The Memory of the Social Thing

Some ideas about how to go approach writing a history of the Online Social Network, the Virtual World (and MMORPGs)…

The first step is to consider how Tom Standage[1] has made a good case that the first instance of a social network, albeit not online or digital, was the telegraph network.  The telegraph was not only a new way of instant communication, a matter which in itself was quite revolutionary at the time.   More interesting was that people created new social activities within the telegraphic network: they played chess, engaged in romantic relationships over the wire, and new forms of crime and fraud were created.  A similar and probably more marked social role had the telephone network later in the century.  Both telegraph and telephone enabled an instant socio-geographical reach not seen before. 

However, both telegraph and telephone systems did lack one important aspect of the later OSN: storage, or an internal memory of the social.  Both were not able to store the information of the activities between the parties for later retrieval and use.  The information about the social interaction was stored in the outer points of the network, in a different media like paper, recordings and plain human memory.  As such, both systems depended on the human element to function as a social construct.

With the advent of the electronic networks and computers this began to change.  At first computers in the fringes of the networks were able to store and manage the information of the transactions (like early e-mail systems), and then when the storage started moving towards the network itself the possibility of the OSN was created.

The development of an electronic system for the exchange of written personal letters and short messages was the next step.  Electronic mail, or E-mail, as it became widely known, was the first instance of an electronic communication designed for human use that was both a social interaction, and stored the information about the interaction, the parties involved and the relevant time and place circumstances.  It used a store-and-forward method of delivery. 

 The first widespread e-mail systems operated using the ARPANET as a transport medium in 1969 and the early 1970s.  Before that some instances of e-mail were present in time-sharing computers at MIT as early as 1965.  E-mail has remained to this day very much the same in structure, but its social and commercial use, and abuse, has reached enormous proportions in the first decade of the 2000s.  It may be well possible to reconstruct whole social models from the content of e-mail messages alone, since e-mail carries the complete social memory within the message.

 

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[1] In the book “The Victorian Internet”, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Standage

The Kamikaze: sabotage of the system

As the V-1s and V-2s started flying off from Pennemuende to London, fire control systems were confronted with a new kind of threat.  The flight of the rockets was highly predictable, and the control systems quickly adapted, or learned, how to deal with them. 

A different case was the Kamikaze fighters.  Apart from patriots they were the response of the human mind to the confrontation with the machine: to introduce the element of unpredictability.

In the Pacific the fight was between fire control systems and humans that were finding ways to exploit the weaknesses.  One can see the flying object as an integral part of the system, as the element that is trained, measured and subject to prediction.  The Kamikaze pilots were part of the system, but they modified their role to be saboteurs.  Saboteurs tend to emerge within systems that become complex and unfathomable.

Hackers used the Captain Crunch whistle to trick the telephone system.  Sabotage can turn out to be more than just pranks.  The emergence of computer viruses understands the computing system as an organism, and exploits its weaknesses in control and self-preservation for self-reproduction and propagation.  SPAMers do the same with the e-mail system.   Social Networks experience the “tragedy of the commons” when its controls are abused and turned against them.

As the complexity of online and mechanical systems grows, it is important to ask what the new role of the human could be.  How can human spontaneity counter sabotage and unpredictability?  Maybe the role of the human operator becomes that of a policeman. 

It is telling that interactive game-like applications are developed to model complex systems with real-world analogies.  In the graphic environment human operators take the role of supervision and security.  Threats are represented by an unfamiliar entity with an odd behavior, which allows the operator to react quickly to sabotage. 

The shooter-game is merged with complex systems to leverage the capacity of the human to react to unpredictable behavior in anyone of its components.  But at the same time sabotage is a process that makes systems more resilient and purposeful.  It is the venom that brings the cure.

Sabotage is the intentional introduction of noise into the system, and human participation in feedback is the most effective way to regain control.

Relics and Social Networks

Tooth of Mary Magdalene

This is a photo of a reliquary holding a tooth of Mary Magdalene, held at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.  As I stood in front of this piece and took this photo I could not ignore the flood of information it conveyed to me by its symbolism.  A mixture of cultural, historical, religious and ethical information.

Relics were an early method of constructing a social network that spread over many geographical areas and cultures.  Their authenticity was not relevant (there are more “nails of the cross” than the number that were actually used, if at all).  Important is the effective system for the dissemination of information.  “Sticky” information carried and spread around the world.  Relics represent units of cultural history and ethical meaning, beyond being objects of veneration.

Yet more than that, relics created a form of social cohesion around its significance.  A cohesion that went beyond geographical boundaries.  One has to think only of the pilgrimages to Santiago de Compostela or the veneration that relics like the Holy Shroud inspire in persons scattered around the world. 

It may be interesting to show that a network of relics can be structured that contains the most relevant information about the shared culture and faith of a group.   And how this network of symbols is the basis for a superimposed social network connected by the  information developed by the same group over time.

Pervasive Social Production Networks

It is remarkable that the development of online collaboration, of social production networks and online communities, and of the New Commons itself, is happening in a backdrop of increased wariness with the perceived maladies of over-extended globalization, the surge in power of transnational corporations, the exclusion of large populations from participation in a world dominated by the unequal relation between technological have and have-nots. 

It seems to be a response by the global digital citizen that will not relinquish his capacity to choose the community, market or production network that he or she is willing to participate in.  The digital citizen that is not content with being forced to consume commercial software, institutional encyclopedias or mass media. 

In some sense it is the creation of a new socio-economic environment for production, integration and collaboration.  The idea may seem just another social Utopia, but the vitality of its emergence and the results to date point to the contrary.   Might the communitarian ideal be possible by pervasive social software?

“Ubiquitous Human Computing” (Zittrain) makes working independent of location, employer and the body itself.  Productive workers can be integrated into a loosely connected PSPN by virtue of residence in the Internet “cloud”.  New and very productive ways of linking people, computers and work are becoming reality.

The work performed in a PSPN is inherent to the community and goes mainly to increase the social capital and common goods of the community.  The advent of the PSPN has been declared a “shadow workforce” (Howe), a group of individuals outside the realm of markets and companies that perform work and are engaged in a productive process of their own making.  There is growing interest in markets and companies to be able to tap into this network of informally working individuals for profit.

Online social networks apparently obey neither market pricing rules nor corporate command.  Their rules are framed by collaboration, trust, common property and personal motivation.  Their social codex can be disturbed if changes in those rules are attempted, which can lead to a sort of “Tragedy of the Commons” (Harding): overuse and failure to generate reciprocity.  Their leading design principle seems to be cooperation, in some cases even altruism, as opposed to selfish (i.e. capitalist) economic interest, running counter the idea of the homo oeconomicus.

Online social networks and the PSPN are not systems that emerge out of pure chance and selfless attrition.  They are indeed economic systems in which motivations and gains can be studied and reproduced.  The communities have an important role in designing and implementing a working organization.  Their characteristics, policies and rules are varied and carried out in many different ways.

The Herd Effect

We digital citizens are sometimes described as a herd.  We follow leaders, gather at certain places to exchange information, roam.  The herd can muster collective action, very much like swarms, using the most basic signals and feedback.  The herd is also a New Commons and its social capital is digital information.  We can just feed on it, like at the social networking sites, or we can take action, like at the crucial time of the Orange Revolution.  The idea is the collective, the possible aggregation of information to make sense.

Following a part of the herd, I registered at Herdict.org a couple of weeks ago.  I became member number 58.  Herdict.org is a website designed and managed by the Berkman Center for Internet and Society @ Harvard University.  The name comes from the fusion of “Herd” and “Verdict”.  The site aims to collect the verdict of the herd on various issues.  The first two are PC Health and Network Health.   Using a piece of software installed on every herd member’s PC, reports are sent back to Herdict.org with information about its characteristics, installed software and apparent problems. 

Given a large enough number of herd members active in the system, it could be a good source of information about which applications are causing trouble, which malware is extending and giving the herd a though time.  But it could also signal problems with the Network itself.  Problems that go beyond the merely technical.  For example, it could spot areas or countries where Internet access is being cut off, or filtering and blocking of sites is being practiced.   This could make it easier for digital citizens to by-pass restrictions on Internet access and censorship by using tools like Psiphon.  As such it could become a valuable tool for ICT4D and the movement for an open Internet.

But also other possibilities arise.  These are not at once evident, but Herdict.org could be a call for collaboration of a very different sort.  In one Gedankenexperiment, herd members could put to use their healthy computers to assist and clean up infected computers or “zombies”.  In this way a user that has advanced knowledge on how to fight off malicious software could help many users worldwide that don’t have the skills or that don’t know that their PCs have been sequestered.  Herdict.org could very well become a place to start such actions and measure success.

See an article in MIT Technology Review: The Web’s Dark Energy: Community policing can make the Web safe, by J. Zittrain.

Reality Mining and Obscurity

Human Ethics is based upon 3 principles: The first is a claim that there is something bigger than the human being itself that supports every system of thought or natural law.  The second two are about how humans relate to one another in a social and political setting: Reciprocity and Anticipation. 

Reciprocity compels us to treat everyone as an equal, the proverbial “Golden Rule”.  Anticipation is the system of rules, knowledge, clues and taboos that enables us to predict how a human being will react in a certain situation, and ultimately how to evaluate and understand his or her actions in light of said rules.  The normative part of ethics if you will.  This simplification is a model of sorts to undestand Ethics as a whole.  The minute aspects of all ethical systems are varied.  But probably the majority of them will lead to this Ueber-model. 

The Model as such is a tool that enables us to understand complex behaviours when there is a lack of data or of time to analyze every aspect of a problem.  A model, if designed properly, can account for a large number of individual cases, but is only an approximation of the truth.  Many cases will be left out or details will not be considered.  And it is in the details that we really obtain meaning and identity.

So it is with the principle of Anticipation.  We create a model of the human being in a certain ethical, cultural and social setting.  We then use this model to predict and judge behaviours of individuals and groups.  The catch-phrases of the anticipatory model are everywhere in our culture as memes, sayings and “Binsenweisheiten“.  But it goes very much beyond phrases and memes.  The anticipatory system is the basis of the literary canon of western civilization, from Homer, Aquinas and Isidore to Freud, Shakespeare and Cervantes.  The Canon is our working model and hypothesis of the (western) human being.  It explains the passions, dreams, behaviours, love, comic… everything possibly human.  And it does so by force of repetition and approximation, rather than by facts and experimentation.   One of the books of the canonic scholar and literary critic Harold Bloom is aptly titled: Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human.

But now fast forward.  Chris Anderson published recently an article in Wired questioning the validity of scientific models.  His point is, why do we need models if we can go for the real thing?  Today we have enormous amounts of data and information available, and moreover, have the computational capability to process an interpret such information.  This is going to have an impact on how we see and comprehend the world.

And what happens to the human model, the canon and the ethics?.  We have not only information about wordly things like traffic and weather, we also have a lot of information about how humans behave.  What they write and care about, what they think of events, how they react to catastrophes and how they fight against political systems.  Even information on how they buy, whom do they know and speak to, and where do they travel to.  The life of the “nomadic Cyborg” (W.Mitchell) is ever more lived out in the electronic Landscapes, Opens and Commons.

The practice of extracting this information, of making sense of all the data in the computer systems is called “Reality Mining“:  In other words, how to obtain a picture of reality from raw data in a non-normative way.  Don’t make assumptions (i.e. models) about reality, just extract reality from the data and understand it.

Alex Pentland of MIT Media Lab calls this “Honest Signals”.  It is about how we can extract a clear picture of the human being, its environment and its social operations.  With this information we can then make true statements about the affairs of the person and the social group.  This could have applications in a wide variety of situations, like to determine the social sentiment of a group (a happy group or a civil unrest) from the tone of their voices.  Or the emergence of public health problems and epidemics to be able to respond faster.

Nevertheless the demise of the model of the canon and the rise of Reality Mining in its stead opens up a series of questions, ethical, political and legal, that must be pointed out. 

First of all: Privacy.  Do we as citizens want to be exposed?  One of the rights of citizenship is the one that creates my private sphere.  And consequently the social civic sphere. 

Second: The political form of free will.  This area where we as a society still have the option to act out of free will and not in a perfectly anticipated way.  What happens to free will if there is no anticipation, no measure of freedom to act outside of predictability?  We need some degree of confidentiality to mantain the anticipatory system of Ethics.

Third: Social Capital.  This is an important question for the crafting of a digital citizenship.  The right of ownership and privacy of our personal information.   Who owns my social links and spheres of influence?  Everybody uses Social Capital for personal advantage: to obtain a job, to do sell or buy stuff, to be part of a Commons like the Internet.  If my Social Capital is in the hands of social networking sites, should I receive compensation?

Here are two interesting quotes.  One from Dr. Pentland speaking of Reality Mining, of which he says that “it’s an interesting Gods-eye view” (MIT Technology Review, 2008, TR10).  Of course he is referring to the possibilities to do good.

The second from Bjarne Stroust-Rup, when asked by MIT Technology Review (Jul/Aug 2008) about the Future of the Web: “The total end of privacy.  Governments, politicians, criminals, and friends will trawl through years of accumulated data (ours and what others collected) with unbelievably sophisticated tools.  Obscurity and time passed will no longer be covers.”

Obscurity and Doubt are a necessary part of every ethical and political system.  It is a precondition for freedom and justice.  We need to make sure that we don’t lose all of it following the New Enlightment movement of Reality Mining.

Everything Global?

Everything seems to be going “global”.  Some examples will show this:

Wars are looking more and more like global police actions, rather than international conflicts.

The financial systems allows money to flow globally, very much like in the heyday of the Gold Standard.  Even the Fed admits that it is constrained by global considerations.

Telecommunications and the Internet seem to know no borders, and speak their own language of transnationality.

News are hardly local anymore.  The canned products of CNN, BBC, WSJ and NYT, among others, assume a global audience and a global distribution.

Supply chains transcend the limits of the logistically possible.  The whole world seems like the proverbial “last mile” of old. 

Corporations operate unapologetically in a world not restricted to their regional offices, personnel and legal systems.  They become ever more like globally linked organizations, supra-national in nature.  Patents and copyrights are enforced globally.

Even terror seems to be global in reach and ideological claim.  Religions speak of hundreds of millions of followers.

But, in the face of all this, why do we still have to put up with nation-states?  And with the corollary: a very old idea of citizenship tied to the existence of the very same nation-state.  Does this markedly un-global idea of citizenship diminish the possibilities of individuals, both in the online world (economic and political rights) and the physical world (migration, exclusion)? 

I must say it does.  To investigate I will post here further.  I don’t think we will see the demise of the nation-state soon, but we will see a change in the character of citizenship.

Space, Change and Citizenship

We exist in a constant balance of freedom and constrain.  This is so in the physical space, in our spiritual and moral spheres, in our relationship with the economy, politics and the law, and it is the reality of our body in relationship with its surroundings.  The outcomes of evolution and ecology are an expression of balances and trade-offs.  Justice itself is a result of intentions and accidents.

All of these ecologies are subject to rules.  Some are just natural and maybe inmutable rules.  Most are man-made rules.  Rules that we have conceived and tweaked during centuries of social, technological and political life.

If we follow the achitectural analogy of the Internet (W.Mitchell), we can surely say that in the last 20 years we have significantly changed the space in which a large portion of humantiy dwells.  It is as if all of a sudden a new landscape with new and far away horizons had emerged.  A lanscape that is at once strange and alluring, because it promises to realize some of the cherished dreams of old: incorporality, persistence, freedom, liberty.   A new “cyberspace” beyond government control, as Barlow envisioned.  The architectural analogy is very useful, because it also allows to account for the effect of exclusion that this new “city” brings.  A great many people are not allowed to have a live behind its walls.

The new “space” has very interesting features.  It seems to transcend nations and governments, it is enclosed by technological and not physical barriers.  It allows for many forms of economic, social and political activity.  It has become an extension of our physical dimension and personality.  It has many of the characteristic features of architectural spaces: containers, roads, networks.  Public and private spaces.  It can allow for total control if mismanaged.

The most striking difference with the spaces we inhabit is that ”cyberspace” claims to be free of control and regulation.  To follow J. Zittrain in his (mostly technological) argument for generativity, the Internet has been created with only two rules to follow: procastrination and reciprocity.  It is indeed the most basic ethical entente.  But as a political system it is going to fail as the reality grows complex with every day.  The barbarians are going to storm the city.

Among the many claims and justifications of the nature of cyberspace, the one that is most salient is the issue of freedom.  This has interesting implications.  Foremost the dissolution of the idea of citizenship.  Once we move into cyberspace we cease to have a citizenship status.  But this is only an illusion.  We are digital citizens.

But what is a digital citizen, what rights and duties do I have as such?  Up to whom is to define this?  Should we have a Digital Constitution?  Who has the authority to proclaim it?  The Internet is a Commons, a New Commons.  When we look at it this way we can start to think about the kind of regulation we would like to have, and by whom it is to be actuated.  The authority should rest in the New Commons itself.

It is very important that we move forward to establish the groundwork for a digital citizenship and the corresponding authority.  Otherwise we will face a “Tragedy of the Commons” scenario.  A moment when a shared space is ransacked and driven to failure by the attacks and abuse from freebooters and reckless national governments.  The idea of a Commons is to preserve the utility of the commonly held goods, while effectively defecting abuse and enclosure.  The role of a strong digital citizenship will be pivotal in this endeavor.

Moving to Boston

In the last weeks I have been moving from Mexico to Boston.  For the next couple of years I will be attending classes at MIT and working from my Boston office.  I will resume posting in a few days.

Collective Memory

Some years before Vannevar Bush wrote about the Memex, the solitary Jorge Luis Borges penned a singular short story: Funes el Memorioso.   There is a good translation by Andrew Hurley, with the somewhat awkward title of Funes, His Memory.   At first it may seem strange to pair these two men in a sentence.  Borges was not very much interested in technology, science and policy, as was Bush.  His interests where in riddles, myths, language, infinite libraries and mirrors and copulation.  But both Bush and Borges where concerned with the possibility of infinite memory, classification and information retrieval. 

Funes is a young lad in a town somewhere in rural Argentina, that is in possession of a prodigious memory.  He can recall every detail in the world, just by willing to thinking about it.  He later begins to develop knowledge systems and classifications of his own.  He is a kind of idiot-savant, that eerily reminds of El Niño Fidencio.

Both Bush and Borges conceived the expanded memory as personal “appliances”, in the case of Funes his abnormal brain and in Bush’s idea the Memex machine itself, which resembled the desk of a clerk with some complex machinery and microfilm inside.

Today we have a working version of this idea of an expanded memory.  It is contained in the Web.  But it is not something personal, it is a collective memory, that is created by large number of persons, and made available for everyone to use as an Information Commons.

We have to kinds of competing collective memory systems. 

The first is the shallow web.  It is formed by millions of websites with easy to access information, created by individuals all over the world.  Google Search is the most common retrieval tool of information.  It uses the links within the websites to decide about the relevance of each website, in fact extracting by this method a system of collective cataloging and ranking of information. 

The second are meta-web systems like Wikipedia.  Wikipedia tries to obviate the need to search the shallow web for information, instead offering multi-language articles that are crafted by a collective of editors worldwide.  The idea of an Encyclopedia expanded to every aspecto fo human knowledge and endeavour.

The most evident problems of a collective memory are its accuracy and completeness.  But in the end, information, like any other human activity, is a representation of the world.  The representations reflect our ideas about ourselves.