When I first started using the term ‘Social Technology‘ back in about 1993, it was an expression I had not heard before, though a rather obvious one. I seized upon it because I needed a replacement for the term I had been using when writing about my work. I had been spending a lot of time on something I called ‘Social Network Optimization‘, but that term had bad connotations of social engineering. As a friend pointed out, nobody wants their social network “optimized” for them.
I now use ‘social technology’ to refer to any collection of tools and techniques which a person or organization might use for social purposes, but for me the main goal is still network optimization. By this I mean the process of replacing poor social connections by good ones. This doesn’t necessarily mean turning your back on former friends, it just means spending less time with them. The amount of time you should spend with a friend or lover should depend on the quality of the connection. In technical terms, a social connection should have a high effective bandwidth, low distortion, and high signal-to-noise ratio. I’ll talk about bandwidth now, leaving the other two topics for later posts.
Social technology can be broken down into hardware and software, though of course hardware devices like smartphones and tablets contain a lot of software which is just there, behind the scenes, below the level of the user app.
Imagine a piece of hardware like a cellphone which supported only texting, not voice or video. It is easy to see that this has a low effective bandwidth. ‘Bandwidth‘ is not quite the right term here. What I am referring to are channel capacities and channel data rates, which could be measured in bits per second, bps. At blindingly fast typing speeds, a person might text 10 characters per second, or 80 bps, but someone else might find that composing and typing in messages at 1 character per second is much too fast, and end up communicating as slow as 1 bit per second, 1 bps.
In contrast a high-definition video link with voice can let people see and hear each other, but take 10 million bits per second, 10 mps.
The actual effective bandwidth is harder to specify. Imagine using voice and video to transmit a license place number. With texting, you might just type in “213 YES”, while on videophone you carefully enunciate “Two One Three Yankee Echo Sierra”.
Decades ago I began thinking about social or personal bandwidth, in which an individual is thought of as a communications channel. This is a natural enough notion, since people are often hired precisely to serve as a communications channel between two people who would otherwise have trouble communicating. For example, if I wanted to explain this to someone who understands only Japanese, the traditional intermediary would be a person, a bilingual English-Japanese interpreter.
When I began writing about what I then called ‘Social Network Optimization’, my idea was to think of a person as a communications channel in the abstract, not as a channel to anyone in particular. What I meant was that the ultimate recipient of the message was to be the global social network, everyone. Suppose you have some remarkable new idea or interesting piece of gossip. You could tell it to different people. Some might not listen, some might misunderstand, some might fail to pass the idea on to anyone. But one or two of your friends might listen carefully, ask questions, make sure they understand, then try hard to pass the idea on to everyone they can. The same friends might be people who listen carefully to what other people have to say, and carefully summarize the best of what they hear when speaking to you.
Such friends would be good communications channels. Just how good would depend on the quality of their own connections. If they didn’t have any good incoming or outgoing links of their own, they might be almost dead ends, capable of communicating with you but unable to push information further out into the network or pull it in from there.
Decades ago I had a vision of an optimized social network. The core of this network would be at least two very high quality social connections per person. I have written a lot about a third, fourth and fifth, but the first two were obvious: a best friend and a spouse or lover.
I envisioned a world in which it was easy to make good social connections of these kinds. That raised several questions, which I have written a lot about over the years.
“How easy?”
“How good?”
“What kind of relationships would these be?”
“How would the world change as a result?”
I think the answers might surprise you. Stay tuned.
dpw