Social networks like Facebook are going to change the world drastically. In my opinion they already did now.
Think about they way people stay in touch with each other. Once up on a time we used to have a handful of good friends, like 5 or so plus we knew the people they hung out with. So all together thats about 30 to 40 persons we more or less stayed in touch with. And I think that’s a good manageable number of contacts. When you met them you had something to tell and they were easily able to support you in life because they pretty much knew what was going on in yours.
But then there was the social network.
All of a sudden you had 300+ friends and the cost of telling someone something went almost down to zero. Just hack it in your status and 300+ friends know that you’ll be on holiday the next week. I remember times as a kid when I was not supposed to tell anybody about going on holiday because burglars would come and rob our house. Does anyone really feel the responsibility for what he is writing to them 300?
Distributed system of friends
Lot’s of things have changed since we connected all our friend graphs. Think about organizing a friday night. Back in the old days someone knew a great party or concert, called his closest 5 friends and told them about it. Then they checked up on their best friends and just like this the whole information spread through the graph. But if someone in the – say 3rd level – friends knew that this party definitely would suck he told it back to the friends who told him and they propagated it back to their source until it reached you again. Maybe it never reached you. Thats exactly what IT guys call a distributed system with a multi-phase commit using transactions. The problem here is the coordination and the human willingness and mood. In an IT system such transactions do work – but still they are one of the most complicated things one could imagine when it comes to organizing and structuring IT systems.
But computers don’t get in a bad mood when they are told to cancel the plan for the 30. time. People do. And after maybe the third trial they will start to compromise and simply leave out some friends that don’t fit in the “transaction”.
Multicasting replaced the distributed system
So why do those social networks work so good? We know now that the old way of organizing or just telling something was really hard work. The social networks served us the possibility to set up that graph of contacts once and simply multicast our informations to all nodes. Compared to the distributed system this is way more effective and less expensive for the individual. Instead of starting the whole transaction thing we now simply ask a question or state were we’ll go and all the other 300 can easily decide whether to join or not.
And although this is a huge improvement in how we interact I see some major risks coming up.
Because of the multicast event organizing we do have contact to a lot of different persons. But when we meet them it’s hard to talk about something really new because they already know so much about each other through Facebook. The next time you’ll meet someone chances are high that it won’t be the same persons you’ve met recently so there won’t be topics to catch up on and the relationship is going to be very platonic.
In my opinion all that leads – or can lead – to less give-and-take because you’ll actually always will find someone within those 300 friends that will join you. You just have to ask all of them – which doesn’t cost you anything.
So where does this lead?
Don’t get me wrong I don’t say I like it – actually I love the fact that you can reach a ton of people with no struggle. I just say that this will totally change how the world behaves. Say in the year 2050 you can simply write a message to all of your friends from kindergarten. You think that won’t changes us?
Post a Comment