The Social Graph is Neither

Whereas the technical skill required to build a basic electronic social network is "can you dial a phone?" Been that way for sixty years and more. For a dramatic musical rendition of the social networks designed by your parents (oh, wait, I mean your grandparents, maybe even your great-grandparents, how time flies) watch the first ten minutes of Bye Bye Birdie. Ooh, look, a video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gKhR8QtQ4do

(I was never a fan of Bye Bye Birdie, by the way, but you can't forget that number once you hear the darn thing.)

Now, these days every eight-year-old has mastered a far greater technical challenge: Mobile text messaging. That's a better social technology because you don't have to talk, or say "hello" or "goodbye", or avoid communicating in seventeen directions at once.

There are things Twitter and Facebook can do that can't be done with chains or trees built on one-to-one texting, but I'm not sure any of them are more social. (Is anything more social than the game of phoning people and asking them to relay messages?) Really, the point of these higher-tech "social networks" is that they fill a gap by letting you be barely social and yet still be present in a bunch of people's lives. I can follow your tweets without you even knowing. I can add Facebook "friends" and then basically ignore them most of the time. I can be "introduced" to a friend-of-a-friend on Facebook without any of the real stress of even talking to them, let alone meeting them in person.

I do see some truth however to your comparison with that idea from meditation. For example, even if you are leading an interesting life, there are many ways to post about it that will make your life appear less interesting than it really is.

I'm pretty sure it would still suck because they wouldn't know to translate their intuitive understanding of how to leverage social dynamics to gain popularity with how to facilitate them in software. But it's hard to be sure, and would depend on the latent design skill hidden in your "popular person".

I think most people don't know how to approach software design, even from a UI perspective. It's hard even for professionals. You would have to get lucky with a person who happens to get it intuitively.

What you've just described is Facebook, except that the "most popular person in high school" got cut out of the loop by the nerd smart enough to realize that the idea was good enough to be worth stealing.

And you're right. It does suck, in a million ways, reflecting our society at large rather well, overall. But it's also the most successful social network to date.

But in my opinion, at least, the main idea that the yacht club twins brought to the mix was actually the primary reason that it grew so easily: Facebook was, initially, at least, a social network for students at elite schools, let the rest of the University-of-CrappyPartySchool rabble diddle themselves on Myspace. Without that, I don't know that it ever would have taken off the way it did...

That is a very euro-centric, post-modernist way of thinking.

What are caste system if not social?

What are far-flung familial relations if not social?

A definition of being "social" which only applies to societies where friendship is paramount, and friends come and go with ease is too limiting and leads you to solutions that can be awkward in other societies.

For example, in my country, we care deeply about family and ancestory--so much so that in every generation one member of the family is nominated to be the "memory keeper" (sorry, there's no translatable word) who keeps track of the geneology of everyone, and is expected at a glance to determine if a stranger is at least vaguely related to us.

Would a free form social graph be useful to us---not really. Our facebook pages are practically 90% family members, 10% people who through marriage will become family members.