As someone interested in the intersection of urbanism and ubiquitous computing, I've noticed an increasing demand over the last few years for the services I'm most interested in to incorporate some kind of social-networking element. Unfortunately, I think this is a very, very bad idea.
One of the major arguments of my book, Everyware, is that we not accede to the heedless restructuring of everyday human relations on inappropriate and clumsy models derived from technical systems -- and yet, that's the precise definition of social networking as currently instantiated.
The putatively most-advanced sectors of opinion within the social-networking community of interest offer pleas that such functionality be "portable" and "open" -- that is, that the profiles and relationships that you establish in one service not be locked up in a walled garden, and that each such service use a common and publicly available schema to describe relationship dynamics. These same commentators fail to admit, however, that the whole milieu in which these concerns of openness and portability are contained is badly broken.
Consider, for example, the three non-family friends you regard as being your closest, most trusted, and intimate companions. Would you share precisely the same set of personal information with each of them? Every social-networking system I am aware of forces you to do just that.
Consider how much of your social life is built on, and derives its robustness from, very common patterns -- someone you're attracted to but dislike temperamentally, someone you care for but have little in common with, someone you wished you knew better -- and then try to contain these sentiments meaningfully in the few, penurious options you're offered by the social-networking application of your choice.
Consider also XFN, the "simple way to represent human relationships using hyperlinks," which has been adopted by the popular discussion site MetaFilter to characterize connections among its 50,000-odd members. What's problematic about this? Well, for starters, the quite forthright imposition of values in the XFN schema itself:
Positive or neutral relationships only
Negative relationship terms have been omitted from XFN by design. The authors think that such values would not serve a positive ends [sic] and thus made the deliberate decision to leave them out [...]
The authors do not deny that such negative relationships exist in the real world today. Of course they exist. However, we see no need nor benefit to standardizing such relationships and capturing them in a form which would spread on the Web. There is enough hatred in the world. We should work to eliminate hatred, not to spread it.
Nice sentiments, surely. And I do mean nice: tepid, distinction-obliterating, mealy-mouthed. But due to "well-intentioned" decisions made at design time, it's impossible to use XFN to model anything that even remotely resembles an organic human community. This reductive stance deliberately aims to bleed away every nuance, complication, and complexity that makes any real relationship what it is. Any site or service that uses XFN or anything conceived along similar lines not merely betrays its users, but insults them.
So is the answer simply to model human relations more granularly? To offer users sliders, or color wheels, or some such user-interface widget that will allow them to express multiple axes of sentiment?
No. Experienced designers will see right away that there's something of a Catch-22 lying in wait here for the unwary, in that, given how dynamic social feeling is seen to be, any system supple enough to model the actual range of affinities and sentiments found in life would be an extraordinary hassle for its users.
Finally, all of these reservations, as strong and as heartfelt as they are, do not in the end even begin to address my single most important problem with social-networking systems: Social comfort and coherence require that by far the majority of actual feelings regarding the people in our livesnot be made explicit. Having to declare the degree of intimacy you're willing to grant each friend, whether in public and for all to see, or simply so that they see it, is a state of affairs I've described elsewhere as "frankly autistic." It's no way to arrange things as absolutely central to life as friendship -- of that I am sure.
For all of these reasons, technically mediated social networking at any level beyond very simple, local applications is fundamentally, and probably persistently, a bad idea. The only sane response is to keep our conceptions of friendship and affinity from being polluted by technical metaphors and constraints from the start.
— Adam Greenfield, Writer, consultant, and instructor at New York University's Interactive Telecommunications Program
I think you touch on this with your Walled Garden reference, but there are too many social networking sites. It takes a lot of time to be virtually connected. In fact, it seems like it takes more time to be virtually connected than, well, connected.
Early social networking sites were successful, and unbeknownst to us, there probably is a pipeline of new ones about to be launched beyond the new ones we are seeing daily. I feel dutiful in joining a new one that already includes a LinkedIn, Facebook, Plaxo friend only to realize I will be joining a new one again because of a friend on Social Network X.
My Outlook "Contacts" has one list. I can parse it and sort it, I guess, but it's just one group. Imagine a rolodex back in the day on someone's desk for each social network they had, 10 separate rolodexes lined up on their desk, often with the same names but maybe with different contact info. Then, you layer in the behaviorial type aspects you mention and it's not just a broken system, it's a full system.
I think every single thing we do online is first an attempt to replicate what we experience in life offline, and then gradually develops into a Web entity with attributes from both worlds.
Social networking is starting with collections of friends/acquaintances, and at some point will morph into genuine communities of some sort. As I have watched like-minded groups form over the last few years (gardening, chess, whatever) it has been striking that it starts out in artificial community websites and then evolve into forums and blogging.
I think it's much too early to call it "broken"; it's growing into itself, IMO.
I, for one, have absolutely no interest in the ostensible "conveniences" of targeted advertising, behavioral marketing, or any of the rest of it, and what's more I very much resent having my relationships pimped out in the name of someone's improved conversion rate. I cannot imagine that I am the only person that feels this way.
That's just at the level of ethics and values, though. Even if we agree to confine our discussion to the purely functional, I still find that collaborative filtering and rich inference = FAIL, and at times EPIC FAIL.
Here's an example I'm fond of using: I've been purchasing books from Amazon.com since the end of 1997. They now have a solid ten years of activity from which to build a model of my desires and future behaviors...and yet they *still* recommend Harry Potter books to me. If a sophisticated organization with a richly elaborated data trail ten years deep cannot build a commercially useful model of me, I very much doubt if any other institution is going to be able to do so in the near future. I will continue to be offered things I have no need or want for, and will continue to experience advertising (or at least those ads that get through my filters) as noise.
This is why I believe that data mining for behavioral marketing is a sham, and that anyone peddling it at present is doing something ethically regrettable in at least two different dimensions.
I'm just wondering if the idea of describing our friendships in a few words is really something the users wants (or has just accept it). What I think is that SN platforms are looking for ways to create more explicit links between users.
Those links will help them further along the line with SN advertising, or focused adds depending on what you like, who you are friends with, etc.
Right now SN advertising is trying to find a way into users liking, some doing better than others. But I think at the end, they'll use our information to make better offers or focused recommendations.
The "putatively most-advanced" sectors of the SN community of interest are those that have nominated themselves that, at least by implication. These are the people driving OpenSocial, making calls for network portability, and so on.
And like the piece says, I don't think they're wrong in wanting these things - within the very limited horizons of social networking as currently instantiated, these are probably the right things to do, portability more defensibly so than "opening the social graph."
My point is that building any kind of humane interaction is close to impossible once you've accepted the constraints of social networking as given, which I clearly do not. This is why even the relatively enlightened minority dedicated to openness and portability are only "putatively" advanced. (I don't think any point of view can be considered "advanced" if what it's calling for is still demonstrably injurious to people's feelings.)
Aside from users' narcissistic desire to appear popular, intelligent, or, dare I say, hip, social networks are defined by their users. That is to say that they often serve to augment real friendships, often between people who are physically distant. Yes, actual relationships are more difficult than casually leaving comments for someone on their blog, wall, or space, but in the world of busyness and looking-busyness, a social network, as rudimentary as it is right now, makes keeping in touch and engaged that much easier.
I'm not a fan of social networks because they are in a 'virtual world' and never come close to depict real life scenrios.I do share the concerns you raised in your post but fall short of calling them a 'boken system'. I think social networks are in the earliest stages of their evolutionary trend and so despite all the flawa in the operation at the moment, we will see a dramatic improvement in the services they offer. Once standards are in place that will allow users to freely own and move their network data such as content and relationship, the better it would improve the user's experience. So rather than the networks controlling the user, these social networks should open up to allow users to take control of their own data and to move freely between systems.
It will be difficult if not impossible to real life relationships on social networks. But who says real human relationships are the best? Certainly not. They also have their scams, risks and limitations and history has the records of these human relationships degenerating with catastrophic consequences. Social networking is the social medium the digital age has given and even though it may appear 'broken' now, it still provide a good platform fr human interraction.
Thanks for referring me to that more representative post on your site, which also led me to the references of last book––nice.
Granted, when online social networks explicitly mimic emotional communication the result is rather awkward and almost uncanny. I can't tell you how awkward it was to see the change in my 'relationship status' displayed as a Facebook newsfeed. This is mediation at its worst, an utterly clumsy representation of life. Still, as Monsieur Hulot also pointed out in his signature style, in essence your critique is nothing new under the sun. Wasn't it good ol' Plato who denounced writing because it was unable to accurately represent the superior communicative powers of speech?
So a facebook friendship is a poor representation of what 'real' friendship constitutes. Even trying to explain what a great friendship is, already diminishes its true meaning––its completely romanticized meaning, of course.
I don't believe that many sane people confuse actual friendship with friendships in online social networks, so let's just keep it at a terminology issue. Here's Ian Bogost's subtle take on more or less the same matter...
Thank you for the thought-provoking piece, Mr Greenfield.
Especially felicitous is your decrying the "heedless restructuring of everyday human relations on inappropriate and clumsy models derived from technical systems."
This has been the curse of the modern industrial age. Marx said as much, though he had no remedy to offer but a procrustean technical system of his own.
The folks who are flocking to today's social networking sites -- though they may be overtly seeking friendship, love, approval, community -- are heedlessly (good word, thanks) embracing their own alienation.
Not to get touchy and/or feely here (after all, pace chuckgregory, IE is not about social networking), but real, honest-to-gosh, human relationships are much messier (and much more interesting and time consuming) than that which may be circumscribed by yes/no, on/off. It's a different pair o' dimes, as the boffins say.
Will the digitalizing "Second Life" mindset pollute and corrupt, what I like to call, the "First Life"? I'd say it's happening today, as it has in the past. But then, I'm just an old e-luddite.
My generation is the last one that lived in a society where computing was not ubiquitous. We still have a built in reluctance to entrust any personal information to any computer system so my first instinct is think that Adam Greenfield's concern overtechnically mediated social networking is addressing a small problem that is a long way away. However further thought quickly removes this complacency. Young people now start to broadcast their personality and document their changing relationships at the same age that they are struggling to develop confidence and understanding of themselves and their friends. Technology transmits and retains embarrassment just as quickly as fun.
Adam's conclusion
"The only sane response is to keep our
conceptions of friendship and affinity from being polluted by technical
metaphors and constraints from the start".
Can be paraphrased as - Get a life, but keep it off Facebook
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M2M: Rise of the Machines? Not Yet David Weldon In the 1970 science fiction thriller Colossus: The Forbin Project, two giant supercomputers from the United States and Soviet Union secretly join forces to take control of the collective nuclear might of the two countries. In the film, the two machines discover each other's existence, communicate back-and-forth, share their collective data, and cut their human creators out of the process. It is the ultimate example of machine-to-machine communications, or M2M. CLICK FOR MORE
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