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.)

Interesting talk on the complexities involved in the digitization of memories, by Jose van Dijk at the “What’s Life Got to Do with It” symposium in Lancaster. Picked up a couple of things:

– The desire to record one’s own life connects with the desire to hold back amnesia. The anxiety to forget is intertwined with the anxiety not to be forgotten. For the western audience, managing memories has become a prerequisite for maintaining control of one’s life.

– The digital secularization of funerals: displaying digital flashbacks of the deceased person’s life

– Changes in the gendered practices of remembering: In many families, the man wields the camera and operates the equipment, whereas the woman organizes the shoebox. But digital practices may alter this because the ordering and storing also now take place on machines.

– Googlization: the embedding of personal collections in global networks. In commercial visions like Microsoft’s MyLifeBits priority is often given to the image of a jukebox of personal memory artifacts. My guess is blogs, on the other hand, would emphasize the inherent connectedness of individual memory to a constantly evolving social context.

Capturing technologies shape the very nature of remembering as they become intertwined in our daily routines of our self-creation. It’s nice to see academics are paying attention.

One of the reasons I post quite seldom is that it takes a while to articulate things; thoughts don’t ‘naturally’ come out in the weblog format. Perhaps it has to do with the shifting relational effect that is “me”, the blog author. Sometimes the effect is not singular but dispersed, diffracted, unstable: I contradict myself or worse, simultaneously enact multiple incommensurable bits of narratives that interfere with each other. What comes out simply isn’t a coherent story.

Blogs, like email addresses, assumedly stand for an individual person. Sometimes they stand for a group of people or an organization, like the Aula POV (sort of) stands for Aula. Much of the configuration work that is required to maintain this setup gets erased in the name of coherency: colleagues, friends, partners, and also machines and other nonhumans contribute to these messages and posts, sometimes even act as stunt doubles and ghostwriters. But more often than not these shifting configurations don’t produce anything postable. I’m looking for ways to practice greater sensitivity to the effacing that’s going on. Perhaps then I’d post more often :)

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?

A few weeks ago I went to hear Donna Haraway speak about the yet-unpublished Companion Species Manifesto at Lancaster. Here’s a video clip (not from that lecture) where she talks about the way we as humans construct ourselves in relation to, and along with, non-humans. In her words, “The kind of sociality that joins humans and machines is a sociality that constitutes both (…) Who humans are ontologically is constituted out of that relationality. (…) There is not some pre-existing anthropomorphic point of view from which vision proceeds to the world (…) Interactions between humans and machines have produced both. It is not humans that produce machines in some unilateral way. The arrow does not move one way, even in the areas of direct human invention.”