Multiple people have responded to my 150 person limit post with arguments about how the web should help increase our ability to connect and expand this number (most notably Tom Coates’ Friendster as neocortical prosthetic…).
Tom’s right in that those who perceive our brains as a computer see technology as an opportunity for augmentation, parallel processing style. This is where i fundamentally believe that humanity matters. Keeping up social relations is not simply about remembering everyone you’ve met or having a structure to keep track of them. It is also about having the time and ability to manage those relationships, keep information flowing, etc. Social networks are not simply about people that you can store to use as appropriate. Thus, i don’t fundamentally believe that an augmented version of your network will give you the tools necessary to maintain more meaningful contacts.
Of course, i’d love to be proven wrong.
[Direct note to Tom’s post: i’m not actually trying to justify why i’m not an anomaly; i’m trying to express why the numbers don’t make sense in the context of an articulated social network that spans time.]
My handheld is an excellent extension of my brain — it allows me to track a seemingly infinite number of contacts (which I can label as either “personal” or “business”) at a level far beyond what my brain can typically recall (I don’t want to have to memorize hundreds of addresses, so I’m happy to have my Handspring do it for me). Looking through my contact list will give you specific information about me, but in terms of expressing my relationship to any of these people it tells you nothing beyond the “personal” and “business” labels (except that most of mine are “unfiled”). The most meaningful thing my Handspring allows me to do to maintain these relationships beyond tracking the who/where factor is that I can add birthday/event reminders to it, which keeps me in decent social graces among those who matter to me. Beyond that, it can capture none of the nuances of who these people are and what they mean to me. “Personalization,” such as adding a photo (or even what exists on phonecameras now, a theme song to specific numbers) to an entry offers an element of this, but short of adding metadata to each entry articulating what each entry means to me, that’s as far as my loyal Handspring goes.
Do we care? Assuredly social networking software could do a better job of capturing nuances in relationships, but can it ever nail exactly what other people mean to me? Do I need it to? What would we gain? I see why I might want to do this for research purposes, but in the practical world, would I ever want a machine to be able to capture the “humanity” implicit in my relationships? My inclination is no, but would love to hear arguments to the contrary.
I think that, regardless of what technology you have connected you, weak connections can only be so weak before they arn’t connections at all.
An example would be the highway and road system. You could conceivably travel by vehicle to everyone’s house on the continent, but that doesn’t mean that they are all your good neighbors.
Creative Networks: Smaller, Better, Smarter
What if we could measure the intensity and depth of engagement between one blog and another instead? What if we measured the frequency of link exchange between blogs, the depth of analysis of particular topics between 3 or 4 networked blogs? Then we’d …
In my eyes, social network tools such as friendster, linked-in, or tribe.net – whether for business or private purposes – can only act as a catalyst to establish and maintain contacts up to a certain level. That is the main role of such tools. However, they would never be able to substitute an active management of contacts.
I could not agree more with Honyman – I have been using openBC for business purposes, and while it clearly is a good tool to find people relevant for your business, the tool is worthless unless you invest a considerable amount of time actually “working the contacts” you make there.