Excerpts:
...communication is the foundation of society, business and government. When you scale up communications, you change the world.
...a key point about the social nervous system: It coordinates (and sometimes directs) physical activity in the world.
It is no coincidence that "transparency" is a catch phrase in government and business these days. It is a natural byproduct of this emerging social nervous system. The social nervous system engenders a healthier balance of power in society and helps to connect our individual actions into a larger context in a clear way.
The social nervous system makes us aware of a broader context of relationship with humanity. My immediate relationships--with my family, my city and state--begin to span the globe.
The Rise Of The Social Nervous System
Joshua-Michele Ross, 03.09.09, 01:40 PM EDTThe Internet now connects humanity into a hive mind. Is that a good thing?
SEBASTOPOL, Calif.--No corner of modern American life is untouched by technology. And no technology is more transformative than the Internet. The simple reason for this is that the Internet is, at bottom, a communications network, and communication is the foundation of society, business and government. When you scale up communications, you change the world.
There are now at least 1.6 billions of us connected via computer and 3 billion mobile devices that touch the Internet. The rise of "social" technologies--such as wikis, blogs, Twitter, SMS and social networks--means that the barriers to participation across the planet (in terms of the cost, access and skills required) are rapidly approaching zero.
As ever more people get connected, we see an acceleration in the way the Internet is used to coordinate action and render services from human input. We are witnessing the rise of a social nervous system. Consider these three cases:
Emergency Response
The Mumbai attacks showcased the use of Twitter as a real-time, peer-to-peer information service. Throughout the event, people twittered the movement of the attackers. The police were on the service admonishing people not to disclose their own movements. Though there was criticism of whether or not the details were accurate (the BBC was criticized for integrating Twitter into its reporting), the larger point is that this real-time communication system influenced the physical behavior on the ground in Mumbai. This is a key point about the social nervous system: It coordinates (and sometimes directs) physical activity in the world.
Coordinating Political Action
The Obama campaign's Houdini project on election day used real-time data from polling stations to adjust its "get out the vote" program. As one participant noted, poll observers "took the real-time results of who actually showed up at the polls and fed it back to the campaign so that they could adjust their GOTV calls and canvassing as the day wore on. Every time someone came in to vote, their names were entered into a computer system, and their names disappeared or escaped, Houdini-like, from the call and walk lists."
Global Virus Forecasting
As millions of users search for health information, Google
Watch the news, and you will see daily evidence of how a system that connects billions of people is influencing the physical world--from recent protests in California against Proposition 8 organized by Facebook to the riots in my hometown of Oakland after several witnesses uploaded video taken from their mobile phones of a police shooting. New services such as Qik are now bringing live mobile camera feeds online (think Webcams for mobile phones). That will make what happened in Oakland a small foretaste of what is likely to come. I used Twitter during the Oakland riot to stay updated on local transit outages and plot a new route home from work.
It is easy to confuse this concept with the emerging field of machine learning such as the smart energy grid, traffic control using the sensor Web or the Planetary Skin Initiative recently announced by Nasa and Cisco
The social nervous system makes us aware of a broader context of relationship with humanity. My immediate relationships--with my family, my city and state--begin to span the globe. We can leverage the ubiquity of communications to coordinate real world activity--and just about anyone can do it. Even a kid with a mobile phone can capture a revolution.
Using a social nervous system, we are finding solutions to some big problems such as controlling disease or responding to emergencies. Most important, we are creating a feedback mechanism that exposes the actions of a powerful few to the many--and the trivial day-to-day life of the many to the whole of humanity.
It is no coincidence that "transparency" is a catch phrase in government and business these days. It is a natural byproduct of this emerging social nervous system. The social nervous system engenders a healthier balance of power in society and helps to connect our individual actions into a larger context in a clear way.
Another outcome of the social nervous system is that we see the shift away from privacy as an inalienable right to an individual responsibility. In a social nervous system there will be increasing pressure to be connected 24/7 to the hive mind that is Facebook, Twitter and so on. Those who do not connect, share and collaborate will have a hard time in business and in social life.
Older generations expect that digital natives will one day wish to erase all their indiscreet photos online. But I don't believe this nonstop exposure will go away as the digital natives mature. Our lives are increasingly being logged on the Internet. It is part of the trade. Given the complexity and precarious position of the modern world, getting people to genuinely reach out and touch their neighbors is a good thing but it will come at the price of reshaping our identities as part of a larger, interconnected whole.
As vice president with O'Reilly Radar, Joshua-Michéle Ross runs O'Reilly Media's consulting practice, helping clients apply Web 2.0 principles. He is also working on a video series, "The Future at Work." E-mail him at joshua.ross@oreilly.com.
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