'In 1999 a young Noah Wyle played the part of Steve Jobs in the film The Pirates of Silicon Valley. The film told the unlikely tale of college dropouts and computer geeks who changed an industry and made a billon. In the late 1980s and early 1990s there was a revolution in information technology which moved computing power out of the computer room and onto the desktop. Technology became more distributed, accessible and democratic. No longer did you need a degree in computing to use a computer, and if you were in business you did not need enormous resources to gain the benefit of computational power. PCs and Macs became commonplace and soon they were not only on every desk but also in every home. Software manufacturers moved their attention from business applications to entertainment, gaming, and lifestyle products. The young guns behind this shift in power included entrepreneurs like Michael Dell who brought affordable computing to everyone. College dropouts and geeks like Bill Gates of Microsoft and Steve Jobs of Apple revolutionized the industry by producing innovative products and maximizing the growing computer power available from hardware and microchip innovators like Intel. This was a story of the young, gifted and rich.
This week sees another film released about a young billionaire; an IT geek whose company has not just changed the ICT industry but has also changed the way we communicate. The Social Network tells the story of Mark Zuckerberg (Jesse Eisenberg) and his company Facebook. Facebook is an example, perhaps the most successful example, of an application which is maximizing the capabilities of what is called Web 2.0, but what is it? Web 2.0 is not a technology or product; it does not refer to an update to any technical specifications. It is a useful name for the cumulative changes in the ways software developers and users are maximising the capabilities of increasing processor speeds and the falling price of memory. Examples of Web 2.0 applications include web-based communities, hosted services, web applications, social-networking sites, video-sharing sites, wikis, blogs, and mashups (combining data from multiple sources to provide a new service). A Web 2.0 site allows its users to interact with other users or to change website content, in contrast to non-interactive websites where users are limited to the passive viewing of information. In short, if Web 1.0 was about broadcasting information, Web 2.0 is about interacting.
Social networks are perhaps the most well-known of the Web 2.0 applications and exist in many forms and serve different purposes. Some, like LinkedIn, seek to offer a forum for business people to keep in touch, to build networks of clients, colleagues and friends. Others like Bebo and Facebook are more general in nature and provide a forum for social interaction, chat and exchange of information. Sites aimed specifically at children include HabboHotel, Clubpenguin and Barbie.com have users numbered in the hundreds of millions worldwide. Facebook alone is growing at 30,000 users per day. Social networks have also expanded the market for online interaction. The massive growth in computer games drove boys and young males to their laptops for interaction with their peers in MMORPGs (Massively multiplayer online role-playing games). What gaming achieved for young men, social networking has achieved for young girls. Social networking is of course gender neutral but because it appeals to young women in a way that gaming never did, there is massive growth in the use of ICT for leisure in that segment.
Clay Shirky has written about the impact of social networking on our society in Here comes everybody and Cognitive Surplus. One of his key themes is that working together in groups is fundamental to our human nature but the complexity of group action in terms of coordination, organisation and communication is hard and gets harder as the group grows. The technologies behind social networks makes many of these difficulties disappear. The centrality of group effort to human life means that changing the way groups function will have a major impact on everything from commerce and government to media and religion. When we change the way we communicate we change society. Social networks, like Facebook and Twitter, blur the line between media and communication. When do they stop being a diary for your friends and start being a broadcasting source? Community is audience and the audience are broadcasters.
Now that we are all wired together we can share resources and information in a way unimaginable even five years ago. The movement of the social networking platform from PC to Laptop to Netbook to smart phone means that the technology is in the hands of rich and poor, the first world and developing nations. The simplification of the technologies from a user perspective means the there is also a diminishing divide between young and old. As Shirky says, Communications tools don’t get socially interesting until they get technologically boring. [the tool] has to have been around long enough that most of society is using it. It’s when a technology becomes normal, then ubiquitous, and finally so pervasive as to be invisible, that the really profound changes happen. This is the stage we are at with social networks on mobile devices.
Is this all good news? Well perhaps not. The ability to create and share images, documents, and ideas means the Internet can have a powerful democratising function. With access to all of this information online and the ability to find groups that share your world view, tailor your own news service and watch only the media commentators you agree with may have damaging consequences for society. Bill Gates predicted back in 1995; Customized information is a natural extension....these subscription services whether human or electronic, will gather information that conforms to a particular philosophy and set of interests. The networking capabilities of Web 2.0 make it easier to surround yourself with the opinions of like-minded but otherwise isolated others, and to insulate yourself from competing views. This can be polarising, and potentially dangerous for democracy.Exposure to competing positions generally increases tolerance. The benefit of traditional news sources, such as the nightly TV news, is that it presents a range of views on a range of topics and if done to a proper standard be editorially neutral. This is a bigger debate well covered by Cass Sunstein in his book Republic.com 2.0. We should evaluate all new communications technologies, including social networks, by asking how they affect us as citizens and not only as consumers.
Another limitation is the sheer size of the opportunity for communication. There are now no technological limits to how many people we can connect to, but we still have strong cognitive limits. You can only read so many weblogs, e-mails, or have a meaningful connection to so many “Friends” on Facebook. The technological possibility of communication does not overcome the human limits on attention. But perhaps this is not a real problem. According to Facebook the average number of “Friends” each of us has is just 130 so perhaps we have already figured this out! What is undoubtedly true is that we are living through a time of massive social change, disguised as a change in technology. Forget six degrees of separation, you are a single click away from two billion new participants in a sophisticated media landscape. One of those participants is me......don’t all email me at the same time, how many “Friends” can one guy handle?!?!?'
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Andrew Power is the Head of School of Creative Technologies at the Institute of Art, Design and Technology (IADT) in Dun Laoghaire, Dublin. Prior to his academic career he spent 20 years in the ICT industry working with companies such as Digital Equipment Corporation, Intel Ireland, and SmartForce. Andrew’s research interests include eGovernement, Digital Democracy and Social Networking. Andrew also serves on the board of a number of organisations in the Not-for-Profit and Creative sectors.
- 'The Social Network' will receive its theatrical release nationwide on Friday, October 15th through Sony.
