What Can Visualizations of Social Networks Tell Us About Ourselves?
Just saw this post tweeted and thought that it raised some interesting questions.
- Social technologies allow humans to interact without respect to locality in time or space. Someone can read and react to your post around the world and six months later, comment, and interact with others surrounding the post.
- This means social technologies have allowed people to interact as they would without the limitations of locality, arguably the most pervasive limitation next to death we have.
- Visualizations of the data-streams of social networks show tantalizing patterns. Nodes and lattices that seem to show up again and again.
- If there are are mathematical functions that predict these data-streams, wouldn’t these functions also be describing how humans fundamentally want to interact?
- Since most of the problems of society stem from living in ways we don’t want to, and since interaction is the majority of life, wouldn’t modeling our societies on these functions produce a working society?
Thoughts? Is social media and technology some sort of natural model of free human interactions?
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Stephen Tiano 3:38 am on July 31, 2008 Permalink | Log in to Reply
“Social technologies allow humans to interact without respect to locality in time or space.
But so have emaillists and online forums–for going on 20 years now. What’s different about social media?
thePuck 3:56 am on July 31, 2008 Permalink | Log in to Reply
I think that usenet and BBSes and such were the beginning, but mostly geeks and business types would use them. Now they are easy to use and attractive, and people have gotten used to the computers themselves in a way they weren’t before.
This leads to vaster masses of people interacting at once than ever in human history.
Also, the viral ease of pulling people in to new services is new. It used to take a massive effort to introduce someone to a new technology, now it is simple and probably works with something they already use.
XIII 4:49 pm on July 31, 2008 Permalink | Log in to Reply
Hmm, on the shoulders of giants… maybe you ought to define social media somewhere.
Because other than the signal to noise ratio going down the drain over the past 20 years I can’t say the ‘new’ services offer that much I haven’t seen in some form or another before. I think the technology going mainstream has far more changed how we interact online than the changes in technology itself.
Which by itself is interesting, it’s the users changing the technology instead of the other way around.
thePuck 4:57 pm on July 31, 2008 Permalink | Log in to Reply
@XIII
That’s kind of my point. While these technologies had been percolating for some time, them becoming available to mainstream users is nothing short of a revolution.
There was writing prior to the Gutenberg press, but it did not have the same impact because it was not in the hands of the people. Think about the impact the printing press had on human culture…this is several orders of magnitude bigger!
As to defining social media…that’s part of what we are doing here. I want it to be defined not as some top-down categorical, but instead to have a true definition evolve from the process of social media itself. To just declare a definition is to invite epistemological problems out the wazoo, because then we have issues of grounding the claim and figuring out the semantic, syntactic, and implicit meanings. There are some real problems with that (see Quine, “Two Dogmas of Empiricism”). Instead, I prefer to let things evolve organically.