A Perfectly Social World

There's an interesting window of time between when you've heard that something new and supposedly "game-changing" is about to happen and when know what it is, the moment before the unveiling. Once you find out, it usually disappoints, but before you hear about the reality, knowing that something big might be on the horizon gets you thinking about what's possible. I remember that happening in the months leading up to the release of the Segway scooter. We knew that an inventor with an incredible track record and lots of resources had secured some very interesting looking patents, but we didn't know if this thing would fly, how it would be powered, or how fast it would go.

It feels like a similar situation now with a supposed re-design of Facebook on the horizon. This article speculates that Facebook will put an emphasis on passive sharing: rather than signifying that you like something by clicking the "like" button or posting a link on your profile or on someone else's, you will just go about your web browsing and other people will see it (or, more likely, just the parts of it that you want seen). Let's just assume, for a moment, that Facebook does something like this.

The first gut reaction is that its too much of an invasion of privacy, and I'm sure people will write tons about this angle if this ends up happening. But its more interesting to think about why passive sharing might be appealing and what it might feel like to live in a world where more moments of every day are shared and social. So, start out by imagining there's a magical switch that is thrown each time you browse on something that you don't want certain people to know about. It filters out exactly the people you want to keep from knowing what you're doing and it does so without you needing to actually do anything. If this existed, what would be the appeal and effect of increased passive sharing?

As I read articles for my research, design experiments, read the NYTimes, watch ESPN, go to reddit, I have an inner monologue, sometimes an inner dialog, a kind of hypothetical conversation about what I'm reading or writing. Heavy posters on Facebook or twitter (or even heavy texters) have taken to transcribing this inner mono/dialog so that it can start a conversation, and they can do this at any place or time. But passive sharing doesn't necessarily initiate social interaction of any kind. It might act as a pretense for conversation ("I saw that you were reading that article I read yesterday. What did you think of it?") or we might just use it as a more finely tuned means of social comparison than just seeing what people actively post about themselves. You run out of new actively posted items to look at on Facebook pretty quickly, but I doubt you'd ever run out of passively shared activity of others to look at. Plus it seems like more of an "honest" look at how they really are, not just the happy, shiny selves they present in their pics.

Since I'm in dissertation mode right now, thinking about one theory and how everything fits (or doesn't fit) it, I'm thinking about this in terms of choice, value, and delaying gratification. You could always use Facebook and other social media (even a phone) to have a social experience, but for people to connect with you or even to see what you're doing, you had to take some initiative. The people taking initiative - the frequent posters, the tweeters, etc. - may not have been all that relevant to you, in terms of your mood or your pre-existing social connection to them. But what if you always had the option of having an interesting conversation with someone you wanted to converse with about something you wanted to converse about? If that option is sitting there in that little rectangle of light you're staring at right now, you would probably choose it over most other activities.

Its been said that we're social animals, that all humans need social interaction and that society grows from this. But all social interaction has been embedded in the rules and systems of culture and physical space. You were surrounded by people, but they were people whose personal lives you didn't care about all that much. Its interesting to think about a world in which you could always look over and see what your friend is doing and strike up a conversation about it.

Hanging out in Ye Olde Towne Square

I was chatting with a friend this evening about the proliferation of cellphones in other countries, specifically Mexico. As is the case with a lot of Non-US towns, many towns in Mexico made the leap from very few telephones to tons of cellphones, skipping the intermediary step of many household land-lines. She was saying that before the rise of cellphones, young people would go to the town square to hang out at night. You could count on seeing your friends and peers at the square, and you couldn't really make plans to hang out in smaller groups at more specific places because you lacked the means to coordinate plans on short notice.

I'd never really thought about it before, but phones and email allow young people the opportunity to make plans to hang out. I suppose you would also see people at school and make plans there to hang out later, but the point is that you'd always have to be somewhere where there were a lot of people in order to see your friends. For older people, the pub or the coffee house were the places where you would see your peers and socialize. Once you introduce phones, you allow people the means to selectively hang out with certain people while avoiding others. Its not that we don't go to public places like bars or malls anymore, but I wouldn't be surprised if hanging out with small groups of friends substituted for hanging out with larger groups in public, especially in places where they went from having no means of communicating with peers to everyone having a device that allows people to coordinate plans on very short notice.

I'd always thought of the influence of cellphones on the public sphere in terms of the actual number of people you talked to, or how long you talked to them for. But now, I'm prompted to consider how phones are used to make plans for meeting in physical space and how those plans are different than the ones you could've made without that device.

What are the implications of this? You'd be less apt to see extreme differences in the US. We've had phones for quite some time, and the adoption of phones was concurrent with the adoption of many other domestic technologies (namely the television) which might've contributed to the destruction of the public square as a social hub. But in a place where they had television, film, and radio already and then suddenly get cellphones, you might see a drastic change in the hanging-out habits of youngsters.

Of course, we now have online equivalents of the public square in the form of Facebook and other social networks and fora. But what about the places where accessing those online public squares is difficult (maybe b/c they've got cellphones that can't access the internet or that make it much easier to communicate P2P but not in groups)? Its important to pull apart these two 21st century technologies - cellphone and internet - and examine their influences on societies independent of one another. If you've got no public space to see your peers, would you have a strong sense of community with those who lived around you, with your town, with your country?