Will networking make the world safer?

No.

If you want a more detailed answer:

A long time ago when the web was young, we all hoped networking would make a better world. Everyone would know of all the bad things going on and would all group together and stop them. With nowhere to hide, oppressors would stop oppressing. 25 years on…

Since then, we’ve had spectacularly premature  announcements of how the internet and social networking in particular was responsible for bringing imminent peace in the world as the Arab spring emerged, followed not long after with proof of the naivety of such assumptions.

The pretty good global social networking we already have has also failed to eradicate oppression of women in large swathes of the world, hasn’t solved hunger or ensured universal supply of clean fresh water. It has however allowed ISIS to recruit better and spread their propaganda, and may be responsible for much of the political breakdown we are now seeing, with communities at each others’ throats that used to get along in mutual live-and-let-live.

The nets have so far failed to deliver on their promise, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they never will. On the other hand, the evidence so far suggests that many people simply misunderstood the consequences of letting people communicate better. A very large number of people believe you can solve any problem by talking about it. It clearly isn’t actually true.

The assumption that if only you would take the time to get to know other people and understand their point of view, you would get on well and live peacefully and all problems will somehow evaporate if only you talk, is simply wrong. People on both sides must want to solve the problem to make that work. If only one side wants to solve it, talking about it can actually increase conflict.

Talking helps people understand what they have in common, but it also exposes and potentially reinforces those areas where they differ.  I believe that is why we experience such vicious political debate lately. The people on each side, in each tribe if you like, can find one another, communicate, bond, and identify a common enemy. With lots of new-found allies, they feel more confident to attack, more confident of the size of their tribe, and of their moral superiority, assured via frequent reinforcement of their ideas.

Then as in much tribal warfare over millennia, it is no longer enough to find a peace agreement, the other side must now be belittled, demonized, subjugated and destroyed. That is a very real impact of the net, magnifying the tribal conflicts built into human nature. Talking can be good but it can also become counterproductive, revealing weaknesses, magnifying differences, and fostering hatred when there was once indifference.

Given that increasing communication is very two-sided, making it better and better might not help peace and love to prosper. Think about that a bit more. Suppose ISIS, instead of the basic marketing videos they use today, were to use a fully immersive virtual reality vision of the world they want to create, sanitized to show and enhance those areas of their vision that they want recruits to see. Suppose recruits could see how they might flourish and reign supreme over us infidel enemies, eradicating us while choosing which 72 virgins to have. Is that improving communications likely to help eradicate terrorism, or to increase it?

Sure, we can talk better to our enemies to discuss solutions and understand their ways and cultures so we can empathize better. Will that make peace with ISIS? Of course it won’t. Only the looniest and most naive would think otherwise. 

What about less extreme situations? We have everyday tribalism all around all the time but we now also have social reinforcement via social networks. People who once thought they had minority viewpoints so kept relatively quiet can now find others with similar views, then feel more powerful and become more vocal and even aggressive. If you are the only one in a village with an extreme view, you might have previously self censored to avoid being ostracized. If you become part of a worldwide community of millions of like mind, it is more tempting to air those views and become an activist, knowing you have backup.  With the added potential anonymity conferred by the network and no fear of physical attack, some people become more aggressive.

So social networks have increased the potential for tribal aggression as well as making people more aware of the world around them. On balance, it seems that tribal forces increase more than the forces to reduce oppression. Even those who claim to be defending others often do so more aggressively. Gentle persuasion is frequently replaced by inquisitions, witch hunts, fierce and destructive attacks.

If so, social networking is a bad thing overall in terms of peaceful coexistence. Meeting new people and staying in touch with friends and family still remain strongly beneficial to personal emotional well-being and also to cohesion within tribes. It is the combination of the enhanced personal feeling of security and the consequential bravery to engage in tribal conflict that is dangerous.

We see this new conflict in politics, religion, sexual attitudes, gender relations, racial conflicts, cultural conflicts, age, even in adherence to secular religions such as warmism. But especially in politics now; left and right no longer tolerate each other and the level of aggression between them increases continually.

If this increasing aggression and intolerance is really due to better social networking, then it is likely to get even worse as more and more people worldwide come online for longer and learn to use social networking tools more effectively.

As activists see more evidence that networking use produces results and reinforces their tribe and their effectiveness, they will do more of it. More activism will produce more extremism, leading to even more activism and more extremism. This circle of reinforcement might be very hard to escape. We may be doomed to more and more extremism, more aggressive relations between groups with different opinions, a society that is highly intolerant, and potentially unstable.

It is very sad that the optimism of the early net has been replaced by the stark reality of human nature. Tribal warfare goes back millennia, but was kept in check by geographic separation. Now that global migration and advanced social networking are mixing the tribes together, the inevitable conflicts are given a new and better equipped battlefield.

 

 

 

The future of karma

This isn’t about Hinduism or Buddhism, just in case you’re worried. It is just about the cultural principle borrowed from them that your intent and actions now can influence what happens to you in future, or your luck or fate, if you believe in such things. It is borrowed in some computer games, such as Fallout.

We see it every day now on Twitter. A company or individual almost immediately suffers the full social consequences of their words or actions. Many of us are occasionally tempted to shame companies that have wronged us by tweeting our side of the story, or writing a bad review on tripadvisor. One big thing is so missing, but I suspect not for much longer: Who’s keeping score?

Where is the karma being tracked? When you do shame a company or write a bad review, was it an honest write-up of a genuine grievance, or way over the top compared to the magnitude of the offense, or just pure malice? If you could have written a review and didn’t, should your forgiving attitude be rewarded or punished, because now others might suffer similar bad service? I haven’t checked but I expect there are already a few minor apps that do bits of this. But we need the Google and Facebook of Karma.

So, we need another 17 year old in a bedroom to bring out the next blockbuster mash site linking the review sites, the tweets and blogs, doing an overall assessment not just of the companies being commented on, but on those doing the commenting. One that gives people and companies a karma score. As the machine-readable web continues to improve, it will even be possible to get some clues on average rates of poor service and therefore identify those of us who are probably more forgiving, those of us who deserve a little more tolerance when it’s our own mistake. (I am allegedly closer to the grumpy old man end of the scale).

I just did a conference talk on corporate credit assessment and have previously done others on private credit assessment. Financial trustworthiness is important, but when you do business, you also want to know whether it’s a nice company or one that walks all over people. That’s karma.

So, are you someone who presents a sweet and cheerful face, only to say nasty things about someone as soon as their face is turned. Do you always see the good side of everyone, or go to great effort to point out their bad points to everyone on the web? Well, it won’t be all that long before your augmented reality visor shows a karma score floating above people’s heads when you chat to them.

Why can’t we make an open source substitute for Facebook/Google etc?

Google is taking flak because of forcing people to join Google+ just so they can comment on a YouTube video, presumably so they can gather more personal data for their ad targetting. Facebook seems to take flak every week for yet another privacy abuse of its users. Twitter hasn’t been in trouble for ages.

It seems to me that when we can make open source office applications and open source operating systems, that an open source general purpose social networking platform should be perfectly feasible. On it, people would be able to keep in touch, share videos, messages, emails, pictures and text, hang out and chat using text or audio-video, comment generally to the world about anything, and could do so freely without having to give up their anonymity, or have to be bombarded with ads.

There can’t be a fundamental patent problem stopping it, because there are lots of sites that let people share videos and text and other kinds of files. There are so many ways to do it that any particular patent can be circumvented.

If our personal data is so useful, the platform could even provide a way of people collecting it for themselves and then selling it for a discount to any company they want to sell it to, but the initial value would be theirs, not some big company.

I did a quick search, search being something else that could become open source, running on distributed peer to peer networks, our own PCs essentially. Some open source social networking components already exist out there. All we should need is a few bits of sticky tape and glue to put them all together now, surely?

Isn’t it time to tell these big companies where to go and reclaim the net for ourselves?

pinterest.com, male and female websites

Men and women are different. Shock, horror.

Their range of likes and dislikes overlaps to a high degree, but the centre of gravity is markedly different in some areas.

A fairly new social website called pinterest is growing very rapidly

http://pinterest.com/

I looked at it and I can see why. It is a very good site. A very nice idea, very nicely done. It deserves to succeed.  But 97% of the followers are women. It is unusual to see such gender polarisation.

So what would a man do if he has lots of images and visual ideas he wanted to share? Well, he would blog them, or stick them on tumblr. Tumblr looks the same as pinterest but without all the chitchat. Social networking sites, blogs and tumblr represent well how men communicate. Social networking sites, blogs and Pinterest represent best how women do.

Strong overlap, but the extremes are pinterest and tumblr. They look like male and female versions of the same idea. There must be lots of other sites that work very well for men or women for which there are gender opposites.

OK, so it’s Valentine’s day. Here is one missing link:

There should be a website that allows people to have a personal board on which people can post notes of affection and affirmation and encouragement for each other. You could limit it to friends to avoid stalkers and nasty comments, but people could give you nice feedback to make your day better. Strokes I think psychologists call them. You can do that with twitter or facebook or email or blogs of course, but it needs brought out, crystallised, just like pinterest does the picture sharing and comment stuff for women. It will be another women 97% site. The pinterest people should build it.