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January 14, 2004
Random Networking
Anil Dash (via BoingBoing), makes an interesting observation that almost all the "enabling technologies" that have come about recently are "tied to individuals. From email to mobile phones to IM to social networking applications, a single person is the most frequent point of contact."
There are a couple of secondary items that come from Anil's observations. How many times have you found yourself lost in phone-tree hell, where an automated phone system that might be useful if you knew exactly who you wanted to talk to gives you the run-around as you try to find the equivalent of a general receptionist to help you find out who can actually help you? Same thing. Ever find yourself wanting to get "into" an social group, only to discover that you can't without an e-invite of some sort? How to get it? Know an individual "inside". How do you do that? Get inside. Huh?
A book I read in 1990 (4 years before the explosion of the Web, back when we were using Macs and Windows 3.0), posited a near-future World Data Net where the challenge wasn't finding information, it was the two-fold challenge of finding the information you wanted and filtering through the barrage of information you didn't need. Design of custom retrieval (for "pull" data) and filtration (for "push" data) software was an industry in itself. One of the main characters, in an effort to prevent what she described as the all-too-common self-selection of the world (filter out everything but agreeable news and opinions), hired a wily convicted hacker to write her filters such that there was always an element of randomness - something that, while possibly of interest to the reader, was outside the purvey of defined filters and search criteria.
It was only a couple pages in the book, but it made an impression on me then, and continues to be relevant today. The one-to-one technology that we're surrounding ourself with is slowly weeding out the random, unplanned encounters of our lives. That may include the spammers, and the annoying guy down the hall - but it also includes the person who might have that out-of-print book we were looking for, or the really interesting person that lives just down the street.
Noted Columnist William Raspberry wrote an opinion piece recently about the importance of community, quoting one researcher who concludes that "it is the [lack of] quality of [...] interpersonal relationships and [...] transactions with the wider social and material environment that lead to behavioral, emotional and physical health problems."
This is going on a bit longer than I intended, but the point seems to be the following: most of the new tools and technologies that we are introducing are, as Anil says, targeted towards individual interactions. Additionally, they enable heavy filtering so as to only show us what we want to see. On the other side, social structures - and individuals within them - are being damaged by the increasing lack of meaningful broad social interactions.
Are we doing this to ourselves? Is the new "enabling" technology not only limiting the breadth of our interactions with others, but actually starting to damage our social insitutions? Can't say for sure, but something doesn't feel quite right these days...
Posted by jim at January 14, 2004 09:40 AM