Software Is Not a Mirror, and the Social Graph Isn't Your Friend

I've been skimming Jaron Lanier's "You are Not a Gadget" recently (skimming because I'm too busy with all my social media and attendant gadgets to read a real book) and all kidding aside, this idea that we are being locked in by our software is really stuck in my brain. The thesis is that our humanity is being locked in to limited practices by the limitations of the software and devices that we use ("locked in" being borrowed from engineering and the lock down of code). One example he gives is the MIDI language for music on computers, and how its early development originally meant as a very simple way to quickly model musical notes on computers became "locked in" as the musical standard and now not only defines but limits our ability to experience the full range of musical sounds in a digital context.

From the blog post "The Social Graph is Neither," the following excerpt:

"There's no way to take a time-out from our social life and describe it to a computer without social consequences. At the very least, the fact that I have an exquisitely maintained and categorized contact list telegraphs the fact that I'm the kind of schlub who would spend hours gardening a contact list, instead of going out and being an awesome guy. The social graph wants to turn us back into third graders, laboriously spelling out just who is our fifth-best-friend. But there's a reason we stopped doing that kind of thing in third grade!"

The above is another good example of us on the verge of becoming locked in, this time in defining the standard for "friend." The mathematics of the social graph and its maintenance become so complex and time consuming that we start looking for the "standard," which is really a lowest common denominator idea, an abbreviation in its worst sense of something that is necessarily so layered and hard to pin down.

Way back when, in grad school at Stanford, I took a class with Terry Winograd on creating characters for digital environments. It was basically like trying to create Clippy, the (very) old Microsoft paperclip character/avatar that was meant to be your guide and helper on the computer. In the class we had to build our characters from scratch; script their natural language interactions, build their personalities on a number of dimensions, give them a back story so that interactions with them would sound "real." What I REALLY learned from that class was how easy it is as designers to get the "God complex," and go down the rathole of trying to replicate everything we do as humans within the software we design. It's an impossible task. Too many nuances, too many spectrums.

So this is my long-winded, utterly human way of saying that maybe the problem with the social graph is that we're going down the rathole of trying to map it, measure it and manage it just like we do in our minds (not brains, minds), and maybe that's not necessary. Maybe we're just doing it because we can; because it's an interesting and esoteric exercise to consider every nuance of friendship and how to measure it and categorize it. Navel gazing. But what is it really getting us? Rather than implementing the social graph as a reflection of ourselves, the maxim should be that we design the social graph to work for us.