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social networking and its discontents VI
A while ago, in one of my social software critiques, I wrote:
"What would actually be useful is to be able to rate my friends in terms of the intensity of the bond between us. There are eight people currently listed as my friends in Orkut. I am, indeed, fond of them all. But two of them I've never met. Two more I've only met on one occasion. One is a casual acquaintance who I haven't had contact with since he moved away from Chicago six months (or so) ago. Two are people who I enjoy some degree of intimacy with, people who I could call on the phone just to say "how are you?," people who I have had dinner with (once or twice) within the past year. And one is a guy who's been my friend for fifteen years. This information has obvious relevance to anyone who's trying to make a meaningful use of my network, but to Orkut (or Friendster or Tribe) all of the bonds are of equal intensity, creating a picture of me and my network of friends which is weirdly distorted to the point where it is practically a fiction."
What's needed in order to solve this problem is a workable taxonomy of types of relationships, and I had given some preliminary thought of some basic categories that such a taxonomy would contain. But now I've learned that Ian Davis and Eric Vitiello have cooked one up already: Relationship (which appears to have been designed as an attempt to formalize some sort of metadata protocol?).
Clay Shirky critiques Relationship (he actually describes it as "self-critiquing"), and he does so mainly by pointing out some of the predictable difficulties of establishing any sort of taxonomy (grey areas, etc.). Still: to my mind even the flawed Relationship taxonomy is better than the current model used by most social software, where all human bonds are equivalent.
Shirky's final point in rejecting the taxonomy is as follows: "the madness of the age is to assume that people can spell out, in explicit detail, the messiest aspects of their lives, and that they will eagerly do so, in order to provide better inputs to cool new software."
Thoughtful, but I think he might be wrong. I think the assumption that people would (if they could) is actually an increasingly safe assumption. The madness may be not the assumption that people will do it, but the fact that people will do it. Labels: internet, networks, rants |
Wednesday, March 17, 2004
11:12 AM
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