what is socially appropriate. ”Nodes” were upset, betrayed, embarrassed, left vulnerable when their actions and associations were rendered visible, and broadcast beyond their intended or imagined audiences. All because an easy flip of the switch made connections where technically possible, bridging the gaps that were perhaps socially desirable as gaps. Ironically, one of the downsides of an integrated technical network is the potential resultant instability of the social network itself. That is, human beings take a while to develop social norms that enable and preserve their social connections; having a sudden disruption issued from afar and rippled through the system in a flash can be seriously damaging and can take time to repair.

 

Twitter visualization by Daniel Lee

How could the snafus men-
tioned here have happened?
Truly understanding this
requires a post-structuralist
approach, which basically states
it is necessary to study both the
object itself and the systems of
knowledge that produced the
object. Crudely, I would say the
“systems of knowledge,” that
is, the way of thinking that led
to these errors, were ones that
privileged simplified ideas and
simplistic business impera-
tives over any concern for or
understanding of human social
engagement. Developers are
excited about the hard technical
problems but also the relatively
easy control a graph (again,
once we have the computational
power) can give. Entrepreneurs
and media strategists are gog-
gle-eyed for the potential audi-
ence “reach” and the bucks that
can be made. I realize I sound
cynical, but perhaps being
cynical is also being realistic in
this case. There is no judgment
here just a perspective on the
nature of the forces involved. I
confess, though, I expect design-
ers to know better. To be clear,
there were plenty of people who
argued against what happened
in both these cases. But the pre-
vailing logic was “let’s go ahead.”
So, how could this have been
prevented? First, there needs
to be a deeper culture of social
that is understood within these
organizations—and that means
more than social as node con-
nections, but rather a “social”
steeped in a deeper understand-
ing of what the technology is
and how it fits into people’s
everyday lives. Second, there
needs to be a concomitant shift
in the way in which design
decisions are elaborated and
business decisions are made.
The evaluation methods used
when testing ideas are clearly
flawed. The media reported tri-
als and lab tests occurred prior
to changes to Facebook and the
launch of Google Buzz. Testing
in a lab on a small scale and/
or testing on oneself (known
as “eating your own dogfood”)
can yield results that are often
limited and sometimes falla-
cious. On the first point, it has
been argued we are witnessing
a fundamental shift in human
sociality because social net-
working technologies operate
on a scale heretofore unseen
and unimagined. But the argu-
ment can sometimes change:
Prior understandings of human
social relations from work on
social technologies can’t offer
insights because of this shift in
scale. But then, these technolo-
gies are tested in lab studies?

What happened to “scale makes it all different?” The counter argument to this is “bucket” tests, in which a random sample of users are presented a new experience and the results of that limited release are evaluated, sometimes in a side-by-side comparison with other “buckets” (for those with an experimental training, think of buckets as experimental conditions). This way, testing on the Web itself can generate thousands, millions, and tens of millions of results from which one can arguably generalize and predict more effectively. Can you tell the effect on a social network with a “bucket test”? No, because a bucket is bounded and a social network is not.

Now let’s address the “eat your own dog food” model. Geeks, computer scientists, and mathematicians who love networks are not good people to assess your social-networking products. And I include in this people who may not be formally trained in these disciplines but who are immersed (like fish in water) in cultures where these disciplines dominate every day— that is, people who work with geeks, computer scientists, and mathematicians (which would be me). Why? Because we operate simultaneously in user and evaluator mode, John Dewey, in his “Critique of Abstraction: The Intellectual Life as a Tool,” makes the distinction between primary and secondary experience. Primary experience is a subjective relationship to external objects that are sensory—emotive, psychological, physical—but not reflected upon. They are experienced. Most of life is con-

• A social network graph of tweet replies from October 14th to December 11th, 2009. The more lines you have, the more replies you sent to dif-ferent users.

September + October 2010