Reboot has now published the video of my talk on social objects, social peripheral vision, and nodal points. I gave a slightly developed, much condensed version of the same at PICNIC08 last week. Below’s the blurb from the Reboot site. The length of the video is 33 minutes.

Activity streams are turning social services into a flow of updates, filtered through people. Mobility is introducing new types of social objects that change the nature of the update streams both into something more frequent and more ambient, but also more vulnerable to noise. In this world the capability to aggregate updates from across the Web and and filter out noise becomes a key problem. I’ll demonstrate how the concepts of social objects and social peripheral vision can be applied to make sense of this shift in the locus of innovation on the social Web, and share some personal war stories along the way.

Update: the video used to be embedded here, but the embed code is no longer working. click here to see the video on the Reboot 10 web site.

A while ago I wondered how our relationship to social networking services will change when instead of adding new contacts, we begin to feel like we’d be better off cutting the links to the people who we actually don’t know, stopped liking, or no longer want to be associated with for whatever other reason. I was reminded of this on reading that Russel Beattie has now decided to link out of LinkedIn. He explains:

Yes, I thought about just deleting the people I didn’t know, but each deletion of a contact requires an individual request to customer service (it’s not just a check box and submit operation) so I finally just decided to cancel the whole thing. I think in general, people who would want to use this service are pretty contactable without using this system, no? … And if you’re a hard to reach person, you’re most likely not using this sort of thing anyways. Anyone can contact anyone in five hops, so what real use is it?

I want to use Russell’s question about the ‘real use’ of LinkedIn as a window into what I think is a profound confusion about the nature of sociality, which was partly brought about by recent use of the term ‘social network’ by Albert Laszlo-Barabasi and Mark Buchanan in the popular science world, and Clay Shirky and others in the social software world. These authors build on the definition of the social network as ‘a map of the relationships between individuals.’ Basically I’m defending an alternative approach to social networks here, which I call ‘object centered sociality’ following the sociologist Karin Knorr Cetina. I’ll try to articulate the conceptual difference between the two approaches and briefly demonstrate that object-centered sociality helps us to understand better why some social networking services succeed while others don’t.

Russell’s disappointment in LinkedIn implies that the term ‘social networking’ makes little sense if we leave out the objects that mediate the ties between people. Think about the object as the reason why people affiliate with each specific other and not just anyone. For instance, if the object is a job, it will connect me to one set of people whereas a date will link me to a radically different group. This is common sense but unfortunately it’s not included in the image of the network diagram that most people imagine when they hear the term ‘social network.’ The fallacy is to think that social networks are just made up of people. They’re not; social networks consist of people who are connected by a shared object. That’s why many sociologists, especially activity theorists, actor-network theorists and post-ANT people prefer to talk about ‘socio-material networks’, or just ‘activities’ or ‘practices’ (as I do) instead of social networks.

Sometimes the ‘social just means people’ fallacy gets built into technology, like in the case of FOAF, which is unworkable because it provides a format for representing people and links, but no way to represent the objects that connect people together. The social networking services that really work are the ones that are built around objects. And, in my experience, their developers intuitively ‘get’ the object-centered sociality way of thinking about social life. Flickr, for example, has turned photos into objects of sociality. On del.icio.us the objects are the URLs. EVDB, Upcoming.org, and evnt focus on events as objects. LinkedIn, however, is becoming the victim of its own cunning: it started off thinking it could benefit by playing up the ‘social just means people’ misunderstanding. As Russell put it,

That was the “game” right? He who has the most contacts wins. At first you were even listed by the number of contacts you had, remember?

Reid Hoffman’s choice (however unintentional it might have been, I don’t know) to encourage the use of LinkedIn as a game is what activity theorist Frank Blackler would call the introduction a ‘surrogate object.’ The surrogate object is actually not sustained by the economic, technical, and cultural arrangement that the activity relies on to sustain itself. Playing ‘Who has the most connections wins’ might have been fun to some people for a while, but it was not very valuable to the users and developers as a collective in the long run. Now LinkedIn is trying to change the object of sociality that it offers, and persuade people to re-orient their networks around their actual jobs. (Don’t get me wrong—I’m the first to support Reid and his team on their endeavour to make LinkedIn more useful as a medium for job-centered sociality!)

Last but not least, we can use the object-centered sociality theory to identify new objects that are potentially suitable for social networking services. Take the notion of place, for example. Annotating places is a new practice for which there is clearly a need, but for which there is no successful service at the moment because the technology for capturing one’s location is not quite yet cheap enough, reliable enough, and easy enough to use. In other words, to get a ‘Flickr for maps‘ we first need a ‘digital camera for location.’ Approaching sociality as object-centered is to suggest that when it becomes easy to create digital instances of the object, the online services for networking on, through, and around that object will emerge too. Social network theory fails to recognise such real-world dynamics because its notion of sociality is limited to just people.

For a much more elaborate academic argument about object-centered sociality, see the chapter on ‘Objectual Practice’ by Karin Knorr Cetina in The practice turn in contemporary theory, edited by Theodor R. Schatzki, Karin Knorr Cetina, and Eike von Savigny (London 2001: Routledge.)

I’m posting from the O’Reilly Emerging Tech conference in San Diego. My pick from this morning was the phrase ‘drying out’ from a talk by Molly Steenson and Michael Kieslinger from Ivrea: the young Filippino women whose SMS traffic was the focus of the Ivrea study had coined this phrase to refer to lukewarm response to persons the group no longer wanted to hang out with.

Drying out connects to a question I’ve wanted to ask Reid Hoffman, who designed the professional networking service LinkedIn, especially after watching the streaming video of a talk he gave at Stanford. Here’s the leader to my question:

In LinkedIn search results people are ranked according to their number of connections. The impression is: the more connections a person has, the more social capital she possesses. Clearly this motivates some people to go out of their way to climb up the ladder. It is a game of growing one’s list of contacts, a perpetual pile-up race to maintain one’s position in the ranking.

Now, relating LinkedIn’s encouragement of such behavior to sociological theorizing about the dynamics of social capital is the point of my question. When studying immigrant communities, World Bank sociologist Michael Woolcock observed that people didn’t grow their networks in a linear fashion. Instead, after a certain saturation point, to move ahead in their lives and enter new spheres of interaction, people had to break the bonds with their existing networks. This was often a painful experience. In Filippino lingo, people had to dry out their old friends to make new ones. The image is one of cyclical renewal of a limited network of meaningful contacts rather than linear growth of an ever-growing Rolodex of futilities.

So my question is this: Should Woolcock be right, and should the same LinkedIn users who now spend their energy growing their networks one day want to do the opposite, and get rid of their excess contacts, how might they dry out these “friends” gracefully?

Dvora Yanow recently quoted a study from the 1970s according to which only 7% of face-to-face communication is verbal (some claim the percentage is around 10). In online interaction, such as the sending and receiveing of social network-service invitations, the ‘rich’ embodied expressions and gestures have to be inferred from ‘poor’ codified information (e.g. tickboxes and a few lines of text explanation). The forced codification that such invitations require has annoyed even the most prolific of the online textual expressionists.

Social sofware developers appear to be grappling with the broad issue of codifying embodied knowledge into computer-readable ‘information’ on many fronts (annotating photos, simplifying moblogging, FOAF… the list goes on). Much of this very interesting work is characterised by a strong epistemological buy-in to the cybernetic worldview formalized by Shannon and Wiener, according to which the world is made of definite entities and ‘information’ can be abstracted from its material embodiment.

A set of critical analyses of this worldview and its practices also exists. Its range includes interesting work by Brian Bloomfield on the assumptions of inscriptions like requirements analyses, Lucy Suchman on situatedness, Geoff Bowker on the cybernetic concept of information, and Leigh Star on classification, only to name a few. Chuck and Candy Goodwin’s work at UCLA is particularly striking in its visuality. In Chuck’s words, meaning is enacted by way of ‘an ecology of sign systems that includes not only talk, but also a range of different kinds of displays made by the body, and structure in the environment.‘