Linked – the Sociology of Networks
As Albert-László Barabási in his study about networks pointed out1, scale-free networks are one of the most fascinating things in nature. And since the invention of the ARPANET and all following LANs that created the Internet with its architectural framework usually known as the WWW and with the help of a wisely established DNS to organize machines into domains and map host names onto IPs2, a human built scale-free network of networks is shaping and making our social life.
And since then a lot of companies are in the network business. From the European perspective there is still the dominance of Facebook, defining a major part of the online social media connections that people are daily nurturing with Likes and Timeline updates. Although the universe of social media networks has very different continents and dynamics (see e. g. the panel discussion of this years DLD13 conference on "How Social Media is changing China and Asia" – they all share the same economics of the online market. As more companies are hunting for market share, the pressure on all participants, users and companies, is growing.
Since market share in the online world equals mindshare, this development poses some critical sociological questions, especially in the scope of artificial intelligence and our social competence.David Kirkpatrick in his story about Facebook3 provides a good allegory for this tension between machine intelligence and our social intelligence. He's quoting Peter Thiel, one of Facebook's board members and visionary about the company's future, and although talking about different conceptual foundation between Google and Facebook, I am tempted to read this passage more allegorically than it was probably intended. Here is the quote:
"At its core Google believes that at the end of this globalization process the world will be centered on computers, and computers will be doing everything. That is probably one of the reasons Google has missed the boat on the social networking phenomenon. I don't want to denigrate Google. The Google model is that information, organizing the world's information, is the most important thing.
The Facebook model is radically different. One of the things that is critical about good globalization in my mind is that in some sense humans maintain mastery over technology, rather than the other way around. The value of the company economically, politically, culturally – whatever – stems from the idea that people are the most important thing. Helping the world's people self-organize is the most important thing." (Chap. 17)
These are interesting insights in the epistemological backbones of two big players in the network market. Maybe we are becoming more and more artificially intelligent – and maybe our algorithms create more and more social forces than we ever imagined. We'll see…
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1. See: Linked: New Science of Networks, 2002.
2. See: Computer networks 5ed., Andrew S. Tanenbaum, David J. Wetherall, Prentice Hall, 2011, p. 54-75.
3. David Kirkpatrick, The Facebook effect: the inside story of the company that is connecting the world, Simon and Schuster, 2010, chap. 17.