This article was taken from the March 2011 issue of Wired magazine. Be the first to read Wired's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by subscribing online.
The author of Where Good Ideas Come From looks forward to personal recommendations replacing spam -- but urges us to disconnect occasionally.
Mark Zuckerberg pronounced at last autumn's Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco that, "Over the next five years, most industries are going to get rethought to be social, and designed around people." It was the kind of remark that no doubt drives Zuckerberg's critics crazy. Aaron Sorkin probably hears those words as an emblem of the young billionaire's ruthless ambition; Facebook über Alles.
Novelist Zadie Smith -- who penned a long meditation on Facebook's insidious effects -- might hear them as the final nail in the coffin of the private life, the end of mystery and interiority.
Everything will be social, and the sequestered self will just wither away.
I'm not entirely sure what I think of Mark Zuckerberg's remark, but I am confident about one thing: it was a very interesting thing for him to say. You don't have to be a Darwinian determinist to accept the premise that we are deeply social animals with extensive neural circuitry that is optimised to make sense of the world through interactions with our close family and friends. As Zuckerberg says, "Humans are hardwired to be interested in people."
For all but the last few centuries of human history, mass society was nonexistent, and purely individual experiences were infrequent. Most of daily life happened on the scale of the mid-sized group -- the tribe or village or town -- in networks of affiliation that seem to have averaged around 150 individuals, according to the research of Robin Dunbar. From that anthropological perspective, the social interactions that Facebook enables are then a return to the norm, after a few centuries of anomalous social organisation. When I left college in 1990 -- before email had been widely adopted and the web was just a hobby of Tim Berners-Lee -- I probably had 100 friends, family and acquaintances, but it was very hard to do things with all of them. Letting them all know big news, sharing photos, swapping advice on new books to read -- all these transactions were almost impossible to pull off. The network was too dispersed and there was no town square to bring us all together.
But when our relationships are transcribed into software, those kinds of semipublic interactions become trivial. What Zuckerberg's remark suggests to me is that successful businesses are going to have to return to the knowable communities of social life, and move away from the extremes of the exclusively private and the exclusively public. When we interact with businesses -- banks, supermarkets, doctors, advertisers -- we do so as individuals or masses, not in small groups. Informal word of mouth has always played a role in some commercial transactions -- friends hyping a new album or book -- but businesses have rarely been able to engage directly with those informal networks. They broadcast their marketing messages to mass audiences, and sell the products to individuals.
When Zuckerberg says that most industries are going to be "rethought to be social", he means that vacant middle zone between the individual and the mass is going to be colonised by most businesses, because that's the way we instinctively want to organise the world. In other words, the modern world of commerce has existed in an artificial state that neglected the channels through which we naturally want our information to flow. And so they built their businesses not around the "social graphs" that connect us to our friends and relatives online, but according to broad demographic clusters and postcodes. It didn't seem artificial to us because we couldn't imagine an alternative. But now we can.
Facebook's staggering rise suggests that there is an almost insatiable appetite out there for services built around social connection. Zuckerberg points to Facebook's extensive history of off-the-charts engagement metrics: even now, with 500 million users, more than half of those people use the service every day. In the Web 2.0 interview, Zuckerberg used his history with Facebook photos to demonstrate the power of the social graph. When Facebook first added photos, its features paled in comparison to mature photo sites such as Flickr. But what it lacked in tools it made up for in social connection, because it was embedded directly into the Facebook universe. And so, despite the relative paucity of features, Facebook quickly became the largest photo-sharing service on the internet.
If Zuckerberg is right that live connection to the social graph trumps all of the other features, then I suspect his prediction that most businesses will be reoriented around the graph will turn out to be true. (Whether that graph belongs to Facebook or some alternative system is another matter.) But that still leaves open the question of whether we should be happy about it. We are not wedded to the structures of our ancestral environments, after all; ritual murder and infanticide were also common characteristics of pre-modern culture, but we've rightly decided that we're better off without them. The same could well be true of the Dunbar number.
It's entirely possible that we're better off without villages.
On the commercial side, I have a hard time understanding why anyone would object to businesses organising themselves around the social graph. The idea that one's life -- the choices you make as a consumer, voter, donor to charitable causes, or as a reader -- should be increasingly shaped by the filter of our friends and family strikes me as being, on the whole, a positive development.
Better to have those decisions made in a public conversation with friends than to have them dictated to us by the advertising people of Madison Avenue.
I would much prefer to receive marketing messages that have actually learned from the choices that my family and close friends have made, instead of a message that targets me because I am a male in my mid-40s who happens to live in the greater New York City area.
In terms of the impact it has on us as individuals -- Zadie Smith and Andrew Keen are concerned that it undermines the mystery of the private self -- I think the fears may be overstated. The things people talk about on Facebook have been social all along: the information was relayed face-to-face or on the phone. Now the same chat is in a wider network, and it's easier to stumble across those conversations as an outsider, because they have a permanent record online. And when you overhear other people's private chatter, it sounds like a waste of bandwidth.
But is the Facebook generation sharing everything? I doubt it.
The interactions I see suggest that people are keeping most of the intensity of private life offline. They gossip, riff, flirt, give advice, share news on Facebook -- but they don't talk nearly as much about the fault lines in their marriage, or their misgivings about the career they've chosen. There are over-sharers out there, but there were over-sharers in the age of the town square and the telephone, too. I suspect most of us will settle into a situation where we enjoy the new possibilities that open up when you can talk to your extended social network, but still carve out a space for our private life.
I think that if there's a downside to the social graph it may be much simpler than some crisis of the private self. It may well be that our brains want to filter the world through the lens of our extended social networks, and that filter may be a powerful new tool for businesses to interact with customers. But the fact that our brains are "hardwired to be interested in people" has an important corollary: environments that satisfy such interest are insanely addictive. Facebook's growth suggests that it's the greatest time suck that human culture has invented to date. We may be better off as friends and consumers thanks to Facebook's restoration of the social sphere -- but only if we force ourselves to sign out once in a while.
Steven Johnson's book Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation (Allen Lane) is out now.
Next page: Case studies...
CASE STUDY: OUTED BY ADVERTISING
Even Facebook limits information shared with third parties, but that doesn't mean advertisers can't glean personal data. Last year, researchers from Microsoft Research India and the Max Planck Institute in Germany found that advertisers actively target users according to their sexual preferences.
During the study, they created similar male Facebook accounts, with one difference: some said that the user was interested in people of the same sex. If ads on the site really were identically targeted, all the accounts should have received similar ads.
However, the different accounts received different ads. Those of the apparently gay men received adverts for gay bars that were not shown to the others. More strikingly, some ads whose text was sexuality-neutral (such as for a nursing degree) were targeted only at gay men. A user receiving these subtler types of ads might not always realise (as he would with gay bars) that clicking on them would confirm to the advertiser both his IP address and his sexuality. Nor is this targeting rare: half of the 66 adverts shown only to gay men during the study did not say "gay" anywhere on them.
CASE STUDY: PREDICTIVE INSURING
In spring 2010, accounting firm Deloitte sampled 60,000 of Aviva USA's recent applicants for life insurance. It built a predictive model that, instead of relying on an applicant's check-up with a doctor, used medical histories, industry-shared data from past applications, and consumer data -- such as income and favourite TV shows -- from profiling firm Equifax. Deloitte tested half of the sample with traditional underwriting methods, half with the predictive model. According to John Currier, chief actuary for Aviva, "the use of third-party data was persuasive across the board." Tom Cheshire
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
