socialtechnology.ca

On the left, you will see the old original Social Technology logo, which has graced such earlier websites as SocialTechnology.org and SocialTechnology.net – it includes the “No Bandaids” Logo, sometimes spelled out as “No Bandaid Solutions”, together with the motto “Genuine Solutions to Social Problems”, which I used for decades.  The three images on the right show social situations.  The leftmost of the three shows a very poor family during the great depression. The middle one shows the children of a rich family, during Victorian times.  The third photo shows a successfully married couple, according to one criterion, at least: they had a great many descendants, including myself.  They are two of my great-grandparents,  Thomas Tighe and his wife, Mary Knox. 

      dpw

This blog is going to be used mostly to preview and test postings to other blogs, most especially the main Social Technology blog, http://www.SocialTechnology.ca/ but it will also contain short items like this one.  For this post, I am using Windows Live Writer, which seems like a useful offline tool.  Let’s see how it works —

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

This is a short post to test BlogDesk post uploading.

If there is going to be a business venture based on advanced social technology, we must consider the question of public disclosure.   If the venture is to be successful, not too much should be disclosed up front to the general public.

I decided to post the fact that there will be a completely interactive real-time and personalized question-and-answer interface instead of user profiles to be filled out. That is almost revealing too much already. Other social networking services could easily decide to use this approach, though I doubt they would be as sophisticated as what I plan.

I also decided to post a few words about the chaining method for growing social networks. This is less likely to be understood by potential competitors, so I decided to mention it.

I do not want to say much more. I do not want to tell people any more details about the user interface for fear that the competition would adopt them.

I don’t know how to interest potential partners and investors without telling them more, so I propose the use of non-disclosure agreements. But even that may not be enough. Sometimes only a hint is necessary.

A cautionary tale is the story of Smalltalk, Apple and Windows. The management at Xerox PARC asked Adele Goldberg to show Steve Jobs of Apple the Smalltalk system with its revolutionary windows interface.  Goldberg refused, saying that would be giving away the shop – even a brief demonstration would be enough to show Apple what to do.

Xerox management ordered Adele Goldberg to give the demonstration, which she was coerced into doing despite her protests. Steve Jobs saw a well-developed windows interface, the first one ever developed, and the rest is history. Everyone knows Apple and Microsoft’s Windows, few have heard of Smalltalk.

I would like to refer readers to a new post on the Facebook discussion group Advanced Social Technology for the Entrepreneur, called A Possible Business Venture.  It may be seen at http://www.facebook.com/topic.php?topic=336&uid=125926210758491