Technology and the Social

This week's topic is near and dear to my heart, so there's much more I can say about the readings this week than I could possibly hope to cram into one blog post (or even two or three for that matter.) I'll limit myself to the questions for the week and Facebook and leave the Turkle's fascinating stuff (as well as that about Internet addiction) for another time.

What do you think is the most important social or cultural effect of technology? Does it have to do with access, identity, community, or something we haven't discussed?

I think perhaps it's the intersection of them all. Technology has allowed adults to play again, with identity, relationships, kinship and community, or even life's path. Children and teens can find it plays an increasingly important role in learning and various elements of coming-of-age. It levels the playing field in some areas and raises barriers in new ones. For me, personally, I think it's most important cultural effect is the level of awareness it has raised about our own culture and our interactions with others.

What is the most disturbing or unsettling cultural/social effect of technology?

There's a few things. Cyber-bullying, cyber-stalking, child pornography and solicitation of such. That stupid craze of beating up random strangers while filming it on a cell phone. I once got an e-mail death threat. Really, though I can't think of something that seems entirely new or specific to the technology. Most of the sorts of things that are disturbing and unsettling, to me, are simply pathological behaviors by people who started to use the technology as effectively (as the rest of us) for their specific pathology.

The Digital Divide is also something I find particularly disturbing, especially given my expereince on the creation end of various technologies. It may be fun for some to keep up with the lightening-fast pace of change in technology, but it often take disposable income to have the latest-and-greatest. Families that bough personal computers - a sometimes several thousand dollar investment - in 2000 may not have the income needed to buy a newer one that can handle online video and the flashy "value-added" extras that web developers add to sites.

As a TA, it breaks my heart when I have to help a student struggle with how to ensure that the file format of her paper is compatible with the sorts of technologies she must send it through, because it was less expensive to buy Microsoft Works rather than Microsoft Word and she's not familiar enough with file formats and conversions etc.

And don't get me started with accessibility issues.

Turning to the phenomenon that is Facebook, something caught my eye in the article Social Networking 3.0:

The newest players in social networking, such as Palo Alto, CA-based iMeem, may have a long way to go to catch up with the likes of Friendster -- but their technology is already leapfrogging that of their older competitors.

iMeem hopes to attract members by building all their activities not around a virtual representation of their social network, but around instant messaging technology. Indeed, the company's name is a combination of IM, for instant messaging, and "meme," meaning an idea spreading through a network.

As an undergraduate in psychology at Stanford University, iMeem co-founder and CEO Dalton Caldwell wrote a thesis about instant messaging's role in workplace collaboration. The wave of social networking applications that emerged around 2001 intrigued him, he says, but "from the first time I saw this stuff, I didn't think it was interactive enough. It was too much just lurking and watching people from afar, but not in real time. It seemed to me the center of the universe [in a social network] should be a buddy list rather than a friends list."

Another possible variable? Email was still the Internet communication mode of choice when social networking sites first came on the scene, and personal computers were the gateway to that world. Facebook, and other social networking sites, nurture a kind of communication style that is more brief, more frequent and more like speaking than the more letter-like and literary-focus of email, web sites and blogs. It seems to me that it makes sense that social networking sites would take off, not only as they added more value for the user, but as people generally started to move towards telegraph-like and telephone-like gateways and more brief, more frequent, and perhaps more intimate types of communication technologies like instant messaging.

I'm curious to see what Zuckerburg has to say in his keynote at SXSW about this idea:

What does Facebook get from this? If all goes well, much of what people do on the Internet will be accomplished within Facebook. Instead of eBay, you can buy in Facebook's marketplace. Instead of iTunes, there's iLike. In other words, Zuckerberg wants to keep you—student, graduate or graybeard—logged on to Facebook, organizing virtually everything you do via the social graph.

With the rush of nifty applications into Facebook this past year, I started to try to do exactly that - use it as my platform for all kinds of other things. It's looking like that's not going to happen. I haven't used any of the MS Office-like organizing applications as replacements for what I do on a daily basis on my laptop, my used blender sold quickly on eBay and didn't get any response on Facebook's Marketplace, and frankly I'm leery about putting a lot of my personal calendar items into any web-based application. I used my calendar too much like a personal diary with a lot of information I'm not sure I'd share with my cat, let alone my social network.

Can Facebook be as much a presence in the life of graduates and geezers as it is to college students? Zuckerberg can't see why not. "Adults still communicate with the people they're connected with."

I agree with Zuckerberg. Many of my relatives joined Facebook after it opened up and immediately started friending each other, sharing pictures, silly quizzes and poking fun at each other - an attempt to stay connected an in each other's presence over long distances. In these brief staccato-voice kinds of technologies, the mere presence of one another seems to be an important part of their success. (Sort of like being on the phone, long distance with your sweetie, watching the same TV program but not saying a word.) But Danah Boyd has a point:

"The social graph will get incredibly meaningless," says Berkeley's Danah Boyd. "Do you really want to be speaking with everyone you ever met?"

Um, most definitely, no.

Which brings me to this paragraph in the next article:

Zuckerberg saw that if he could successfully map the social graph, he'd create a powerful new model of communication — a giant word-of-mouth engine. Imagine if, every time you logged on, you weren't greeted by NYTimes.com or even a Google News like aggregator, but a collection of headlines and blog postings, written or handpicked by your closest friends and relatives. Instead of information spreading hub-and-spoke like from major media outlets, it would flow to consumers the way it does at a dinner party, through people they know and trust. The result, Zuckerberg says, is that "it may no longer be optimal to have a few big media companies in the center controlling the flow of information."

It's an idea that seems to make sense. In our daily lives we hear things from friends, relatives, acquaintances and pass along information through those same social networks. But when I think about some of the people in my social networking circle, I'm not sure I'd really care for them to be part of my flow of information for a variety of reasons. The irony is that we tend to connect to many people beyond those that we know and trust, which may introduce some of the same kinds of problems that having big media companies controlling the flow of information does.

Besides, if you start adding advertisng, just how accurate and useful is it? From, Facebook Grows Up:

News Feed ads are "well targeted—people like the content," Zuckerberg says, unconvincingly.

Heh. I'd like to know how I managed to get into the target demographic that see the ad looking for "experienced captains". If it's the handful of pictures of me, soaking wet (after falling off a zillion times) on a sit-on-top kayak, I think they're really optimist about my nautical skills and their scalability. But then, hey, I'm also a male priest looking for my Irish roots, according to the marketing materials I started getting after buying a Celtic CD in the early 1990s.

One thing that fascinates me is the fact that so many technologies with far-reaching social consequences are developed by brilliant software designers - predominantly male, with a particular (and possibly gendered) perspective on interpersonal relationships. The fact that Aspergers syndrome can run high in this community makes it even more curious. (Wired called it the Geek Syndrome.)

It makes me curious then, how might these types of social technologies looked differently if the creators, promoters and designers had been primarily women?