I would like to encourage you to think of your friends and other social connections as channels through which information flows outward from you into the global social network as a whole, and from which information from the whole of society reaches you. For now, ignore other channels, such as those found on the Internet. Think just of interpersonal channels.The “information” carried on these human channels can be anything which human beings can carry in their minds and communicate to others, including thoughts and feelings. Let us not pretend that we ever get completely accurate information, nor information uncluttered with irrelevancies.
What the social network receives from us via our direct social connections is distorted information and noise. Who knows which of your outputs society might consider noise, but no transmission is noise-free.
We can use the technical term ‘couple’, a verb, to describe the ways in which our friends connect us to the social network. We are coupled into the social network through the people in our social environment.
What matters about each connection is it’s strength in term of bandwidth or data rate, its distortion characteristics, and its noise characteristics.
When seeking a friend, spouse, lover, a teacher, a mentor, or perhaps a younger person to guide, what you should be seeking is a person whose interactions with you will have desirable data rate, distortion and noise characteristics.
You should seek someone who can and probably will exchange a lot of information with you: someone having a high data rate when communicating with you.
You should seek someone who does not distort your messages when passing them on to society, someone who does not distort society’s message when sending it to you. You should seek someone who does not fill your communication with irrelevant noise.
When we speak of honesty, for example, we tend to treat it as a property of a person: someone is truthful, or is a liar. It is not wrong to make such judgements, but rather than attribute them to a person, it is more useful to use them in describing a connection.
Rather than saying that Albert is an honest person, for example, it would be more useful to say that there is much honesty in the communications of Albert with his best friend, Bruce. We could also say that there is much honesty in the communications of Albert and his wife Abbie.
Honesty is related to distortion, the distortion of the truth. It may also be related to noise, the masking of the truth with irrelevancies.
In choosing a best friend, Albert wisely chose Bruce, because they are capable of being honest with one another and want to be honest with one another. These are more human ways of describing some aspects of the distortion and noise characteristics of their relationship as a communication channel.
In choosing Albert as a husband, Abbie wisely chose someone she could have an honest relationship with. Not an easy thing to do!
As I mentioned yesterday, there are several properties of communications channels which are important, and all of them should be considered in choosing social connections. As I will show in a later post, there are so many important factors that finding good connections “by hand”, personally, is almost impossible. The mythical “one-in-a-million” relationship is just barely close enough.
That is were social technology comes in. Social technology must provide the tools and techniques with which a person can establish good social connections and live in an increasingly optimized social environment. The key goal is a few relationships of the highest possible quality.
Current social utilities like Facebook do just the opposite, they make it easy to find many relationships of low quality. Another goal is to improve the signal-to-noise ratio of the total of your communications within society. Facebook does just the opposite, adding social noise.
Think of it this way: Society is trying to tell you something. Don’t seek it on the Internet, ask your friends. If they are the right friends, society’s message will be in their words. You probably want to influence society in some way. Most people do, if only for their own gain. For whatever reason, the best way to influence society would be to influence your friends. If they are the right friends, that will be effective.
So, the key is finding the right friends and the best possible other people to form your social environment. You just can’t do that by acting in person. Even with all the social technology that is currently available, it will be hard.
What I envisioned decades ago was a world in which it would be easy to find and form high quality social connections. Ever since then I have been working out the technical details, which I will discuss in successive posts. Stay tuned.
dpw
