CHAPTER 32
Communications and Relationships
It's reasonably obvious that the state of a society's communications tools will shape the size, nature, and intensity of potential interpersonal relationships within that society, and vice versa. Cave painting, orally transmitted legends, tabloid newspapers, and telephones each support different kinds of social networks. Smartphones and the Internet are no different: The changing state of our tools is altering how we relate, and new ways of relating feed back into the evolution of the tool sets. Those evolving relationships have implications for work: Is your boss your Facebook friend? What do you do when a coworker's profile appears on Match.com? These new relationship patterns are shifting the nature of entrepreneurship: Why build a physical widget when you can write an app? Finally, there are huge commercial questions: Will Apple, Facebook, Google, or some other entity profit from being the same kind of force AT&T was in the heyday of the telephone as the dominant communications platform?
Three layers of the relationship questions merit attention. First, we consider the changing nature of our connections. Second, we examine what kinds of networks emerge from those connections. Finally, we see what creative possibilities emerge from the changes in the ways we relate and communicate with each other.
Connections
People of a certain age will remember what it was like to have two phone numbers, one for the workplace and one for home. If you were near one of them, you could be reached; if not, you might be hard to find. In some ways, the mobile phone simplifies matters: If a voice connection is desired, one number follows you 24 hours a day, across oceans, in some tunnels, in national parks and crowded urban canyons. But what if one doesn't want to be reached for soccer league purposes during preparation for an important meeting? What are the limits of when a coworker can call on the weekend? One number for everything forces such issues out of the infrastructure into the realm of interpersonal rules of engagement.
But for more and more people, a voice-to-voice connection is not necessarily the objective. A picture may be important or merely entertaining but has capabilities of its own. Skype makes video calling cheap and easy; so does Apple's iChat, but each requires a bit of setup and coordination. Text messaging has soared in popularity in the United States in less than a decade. Maybe a Facebook message, or a Google chat, or a Twitter direct message is the right tool for the job.
Given so much multitasking, not even counting “productivity” applications such as Word or Excel, it's hard not to wonder about distractedness. In the early years of the Internet boom, Linda Stone, who at the time was at Microsoft, saw multitasking as “continuous partial attention:” People were sort-of tuned in to multiple windows, maybe earphones, and perhaps a television nearby.1 Now that people can interact with others so quickly and at such scale, at least one blogger has raised the issue of “continuous partial affection,” the notion that we can be sort-of connected to a whole bunch of people but not really attend on an emotional level.2
Multimedia, especially on the move, deserves attention: As we saw in relation to innovation, being able to see techniques, read facial and other physical cues, or situate a person or group in physical context enriches the conversation. Putting a teleconference rig on a simple robot changes the dynamic of a remote meeting: The outsider can inject nuance, follow the conversation into the hallways or to the lunch table, and generally be more present.3 The tagline at YouTube, meanwhile, reads “Broadcast Yourself.” The implications of hundreds of millions of people doing just that have yet to be fully plumbed, but the transition from wireline voice to mobile multimedia is happening extremely fast. Just what will change as a result will be fascinating to see—literally.
Thus, the first problem is determining what kind of interaction I want to initiate. Then I need to think of the recipient's patterns, and then the identity problem enters in: Facebook simplifies this by using a real name, but it's common for a single individual to have multiple phone numbers, aliases, avatars, and other naming conventions. Many of us are in a similar position to the Bell system's “telephone ladies,” the young women who patched callers together at early-twentieth-century switchboards. Particularly at work, when colleagues of different generations are involved, the task of management is complicated by the multiplicity of platforms, each with ill-defined conventions for its use.
In a world of so many connections, everybody is on some information grid, whether in a spy satellite's photo, a digitally facilitated social network, a photograph, or any number of economic transactions. Even Osama bin Laden had (delayed) access to e-mail in his compound, relying on what old-timers refer to as “sneakernet,” the process of hand-carrying first floppy drives and later USB sticks (100 of which were seized in the 2011 commando raid in which bin Laden was killed) from computer to computer.4
Online Dating
Love and work are the cornerstones of our humanness.
—Sigmund Freud
How have the technological changes of the recent past affected these two facets of our existence? In terms of love, we have seen misplaced romantic e-mail damage the careers of public figures, including chief executives and a governor. Finland may show us the wave of the future: In 2006, the prime minister met a woman through an online dating service, then broke up with her via text messaging a few months later, stating economically “Että se” (“that's it”).
Structured dating services such as Match.com or eHarmony have become huge businesses, not counting the vast amount of flirting within the big social networks: Paid online dating sites had become essentially a billion-dollar industry in 2008, according to Forrester Research, putting it ahead of pornography and making the industry slightly more than half as big as digital music and gaming. eHarmony's 2010 ad budget was estimated at $90 million.5 Harris Interactive estimates an average of 542 eHarmony users got married—every day—as of 2009. Match.com, part of InterActiveCorp, was recognized in 2004 as the largest dating site in the world and reported 20 million members worldwide as of 2011.
Countries around the world are getting involved: In Japan, dating sites must register with the police, and more than 1,600 such companies did so in the first month of the requirement. According to New Media Age, UK traffic to online dating sites grew 13% between September 2008 and February 2009: Total visitors to the leading site currently number about 5 million, reaching 13% of the total UK online population. Australia represents a hot new market, with both Match.com and eHarmony advertising aggressively.
Online matchmaking has many variations. One can search for potential spouses, for religiously or culturally similar partners, for friends, for same-sex prospects, for uncommitted physicality, or, at Toronto's Ashley Madison, be guaranteed an extramarital affair—or your money back. The various market segments each have multiple providers, varying by geography, matching method, and revenue model. Based only on online comments from users rather than any personal experience, claims of differentiation between different sites' matching accuracy and inventory may be inflated: Many people use multiple sites and find the same people matching their profile. Furthermore, the basic model misaligns incentives: Sites do not get paid for good matches.6
As we saw in Chapter 19, when the American Press Institute convened a meeting of newspaper executives to discuss the state of their industry, they placed substantial blame on Google for being the “atom bomb” to the news industry even as ESPN.com, Monster, Realtor.com, and dozens of other sites were eroding newspaper readership long before Google News.7 Personal ads are clearly a part of this erosion: Match.com, eHarmony, and the rest did not cannibalize all of that $957 million in U.S. revenue from newspapers, but clearly papers have lost some of their mojo in that department. Some independent newspapers maintain a strong singles presence, as witness the Chicago Reader or The Onion. Mainstream papers, meanwhile, take a variety of approaches. Boston.com (the Globe's online operation) franchises singles from Yahoo! The LA Times points readers to eHarmony. Many papers, including the New York Times and Dallas Morning News, have no personal ads.
Why is the Internet a good singles market? The decoupling of physical location from the search process is a very big deal for market “thickness,” not to mention the overall sense of romance and adventure in the process. If you live in a small town, the online services broaden your mating horizon.
In addition, the use of algorithmic matching tools is enhancing the matching process: eHarmony's “scientific” survey instrument includes 400 questions, far more than most people ever answer on any unsuccessful first date. As we will see, however, the comprehensiveness of the surveys has many implications. At Match.com, the core algorithm trades off 1,500 variables. According to the engineer who manages the search process, it's a lot like Netflix, which uses a similar matching algorithm to suggest movies you might like—“except that the movie doesn't have to like you back.”8
Not surprisingly, the online dating phenomenon has generated sometimes-hilarious commentary in the form of vast numbers of blog entries and a few books. Such titles as MatchDotBomb: A Midlife Journey through Internet Dating, Millions of Women Are Waiting to Meet You: A Memoir, and numerous how-to volumes (including a Dummies guide) testify to the pervasiveness of this cultural phenomenon.
The unintended consequences are fascinating to watch:
- Is it ethical for pay sites to count nonpaying (former) participants in a match panel?
- How sustainable are the various business and operational models? Might one technology, celebrity endorsement, or other factor prove decisive in a particular market?
- What happens to a profile after the user quits the service, either because it worked or because it failed? What rights does the user have to his or her profile on either free or paid services (1) after a month, (2) after a year, or (3) after the company goes bankrupt or gets acquired?
- What are the de facto (when people meet in person) and de jure (in court) standards for truthfulness? eHarmony, for example, insists that applicants be single: Legally separated individuals are excluded and can be banned if they lie to get on. “Truth in advertising” has many nuances in this domain.
- What exactly are people paying for? What are the guarantees, warranties, or lack thereof?
- How can and will various systems be gamed? Some services have been accused, without proof, of employing “ringers” (professional first-daters) to exaggerate the quality of available singles.
- What will the profile be used for? Cross-selling opportunities, for example, are numerous and more than a little spooky, given the extensive questionnaires and behavioral tracking.
- While the nightmare blind date has become a cultural stereotype, the prospect of meeting truly dangerous people online is more than a little scary, as the Boston Craigslist murders suggest. It's also possible for bad first encounters to facilitate stalking. A colleague whose “thanks for coffee” and the implied “have a nice life” after a public, “safe” meeting drove the unsuccessful dating candidate to look her up using available search methods. He later turned up on her doorstep unannounced. Match.com was sued by a woman raped by a convicted sex offender the service set her up with; Match.com announced it will now screen for convictions of this sort.
The role of such civic institutions as churches, service clubs, and bowling leagues in the wake of suburbanization, television, and more women in the workplace has changed slowly but significantly over the past 50 years. The matchmaking process has changed as well, and the state of online dating businesses will bear watching. In addition, the place of Facebook in 20-somethings' lives is undoubtedly generating its own set of changes to courtship.
Networks
Given the characteristics of today's social communications tools, networks of kinship, association, and other types of ties are evolving as well. Before looking more closely at Facebook and Twitter, a fundamental question relates to how big a person's meaningful network actually can be: Just because technology makes “friend” lists of thousands of individuals possible, can a person actually relate to that many contacts in any meaningful way?
Robin Dunbar teaches anthropology at Oxford. He compared brain sizes for various primates with the size of their social circles and hypothesized that, based on brain size, humans should be able to manage social networks of 147.8 people (within a wide error margin).9 What about Facebook lists measured in thousands? Research is ongoing, but based on address books and other measures, most people interact in meaningful, sustained ways with a much smaller number of friends: As of 2009, Facebook's own measures suggested that an “average” man who has about 120 friends replies to wall posts of about 7 people; women responded regularly to about 10 friends' posts. Even people with big (greater than 500) friend counts left comments for 17 people (men) and 26 people (women).10
This conceptualization is useful as far as it goes. But in an age of “six degrees of separation,” measuring the power of a network is not a matter of counting friends, defined in whatever way. Beginning with a seminal paper by Mark Granovetter in 1973,11 networking science has investigated the power of weak ties, not only primary ones: The question is not who do you know but whom can your network reach. Richard Bolles popularized the notion in his job-hunting guide, What Color Is Your Parachute? In the book, Bolles emphasizes that people seldom know the person who will hire them when they begin the job search. Parachute first appeared in 1970 and has since sold more than 10 million copies worldwide.12
Making Social Networks Visible: The Case of 9/11
The next article was published in newsletter form on September 13, 2001, long before the advent of Facebook or Twitter, tools that would have changed the way that fateful day unfolded.
This week's attacks and the subsequent deaths are being painfully felt. Everybody, it seems, knows someone who knows someone who died or was injured. Here in Boston, the odds of being connected are especially high, while our hearts go out to the New Yorkers living with so much uncertainty and dread. At this time of tragedy, the phenomenon known as “six degrees of separation” feels different. Each of us connects to the computer network administrators, or the daughters, or the fire fighters, or the air travelers for some personal reason: I've flown American 11 to LA probably a dozen times, for example, and everyone has some similar story that connects him or her to some facet of the tragedy. In this moment, rather than talk about cell phone antennas or Internet slowdowns or American government digital snooping efforts to gather clues, I wanted to point to some fascinating research that shows some weird and wonderful aspects of networks that underlie this dynamic of personal involvement.
The story begins with a distinguished Hungarian mathematician, Paul Erd
s, who died in 1996 with an academic body of 1500 research papers. For years after, however, unpublished work came out. Erds' eminence, combined with academics' love of the obtuse, spawned an ongoing conversation among math professors about their “Erds number”—how many links connect any given professor with Erds as a co-author. The lower one's number (1 if co-author with Erds, 2 if a co-author with a 1, etc), the presumably higher one's own reputation. As of 2000, the number of people 1 remove from Erds was 507. What's interesting, apart from the traction of the exercise, is Erds' influence: 60 Nobel prize winners have relatively low Erds numbers (Watson's and Crick's are 7 and 8, respectively, despite their field's distance from pure math), while 42 winners of the profession's Fields medal (the highest honor in mathematics) have low Erds numbers—most four or less, with all under 6.
We then move outside mathematics, in 1967, to Stanley Milgram, the same psychologist responsible for the “we do as we're told” experiment in which subjects rather willingly administered fictional (but apparently real) electric shocks to other people under orders of an authority figure. Along a different research direction he created an experiment to see how social networks actually behave. He asked people in Kansas and Nebraska to get letters to people in Boston by sending the letters to people the Kansans and Nebraskans thought might know the recipients personally. The recipients did the same thing, forwarding the notes and notifying Milgram of their participation. The letters took from 2 to 10 hops to arrive, with the average being five. Why Milgram termed the phenomenon six degrees of separation remains a mystery, but the small number of intermediaries poses a riddle.13
If, as sociologists estimate, each American knows about 300 people, and there are about 270 million Americans, simple math suggests that it would take on average about a million handshakes to connect any given person to any other one. The problematic assumption here, however, is that the networks are evenly distributed. If all the people I know only know each other, it's a closed community. At the other extreme, according to Steve Strogatz of Cornell, if I know 100 people, and each of them knows 100 people, I'm two hops from 10,000 people, three from 1 million, and five degrees from the entire planet—but that assumes zero overlap, that each of 100 people has 100 more friends not already in the network.
It is the middle ground between closed order and complete randomness that Strogatz and his graduate student Duncan Watts investigated. This story made headlines in 1997 and 1998 when the six degrees of Kevin Bacon game was resonating with many people's experience with the Internet. Whether in terms of web links or e-mail communities, many people found that they knew someone who knew someone who could answer their question or procure a desired item. (In fact, Lada Adamic at Xerox PARC showed that within a large percentage of the Web, any webpage was an average of four hyperlinks from any other.)
Watts and Strogatz found that only a tiny—1%—increase in randomness had orders of magnitude implications for reducing the number of intermediaries between points A and B. What's interesting is that redoing those few connections doesn't change the clustering within the network—most of your friends still know each other. The other factor here is that the connections are extremely unevenly distributed: everyone knows someone who's always sending along e-mail jokes or industry buzz. His or her e-mail friend network will have far more one-degree connections than average. At the same time, there are info-hounds who are the recipients of many feeds but the spreaders of few. Marketing experts like Seth Godin are looking at the network problem from this perspective.
Back to Watts and Strogatz, this is when the story gets weird: the same network structure, ordered with a tuned amount of randomness, explains not only Kevin Bacon's movie career but the western U.S. electric power grid topology and the neural structure of a worm called a nematode. The implications of this incredible finding are only beginning to be exhausted. Two business school professors found that small world networks, as they're called, explain the ownership structure of over 500 large German companies: any one firm is connected to any other by only four intermediaries. The fact that consciously engineered systems, natural systems, and cumulative patterns of behavior all can be represented by the same graphical model is truly stunning.
So in the midst of our public and private grief, the feeling of connection to the victims relate to a powerful phenomenon—one still mysterious even to experts like Watts and Strogatz, who speak with a certain reverence about it. What tragedies do is activate our sense of our networks: none of us goes around asking our coworkers if they have a friend or relative who works in, say, Miami or Milan unless there's some reason to wonder. One we identify end points—the lists of the dead or the stories of survival—then the network of human connection emerges, and from there we cry, or give thanks, or give blood, or do any of the other myriad of things people have done for millennia to heal each other in times of suffering.14
The question of how big a social network can or should be remains open. Google's Plus service, designed to compete with Facebook, allows multiple types of friend and acquaintance networks called circles. Path, a start-up photo-sharing site, caps one's network at 50 people, presumably to maintain intimacy. Twitter's follower model provides an alternative to Facebook: A person's broadcasting persona can be managed more straightforwardly than in Facebook, where reciprocity is more the norm among individuals. For celebrities, Twitter gives the person an alternative to media spin, and more than once a rumor has been corrected by the subject. At the same time, numerous high-profile athletes have been done in by their own words; ethnic and homophobic slurs are, unfortunately, common.
At the same time that people try to understand the size of digital social networks, the qualitative issues also give pause. The things that people share are not universally appreciated: A recent trend is YouTube videos of one's pregnancy tests, as we saw in Chapter 31. Facebook's ever-shifting definitions of user privacy defaults frustrate many users. Finally, some of the implicit Facebook narratives, especially among women, are problematic: About a third of women surveyed in 2011 complained about people who “bragged about seemingly perfect lives.” Two-thirds of the survey population complained about complainers; “drama queens” and political evangelists also were common targets.15
Creation
There's a debate in some academic circles over what are called “generative” technologies. According to Jonathan Zittrain, a law professor at Harvard, examples include:
Technologies like personal computers that have the capacity to produce unprompted, user-driven change. For example, on a PC any person can write code, run that code on a variety of platforms, and share that code with anyone who might want it. In general, generative technologies are useful for performing tasks, adaptable, easy to master, permission-free, and share-able. In the name of security consumers are increasingly moving away from generative technologies like the PC and towards tethered ones like the iPhone.16
In point of fact, very few people could write code on PCs, Microsoft controlled much of the innovation of the platform, and PCs were not (and still are not) “easy to master.” While the Apple mobile platforms are certainly more locked down than the Apple IIs of the 1980s and Wintel PCs of the 1990s, meanwhile, the trade-off in ease of use means that smartphones are arguably generative in that they create change far beyond the blueprint of the inventors. Text messaging is a great example. Locality-based social networking is another. Mobile cameras and video are nothing if not creative.
At the level of the Internet, mash-ups are easier to create than PCs were to code. The availability of resources for artistic, informative, and social/political expression are vast, and the long tail of user-generated content means that more people than ever before can find an audience. Resources (maps, music, news, calculators, and data), tools, and distribution have all become free. The staggering growth of mobile and then other forms of app stores is also significant: Whereas “any person” could write code for the PC, theoretically, the wealth of creativity unleashed by the economic promise of the iPhone and Android to software developers is not to be dismissed.
At the enterprise level, another facet of creativity bears mentioning. Whereas the buzzphrase of the late 1990s was “knowledge management,” one doesn't hear that much anymore. Rather than building expensive, rigid hierarchical systems for managing knowledge, there's a much greater awareness of the social context in which innovation, or good customer service, or effective marketing can emerge. Thus, enterprise tool makers, including SAP, and vendors, including IBM, are building Facebook-like infrastructure for companies that seek to unleash the brainpower and networks of employees, suppliers, partners, and customers.
Procter & Gamble (P&G) is one case in point: By opening its famously homogeneous corporate culture to external partners in the Connect and Develop program launched in 2001, new product introductions, crosslicensing agreements, and, most crucially, revenues have grown after stagnating in the 1990s.17 The company's Old Spice brand enjoyed record growth in 2010 after an enormously clever social media/broadcast campaign featuring an entertainingly articulate spokesmodel. The degree of trust between ad agency, other partners, and the P&G team was noted at the time as being exceptional, and it is likely not an accident that the changing technology landscape coupled with the conscious shift in attitudes and behaviors across P&G helped to create that positive chemistry.18
Looking Ahead
At the level of individuals, families, tribes, and formal organizations, changes to the connective tissue are reshaping both the interpersonal connections and the nature of the group. Liking someone, or some topic, or some item or product is not the same proposition it was 20 years ago. The artifacts of a personal connection have also changed, with consequences for relationships, for law, and for commerce. The definitional distinctions between relationships, networks, and markets are fuzzy. All told, people's relationships are more complicated, more documented, and richer with possibility than ever before. Those relationships are set in physical contexts that themselves are in transition, and it is to that topic to which we turn next.
Notes
1. http://lindastone.net/qa/continuous-partial-attention/.
2. Gene Smith, “Continuous Partial Attention,” atomiq.org, March 13, 2007, http://atomiq.org/archives/2007/03/continuous_partial_affection.html.
3. www.willowgarage.com/pages/texai/overview.
4. Dean Takahashi, “Bin Laden Relied on Thumb Drive Couriers to Evade Email Detection,” VentureBeat, May 12, 2011, http://venturebeat.com/2011/05/12/bin-laden-relied-on-thumb-driver-couriers-to-evade-email-detection/.
5. Steve Mcclellan, “eHarmony Connects with OMD,” Adweek, January 18, 2011, www.adweek.com/news/advertising-branding/eharmony-connects-omd-126250.
6. Nick Paumgarten, “Looking for Someone,” The New Yorker, July 4, 2011, www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/07/04/110704fa_fact_paumgarten?currentPage=all.
7. American Press Institute, “Paid Content: Newspaper Economic Action Plan” (May 2009), www.niemanlab.org/pdfs/apireportmay09.pdf.
8. Paumgarten, “Looking for Someone.”
9. Matt Ridley, “How Many Friends Can Your Brain Hold?” Wall Street Journal, February 12, 2011, http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704422204576130602460527550.html.
10. “Primates on Facebook,” The Economist, February 26, 2009, www.economist.com/node/13176775.
11. Mark Granovetter, “The Strength of Weak Ties,” American Journal of Sociology 78, no. 6 (May 1973): 1360–1380.
12. Richard N. Bolles, What Color Is Your Parachute: A Practical Manual for JobHunters and Career-Changers (Berkeley: Ten Speed Press, 2011).
13. Stanley Milgram, “The Small World Problem,” Psychology Today (May 1967): 60–67.
14. Not available on line or in print. Later issues are at http://earlyindications.blogspot.com/.
15. “Eversave Survey Reveals Secret Facebook Opinions and Habits of Women,” Business Wire, March 30, 2011, www.businesswire.com/news/home/20110330005284/en/Eversave-Survey-Reveals-Secret-Facebook-0pinions-Habits.
16. Jonathan Zittrain, Glossary of The Future of the Internet and How To Stop It, http://futureoftheinternet.org/glossary.
17. Henning Kagermann, Hubert Oesterle, and John Jordan, IT-Driven Business Models: Global Case Studies In Transformation (New York: Wiley, 2010), pp. 74–77.
18. Marshall Kirkpatrick, “How the Old Spice Videos Are Being Made,” Read Write Web, July 14, 2010, www.readwriteweb.com/archives/how_old_spice_won_the_internet.php.