High-Tech Software for Social Purposes
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High-Tech Software for Social Purposes |
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This site is for the development of new software. It complements the main Social Technology site.
Briefly, Social Technology is technology for social uses or technology with a social basis. Facebook is a conspicuous example.
As explained in many pages on the main site, the important thing is to make the right social connections, to the best available people, job, and other aspects of a person's Social Environment. It is the right connections which must be sought, not simply a large number of connections. Indeed, having a large number of connection is actually harmful -- it decreases the signal to noise ratio. Much of current social technology is actually harmful , I believe, rather like surgery in the days before the mechanisms of disease were understood.
As the WWW has become almost a necessity in many people's lives, it has also become part of the problem. As search engines like Google have become extremely popular they have also become part of the problem. They may increase the gross or total amount of communication in a person's life, but often interfere with what can be called the net, meaning profitable, communication, the amount of information that is actually absorbed and used. It was actually easier to reach out and find people to discuss things with before there was more people than content on the net, so it was easier to catch people. Now a vast amount of the valuable information on the web pages are lost in a sea of information which is even beyond Google's ability to index. I use the play on words Net Net-Bandwidth as opposed to Gross Net Bandwidth to describe the continually shrinking signal to noise ratio on the Internet and more importantly on the Social Network. How much useful information flows between people? I argue that it is much much much less than it could or should be. Bandwidth has a great deal to do with interpersonal compatibility, though that is not the only consideration. I believe that most people spend most of their time and effort communicating poorly with incompatible people. I have written a lot about the harm this does to society and the benefits of doing something about it. I feel this should not require such extensive explanation, but even with it people do not seem to get the point.
We need to be able to measure progress towards the goals of increasing net net-bandwidth and increasing the signal to noise ratio. We coud do this if we develop a way of estimating the amount of data passed and absorbed in ongoing conversations which are seen as meaningful by both parties -- meaningful enough to reply to. Most e-mail that is written goes often into the void and is not answered or receives only the most token answers. Most web pages are rarely visited and the visits generate no e-mails, no conversations, nothing to show that the page was ever looked at. Primitive tools like hit counters are not reliable indications, it is the consequences of people reading a page which matters. There is no real technology for measuring all this yet, but clearly most net activity has nothing to do with meaningful information transfer -- social bandwidth, the actual amount of information composed in person by people, then read and absorbed by others. But this could be measured, or approximately measured. That kind of measuring tool would itself be social technology.
The software to be developed here shall include:
social networking capabilites, like Elgg
Content Management System capability
bandwidth measuring capabilities
software development support
interpersonal matching capabilities for networking
career modelling and matching capabilities
About the author: My name is is Doug Wilson, and I used to put up pages under the name of Douglas P. Wilson. Too many people have that version of the name, so now I use my full legal name, which is Douglas Pardoe Wilson. I think that is a unique descriptor. For more information, or to contact me, see below.
I used to have SocialTechnology.Org, but lost it due to negligence. Nobody noticed it or cared enough to write me about it, so I just let it lapse without noticing that it was gone. I am renting webspace by the year now, instead of by the month, so that kind of accident should be more unlikely. Earlier, before the web, I had a mailing list (discussion group), called the Social Technology Mailing List. It is now obsolete, though some version may exist somewhere on the net, probably filled with spam. My last attempt to start a discussion on the topic was with a Social Technology group on Yahoo, but that proved futile. There are an enormous number of groups out there, which makes it difficult to attract people to any existing one. It has been especially difficult with an interdisciplinary subject such as Social Technology. Host sites usually insist on a group being shoved into one category or another. Social Technology belongs neither in the Computer Software, Information, Sociology or other available categories. Let us hope it might become a category itself.
When the old social technology mailing list existed there were no applications of social technology on the net, as far as I know. Now we have FaceBook, MySpace, Twitter and endless dating sites, not to mention all the groups and the big portals like Yahoo and MSN which support them. There has usually been at least one social technology group, somewhere, but they are mostly spamcatchers. Getting a serious discussion of social technology going seems very difficult these days, though there are many reasons for interest to be high, including commercial prospects. I have usually had at least one proposal for a new application of my version of social technology on a web page, somewhere, if only to attract the attention of people who might have no interest in projects without commercial potential.
Type in this address to e-mail me.
I have used a series of e-mail address over the years, each of which eventually became out of date because of a change of Internet services or became almost useless because of spam. Eventually I stuck with a Yahoo address, but my inbox still fills up with spam and their spam filter still removes messages I wanted to see. So I have switched to a new e-mail service. Web spiders should not be able to find it, since it is hidden in a jpeg picture. I have also made it difficult to reach me. The picture is not a clickable link. To send me e-mail you must want to do so badly enough to type this address in. That is a nuisance, for which I do apologize, but I just don't want a lot of mail from people who do not care about what I have to say.
Copyright © 2010, Douglas Pardoe Wilson