Social Networking Tools are Representative of Human Evolution
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Related subjects: Hyper-convergence (Web 3.0), I.T., In the Loop, J.E. Robertson, L'accés: Society of Access, Media, Science & Technology, U.S. news Comments Off
An attractive woman, 34-ish, drives a compact station-wagon, late model, over a still-cobblestone side street in the center of Madrid. She advances slowly, toward a red light, and talks on her cell phone. She seems equally concentrated on both activities. Driving an automobile is a potentially dangerous activity, in which one’s own life or the lives of others may be at risk, while a casual conversation is not so much that. Yet she seemed to give equal weight, her body, her manner, seemed to give equal weight to both activities.
Blackberry and Facebook come to mind: email in your pocket and the recorded, manifest social network. Microtechnology and software, combining to give us a boom in communications, are driving us to distraction with the lust to shore up and broaden our social networks. There may be something about this behavior that is inherently tied to how we, as human beings, socialize, and survive.
We are a social, talkative species. We rely on invisible social networks to shape our built environment, to feed us, to give us meaning. Most of us do not take part in the designing or building of roads, bridges, railways, skyscrapers, megafarms, or vehicles of any kind. And most of the people who do possess only a portion of the total knowledge required to successfully achieve such constructions. Most of us do not know how food or energy gets to the places where we consume it, and few of those who play a role know much more than those who don’t about the rest of the process. No individual can make a modern city bus, withut help of some kind, much less an airplane or an ocean-liner.
We expect the built environment to be what it is, at least in the way it appeared when we first learned of it, and we are indignant if it falls into decay. Population is booming and it is all the rage to recite the unproven adage, “Life is all about networking”, or its less helpful cousin, “It’s who ya know”.
So maybe it’s no wonder that the need to be “connected” is also going through a groundswell. We are connective; it’s a fundamental part of normal human functioning to form social bonds beyond the immediate nucleus of our world. We cooperate in systems of language, currency, study or government, in the learning and repetition of cultural constants and assumptions. We need to form a connective tissue of knowledge and expression, and we need to feel that across a broader fabric there are reliable nodes of interest and personal knowledge, were we can be heard, expected, wanted and understood.
And so, the new media incite us to the opportunity (read: temptation, or compulsion) to test, affirm and expand these social fabrics, which however dispersed they may be, give us our “sense of identity”, a kind of proof of constancy, or our identity as such, insofar as such a thing is possible.
An article in the New Scientist magazine, from 24 March 2007, entitled “Future recall: your mind can slip through time”, explored the labors and meaning of what we call ‘memory’. A series of studies had found that the human brain actually seems to have a default setting whose principle preoccupation is time travel, or rather the projection of experience across one’s awareness of time and the stuff of the world. Remembering, and also envisioning the future.
The apparent novelty in this approach to exploring how the mind works is the focus on re-running and re-casting, on a nearly constant basis, the contents of memory, experience and dreaming, in order to form a more or less reliable projection of what to expect in times approaching, how much joy or sorrow, how much danger, boredom or adventure. Dreams are also apparently an integral part of this process, helping to make unexpected connections and to sort through jumbled information abou lived (or desired) experience.
Turning constantly to the newly ubiquitous modes of communication makes sense, evolutionarily, in this light. Our species has evolved an intellectual capacity for surveying and comprehending abstract landscapes, in which we can conceive of, understand and keep track of vast social fabrics, and this is what we aim to do when we seek, at constant intervals, to acquire the latest possible information about the make-up and tenor of our social networks.
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