When Andy Oram posted 'The Behavior Gap: Three Persistent Problems for Internet Technologies', he touched on a few things that I haven't been able to get out of my head through my fingers for some time, and I'm glad that he did write it since it gave me a little more focus on what is a very complicated issue1. It seems to me that, while approximately 80% of the world has to get online in any meaningful way, we 20% (as of 2008) have hit a glass ceiling.
We 20% have learned that technology can help us. Some of us have even figured out that technology can hinder us, though this requires surviving the geekteens - a technology maturity level that can strike at any point in someone's life. More technology doesn't necessarily mean better, as most mature geeks know and as Steve Talbott wrote of in 'Devices of the Soul'.
We have limitations, and we can take a few different approaches. We have the pessimist way (overly critical), the optimist way (buy my Web 2.0 Shag Rug) and the realist way. I fall into the latter category.
Andy's article points at three major problems:
Many Too Many & It's hard to split tasks between systems
Andy writes:
...But the YouTube phenomenon and Web 2.0 assume a many-to-many model. We just don't have efficient techniques for to handling that model, particularly for streaming media. It requires ad-hoc channels that can be erected quickly between people who don't have a pre-existing relationship. Packet switching has taken us amazingly far toward solutions, but current user activity is showing up its limitations.
It's worth noting that many-to-many models are hard for other computer technologies to handle, too. Relational databases offer one-to-many and one-to-one relationships, but have to cobble them together to fake a many-to-many relationship.
The many-to-many model doesn't scale in social terms either. It can be applied metaphorically to real life, where we're used to one-to-many relationships (with centralized government and business institutions) as well as one-to-one relationships. We build up many-to-many relationships in our schools, churches, and neighborhoods, but we don't really treat them as such because we rarely try to manage all the complex interrelationships in these institutions...
I completely agree, and will try to add some value here: Our tools reflect ourselves and technology is no different. In many-to-many relationships, our tools reflect our constraints in being human: We humans do not handle many-to-many very well. We have a tendency to create a focal point or bridge and allow things to filter through that way because we only have so many brain cells to work on a problem at any given time. While some may have more or less ability to handle problems at any given time, we have to cater for the majority. The majority would be something statisticians and economists would happily call the center of the curve. The average, mundane human being who simply wants to make the best use of technology in their own context, be it staying in touch with friends or using the Internet as a looking glass for everything that they want to know.
Back in the 1980s, there was a word I read in an old Byte Magazine (when they were thick and worth reading): Infoglut. Infoglut, in a more wordy and less cool phrase, is Information Overload - and that has a lot of effects on we human beings. But first, let's look at the etiology of Infoglut.
Infoglut happens when information comes in faster than we can process. If you have a pile of things to do and a pile of things to complete, infoglut is the large pile of things to do. When we, as humans, have a lot of things we are handling, the risk of infoglut increases profoundly - not only do we have more to do, we have to switch our attention between tasks. The switching of attention takes time. The time used to switch attention could have been used to complete other tasks. It is a source of frustration. It is a source of stress.
While some of we humans thrive on stress, this sort of stress is typically seen as a bad thing not only for one's health - but also for one's productivity. I recall visiting a coworker in a hospital in the late 1990s who said, "This is so great. I don't have my pager. I don't have to answer a phone. I have no internet access. Finally, I can get some rest"2.
What it boils down to is this: We humans suck at many-to-many relationships. We tend to focus on a few things at a time. Even Paul Morphy, while he could play blindfolded against 8 opponents at the same time, only played one move at a time. Why? Think about it.
Because no matter how you slice it, we do one thing at a time. The situational awareness necessary for social networks may be on par for air traffic controllers and fighter pilots already. Whenever I first looked at Facebook, I felt like an air traffic controller who has to listen to potty announcements issued from the back of a suburban assault vehicle. And then Twitter. And then...
So this leads me to some rhetorical questions:
- If we spend more time reacting, do we spend less time acting?
- If we spend more time reading nonsense, will we learn to communicate better?
And, below those, I have to ask: If we humans have been ok without many to many so far, what is the drive to have it now? What makes it so important?
Just because everyone had telephones did not mean that everyone called their friends every 5 minutes, though some parents of teenagers may feel otherwise. We human beings simplify.
Is this a problem that we need to solve for ourselves? I am not certain it is. However, in programming, we do need more efficient many to many processing to better simplify data. Remember the marketing of just about everything, offering you time for leisure? Exactly.
We don't know what will happen next in time
While I have little to add to Andy's article here, I feel compelled to expand on this paragraph:
...It's ironic that we have to base decisions on local information in a medium that has extended our social settings further than anything in history--and that punishes any missteps by preserving them forever and making them accessible to everyone...
This is not only true, it is simplified. Consider the recent debacle over the presence of the depiction of Muhammad in the Wikipedia. While the majority of English speaking Internet seemed to equate Islam with terrorism all over the web, and therefore reacted less than pleasantly for the pleas for removal, I'm not certain that the Arabic internet saw things in much the same light. On a cultural level it is disturbing to note that middle ground was tossed out without ceremony; there was a technological way to honor the request without censorship but Wikipedia administrators did not see that as important enough. The sensible thing to pull from that situation was that people made decisions based on the knowledge, culture and prejudice available to them in a local sense and echoed it across the Internet. Local decisions did not even acknowledge compromise - indeed, most writing I encountered while watching it did not even seem to wish to consider compromise. This, you see, is the brave new Internet and a demonstration of how many-to-many doesn't always come up with the most wise solutions. Still, the Internet reinvents itself from second to second3.
The Internet, despite what your mother may tell you, is fragmented: Linguistically, culturally and geopolitically. While Thomas Friedman wrote of globalization in The Lexus and the Olive Tree: Understanding Globalization
Trust
All networks are built on trust. This is a robust principle of networking, and one has to wonder how much we can trust each other as we see each other's presences more often but spend less quality time with each other. An hour on a social networking site could be spent in other ways; what do you accomplish in an hour - and how much do you trust your social network? How much does your social network trust you? How much do people outside of your network trust you? How much do you trust people outside of your network?
In The End
In the end, the truth is that most of the present social networking and Web 2.0 stuff is simply evolution - and whether it succeeds or not is something that will be a matter of history within our lifetimes. There are core issues regarding human attention span that on one hand marketers are trying to capitalize on. On the other hand is an increasing Internet population with less and less time as they deal with more and more things. Even as IBM and Linden Lab celebrate a victory in transporting an avatar from one virtual world to the next, the question that should be asked is 'Why?'.
'Many to many', as a concept, has practical uses - as does artificial intelligence. With artificial intelligence, despite science fiction books and movies, the thrust is not to reproduce humans: we already have a very cheap and enjoyable way of creating humans, enough so that the global population almost tripled in the last century. The thrust of artificial intelligence is focused on technologies that can assist our being human - and so should our 'many to many' technologies. 'Many to many' and other Internet related technologies now involve something alien to a lot of people with technical skills: social responsibility. One cannot trade social responsibility for trust; they go hand in hand - and more thought in creating new technologies should focus on social responsibility instead of selling advertising space to people.
The balance is off, and must be addressed.
1It is somewhat poetic that I am presently reviewing Amy Shuen's 'Web 2.0: A Strategy Guide: Business thinking and strategies behind successful Web 2.0 implementations.
2 The last I heard, this person went off and found a small cabin somewhere. Maybe On Walden Pond, figuratively if not literally.
3The dominant culture on the Internet seems to remain English speaking and of Christian influence. This is a personal observation and may be far from true, but it remains an observation and one which is subject to change. We don't know what will happen. Look at Orkut and tell me how your Portugese is.
Technorati Tags: 
