And we connect by sharing information with each other that ranges from silly gossip to important and relevant knowledge (like how to survive a natural disaster).

And the connection is as, if not more, important as the information being shared. This is a key insight into information technology because it tells us what’s really going on behind all this BIG DATA.

If we work backward from this goal of connection we see that connection is driven by the human instinct to connect by sharing, which is rooted in some initial step to create whatever it is we wish to share. Connection <- Sharing <- Creating. Here we have reverse engineered the internal logic of the tuka creative social media ecosystem: Create -> Share -> Connect, which repeats in an endless feedback loop.

So, the point of this post is to show that tuka is not really about what a new technology tool can do for us, but about what we can do with technology to be more like who we really are.