Social Networking...Same Wine, Different Bottles ?.
Riffing on Roland Tanglao’s post of Esther Dyson’s comments on the “dark side of social networking” software.
Caveat...I already know my conclusions will be construed as mushy and naive. Oh well. Must learn to blog more carefully, better construction and elucidation of thoughts.
For now, no one online social network has enough heft to matter. But these issues will inevitably arise when the services approach critical mass. Consider the undercurrents of discomfort already swirling around Google because it is perceived to control the content we see. Imagine a service that controls information about people, even if it only runs algorithms.
These systems are collecting personal data with relatively simple who-knows-whom links -- but even that is not so simple: Who is not acknowledged by whom? Who is the best networker? Who refers turkeys? Who has long-term relationships, and who can't keep his friends? Moreover, the issue is not just explicit entries in a contact database. The data includes frequency of contact, who replies to whom and how promptly, who is bcc'ed and so on.
Beyond that, there are services that assemble other types of information, such as its members' uploaded files and published articles, to create what vendor Spoke Software blandly calls "dossiers." The data in the dossiers isn't sold, but it is used to derive information about connections, which is sold.
At the end of the day we will have private aggregations of data more rich and interconnected and personal than any government ever dreamed of ... and of course this data will be readily available, just as data from credit card companies, merchants and airlines is today.
Finally, I have to ask what these tools do to the old, low-tech concept of friendship. In some way, with their numbers and lists and classifications, these services can subtly make a social network into a trophy collection. Technology has made it easier than ever to count your friends -- but that doesn't mean you should
As we rapidly move further into an interconnected interactive space, enabled by social networking and other forms of social software, I continue to feel an unease I can’t quite define. Why this unease ?
Many people have glimpsed the possibilities for constructive human activity in an interconnected world. John Perry Barlow articulated a counter-culture world of freedom from mind and economic control. Doc Searls and David Weinberger have offered us the Cluetrain Manifesto and the World of Ends. Chris Locke mesmerized us with the truth of Gonzo Marketing. Jim Moore has described the Second Superpower. Joi Ito has helped us catch glimpses of an Emergent Democracy that is almost tangible. Howard Dean’s campaign threatens to break that possibility wide open…the real test being how affairs are conducted if and when he is elected.
David Isenberg clarifies for us that a Stupid Network offers more long-term value (to society) than an oligopolistic Smart Network. Wired magazine recently suggested that Open Source is a principle that is spreading into various areas of human activity, not just a means of creating useful, reliable and inexpensive software. Headshift, a consultancy in the UK, has written and disseminated a white paper titled Smarter, Simpler, Social in which they analyze and then synthesize the evidence that the connection of human minds, imaginations and voices need not be expensive nor complicated, and that it offers greater flexibility and adaptability than integrated enterprise information systems. Don Tapscott and David Ticoll, two Canadian researchers, opine that corporations will soon be naked in the rapidly approaching Age of Transparency. Blogging continues to grow like a weed. The Baby Boomers will begin to retire in large numbers faster than we realize, and the Digital Generations will fill the space quickly, bringing their interconnected, interactive, collaborative mental models along with them.
Business 2.0 proclaims that “social networking software” is the technology of the year.
There seems to be a great hunger to connect with other people in this streamlined, increasingly efficient information and knowledge-based economy we are building. The hunger may have several root causes…
§ the loss of community that people over 40 were familiar with (neighbourhoods, extended families, a life lived mainly in one place) and that people from small towns still may know,
§ the desire to connect with people who have similar mindsets, interest, values and such
§ the possible sterility of a waking life lived behind one or more screens, and
§ the desire to find someone who can help you …find a job, create something, journey with you on the trip into the (increasingly) unknown, uncertain territory of continuous change, and
§ (perhaps) the desire to “take”, to use people for what they have and what they offer.
We’re networking because we need…money, activities to fill up our time, ways to be with others instead always just with ourselves.
We’re networking because there’s nothing else left for us to do. The hamster’s wheel has gone electronic. Our efficiency, our plundering of resources, our filling up of our mental and emotional time and space with activity, prevents us from paying attention to what’s going on around us and within us. We network to find out how best to deal with mindless spam, fer chrissake.
We haven’t yet figured out how to make our way in this interconnected, integrated, efficient world. We’re (generally) operating from need, not from a desire to create, serve, expand.. We’re looking for the next hit, the next thing that will grab peoples’ attention long enough for us to pry some money out of them.
We network because (increasingly) smart people need work, need to sustain themselves and their families. The integrated, interconnected efficiency that is so prized by our corporations and their shareholders is creating disengagement, chaos, fragmentation and isolation at the human level. I am amazed at the collection of really bright and capable friends, colleagues and professional acquaintances who, having grown disenchanted, bored or disgusted with the corporate world, are now sparking along on their own, hoping to connect and catch a current.
Amidst all this, I would be remiss not to acknowledge, strongly, all the wonderful things networks and networking have begun to bring us…the unbridled creativity, the means to connect and act on local and global problems, means that were previously unobtainable, if not unimaginable.
This need for connection is (I think) directly related to the context of the times in which we live. There is a governing structure in place, consisting of money, power, legal control and a dominant “business” mindset. I sometimes call it “the revenge of the accountants”. Money and control are used as blunt instruments with which to clear the path for the agenda of the plutocracy, the rulers who scoff at anyone who can’t deliver their elevator pitch in less that 23 words or describe an airtight, guaranteed ROI or show you exactly where in the business model the money tap gets turned on.
Oh, don’t get me wrong – I’m not against succinctness or clarity, and don’t want to invest in things that don’t provide results (although learning, expanded imagination and heightened awareness can be damned valuable ROI at times), and I believe a business model should be exactly that – a model of how a profitable business might and will operate.
Generally, we don’t yet know how to operate as whole human beings in this business-oriented interconnected interactive world. It takes new skills, new logic, new emotions and different dynamics. Most of us still only know how to interact in prescribed ways with the large institutions, the commercial and political systems that govern our lives. We haven’t yet learned how to create, how to sustain ourselves and help others sustain themselves, even though we are (usually) interconnected and (often) concerned that we are at the mercy of these institutions and commercial and political systems.
With our collective experience of the dot.com boom and dot.com bust, I believe the mainstream heaved a collective sigh of relief, and waited for everything to go “back to normal”. There was no “new economy”, after all….or so people thought.
But…life was and is different after the creation and adoption of the browser, the increasing penetration of broadband, and the success of new business like eBay, Dell and Amazon. And the playing field is still there – it hasn’t been dismantled, uprooted or covered over. It’s dawning on everyone that the interconnectedness is here to stay, and that the network will be the mainstream. Businesses, organizations, stakeholders, groups of interest and individuals are all linked together – and this will be our common playing field from hereon out.
In that sense, social networks offer us a practice field upon which to learn our moves, and perhaps make a difference.
My unease, I think, comes from the belief that the prevailing mindset will continue to be “how can I use “X” to make a buck”, and that this is seen to be "just fine", thank you. I think that this is what Esther is getting at.
My unease continues from that point to include my concerns that the “just fine” mental model is also that model which supports and delivers the policies and practices that have unarguably created a world out of balance…a world of global warming, a world that contains an AIDS-orphaned generation of African children, a world in which excuses are sought for white-collar criminals who have done much more harm to society than a hundred bank robbers or pot farmers, a world where already-rich cronies buy friendly governments who disembowel social programs in the name of excessive costs.
I’m uneasy because I suspect that “social networking” software has a good chance of becoming like Disneyland, television, Verisign, Google and everything else we build up in our culture of money and profit - a way to stick the suction end of the vacuum cleaner into our pockets. Unfortunately, while social networks offer the means, there is no coalescing vision that suggests a widespread, global discourse on how we ought to live together as human beings.
I want to believe that the interconnectedness will create transparency to a degree that we can collectively realize a real step forward in human evolution. I want to believe that powerful, disdainful, exploitative and controlling hierarchies can become purposeful, supportive, helpful, results-focused, profitable wirearchies, in which reward is more evenly meted out in terms of knowledge, expertise, values and responsibility.
But I have my doubts. I think that the neediness will win…in the short term. We can’t create a better human world, interconnected or not, until we find some common and shared ground that provides respite from the continuous need.
Oh, there are examples…like Open Source, the Creative Commons that Larry Lessig and others helped create, the democratizing effects of blogging, and the like. But I’m not holding my breath.
I do want to do my part. Wonder what it will be? [wirearchy News]
9:41:06 AM 
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