Social Technology
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Social Technology |
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This is an advocacy site. It exists to push for the social technology which can provide genuine solutions to social problems.
Included on this site are:
and much more. There is a Blog, a Wiki and a Social Network Site. There are discussion groups and online e-book novels on social technology. More than anything, this site is aimed at genuine solutions, and it offers two, so far, both based on computer technology, with some mention of how they could be extended to people who do not have access to computers, such as those in third world countries.
Technology is the collection and study of techniques for doing something, or the actual results of this study, a collection of tools and techniques that can be used for some purpose. Social technology is technology for social purposes and includes everything that we know how to do to make society run, plus what we are developing for the same purpose. It includes personal communications devices such as cellphones, which help to tie together society by facilitating communication, just as the old landline telephone system did, starting a century ago. But social technology also includes all those social procedures which we use to keep society in order, from the mechanisms of parliaments to the educational system. It is a very inclusive subject, including interpersonal communications technology, the political and legal systems and educational technology. But does it work? Is the social technology we have actually good enough to meet our needs?
In many ways the current state of social technology resembles that of medical technology in the days before the mechanisms of disease were understood and sterile operating procedures were invented. It is like the times when doctors knew nothing of vaccines or antibiotics or effective drug therapy, instead using bloodletting, leeches, noxious potions and other supposed remedies. In those days going to a doctor or staying in a hospital could be more fatal than just letting nature take its course.
It will be argued here that current social technology is at least as misguided and dangerous. For example, the social sciences have recognized the importance of small groups of truly compatible friends, but current social technology like Facebook tends to overload people with unwanted communications from people only marginally compatible. Much worse is the lack of technology for providing support and networking in the developing or militaristic countries, where a well-established network of mutually supporting people could end famine, poverty and war.
Just as biochemistry intended originally for medical purposes has been perverted to the manufacture of recreational drugs, current social technology is abused for recreational purposes, neglecting its potential for social change, for the genuine solution to social problems.
Of all the social technologies mentioned, interpersonal communications seems the most advanced, and they are advanced -- the new ones have astonishing capabilities, like a personal computer and a digital camera combined. But social technology is not just the tools, it is their application and effects in society. These tools are of only limited use in solving social problems, and may actually be harmful -- useful and fun, but contributing to problems, rather than helping to solve them. The trade in illegal drugs, for example, can make effective use of cellphones and networking systems. For example, the WorldWideWeb has had an enormous impact on our society, much of it for the good, but it is also spawned a massive Internet pornography industry.
While tools like cellphones and Facebook have gotten very advanced, our parliamentary or legislative systems have barely changed in hundreds of years, and they are so backward and ineffective that politics is given a very bad name. Our legal systems do not work very well, locking up too many people, making them less likely to function in society, not rehabilitating them but make their lives worse and making them greater threats to other people. Educational technology has benefitted considerably from the use of computers in the classroom, a genuinely new and relatively effective social technology. But still many people leave the system young, before highschool graduation, and many go no further than highschool. While there many are unhappy, bored, and learn much less than they could.
Social technology involves providing for informed and effective choices. The most important choices are those which connect people:
Yes, cellphones and social network software can help with all this, but it cannot help very well, indeed they can be harmful. More than anything else, they can be harmful because they encourage and perpetuate existing social connections, relatively poor ones, rather than helping them find new, much better ones.
The major points raised on these pages are:
Life in society does require informed and effective choices. Cellphones don't help much if you don't know who to call. People today can only pick from a small number of choices, the only ones they can find, perhaps one in a hundred, or one in a thousand at best. To find an ideal friend, lover, or job really requires choosing perhaps one from a million choices. There is no way to do that with current social technology, despite what the best dating and job finding sites may claim. They too do more harm than good, because they do not use the necessary mathematical methods -- to be explained later.
Imagine the effect on society if everyone could find truly compatible people to associate with or marry -- people would be much happier and the divorce rate would fall to insignificant levels. Imagine the effect on society if everyone could find an extremely good and truly appropriate job, leading to a successful career doing something satisfying. Society would be changed beyond recognition. Extend this to everyone in the world and the world would be saved from so much of what torments people today. On other pages it is argued that the drug problem, crime and war can be eliminated with the right social technology -- because who needs or wants or would pursue any of these evils if surrounded by compatible friends and doing satisfying work. That is what Social Technology promises.
The pages on this site are about Social Technology as that phrase has been used for three decades by the author of this page. I first made it public on a Social Technology Mailing List, which had several subscribers and hosted many interesting discussions. But that was before the Internet became popular and the Web made it almost universal, drowning those discussions in a vast pool of noise -- misused bandwidth . When first discussed on the mailing list, in the 1990s, there was nothing like Facebook available, but I was already proposing pieces of Social Technology which would make it seem primitive. I am sorry to say that there is still nothing which approaches what I suggested at the time and our available technologies for social purposes seem rather medieval. Social Networking today involves what are basically handtools, but unlike the master craftsmen of the middle ages, nobody seems to do anything beautiful with the available tools.
As explained in many pages on this 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.
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.
Since the web began I have had a social technology page somewhere on it, in one or the other of my registered domains. I have let some of these domains lapse because of lack of interest. It is only recently that people have started to understand the term Social Technology and what that technology can be used for. But it is just not understood. Even the self-proclaimed experts on the subject seem to miss some vital points. As noted above, I have estimated and feel strongly that one needs the best person from a pool of a million candidates to be a best friend or lover, or the best job from a million job opportunites to have a satisfactory working life.
This just not possible to find that with current social technology. Any attempt to do so seems to stand up against an impenetrable barrier , the mass of other individuals who might be the right person, seem to be the right person, or draw one away from the quest for the right person. There are far more potential jobs than ever get advertised, and many worth travelling to or relocating for, but out of so many it is still impossible to find a good one.
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 too, 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.
Where are we with Social Technology? Is this the stone age or the space age?
Not later than neolithic, I am sorry to say. See Status of Social Technology . Like the technology of primitive man it is based largely on mythical beliefs and does more harm than good. Please disagree with me about this. I would be so glad to have someone to argue the point with.
How can we measure progress?
It is all about bandwidth, really, especially the spam-free bandwidth. 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 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 large amount 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.
Briefly, we can measure bandwidth in terms of 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. Hit counters are not reliable indications, it is the consequences of people reading a page which matter. 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.
Note: for an early example of Social Technology, with reference to a book of that name, see the page about the Delphi Method. In one version of that method the mass of individuals is actually a positive valuable thing, however that method uses no interpersonal interactions and therefore does not decrease anyone's signal-noise-ratio. It neglects important mathematical facts and methods, and in its best known form is for experts only, not a way of organizing the general population -- if it did, that contribution might make things much worse rather than better.
The main Social Technology page.
Find Compatibles, the key page, with the real solution to all other problems explained
Technological Fantasies , a page about future technology
Social Tech a page about Social Technology, technology for social purposes. I think I was the first person to use this phrase on the Internet, quite a long time ago.
Roughly corresponding to these web pages are the following blogs:
Social Technology the main blog, hosted on this site, with posts imported from the following blogger.com blogs, which still exist and are useable.
Find Compatibles devoted to matching people with friends, lovers, jobs, places to live and so on, but doing so in ways that will actually work, using good math, good algorithms, good analysis.
Technological Fantasies devoted to future stuff, new ideas, things that might be invented or might happen, such as what is listed above and below.
Sex-Politics-Religion is a blog about these important topics, which I have been told should never be mentioned in polite conversation. Alright that advice does seem a bit dated, but many people are still told not to bring up these subjects around the dinner table.
I believe I was the first person on the Internet to use the phrase Social Technology -- years before the Web existed.
Those were the good old days, when the number of people using the net exceed the amount of content on it, so that it was easy to start a discussion about such an unpopular topic. Now things are different. There are so many web pages that the chances of anyone finding this page are low, even with good search engines like Google. Oh, well.
By Social Technology I mean the technology for organizing and maintaining human society. The example I had most firmly in mind is the subject of Find Compatibles, what I consider to be the key page, the one with the real solution to all other problems explained.
As I explained on my early mailing lists and later webpages, I find that social technology has hardly improved at all over the years. We still use representative democracy, exactly the same as it was used in the 18th century. By contrast, horse and buggy transportation has been replaced by automobiles and airplanes, enormous changes.
In the picture below you will see some 18th century technology, such as the ox-plow in the middle of the picture. How things have changed since then in agricultural technology. But we still use chance encounters, engagements and marriages to organize our home life and the raising of children.
I claim that great advances in social technology are not only possible but inevitable. I have written three novels about this, one preposterously long, 5000 pages, another merely very very long, 1500 pages. The third is short enough at 340 pages to be published some day. Maybe. The topic is still not interesting to most people. I will excerpt small parts of these novels on the web sometime, maybe even post the raw text for the larger two.
This site includes many pages dating from 1997 to 2008 which are quite out of date. They are included here partly to show the development of these ideas and partly to cover things the newer pages do not. There will be broken links where these pages referenced external sites. I've tried to fix up or maintain all internal links, but some will probably have been missed. One may wish to look at an earlier version of this page, rather longer, and at an overview of most parts of what can be called a bigger project.
Type in this address to e-mail me. The image is interesting. See Status of Social Technology
Copyright © 2007, 2008, 2009, Douglas Pardoe Wilson
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.
Social Technology Pages
What's Ahead
Welcome to SocialTechnology.ca!
Books Available
CASA
Data Mining
DotComs
DotOrgs
Daughter or Sister Sites
Doug Wilson's Home Page
Links to Doug Wilson's Personal Pages
Easy Introduction
How It Works
How It Works
Idea List
Information Retrieval
The Perfect Match: 1-in-a-Million, or Better
Change List
Older Index Page
Another Old Index Page
The Project in Summary Form
Progress Report -- (old)
Putting It Up on the Web
How To Help
Relative and Absolute Links
Social Network Optimization (SNO)
Sociological Information
The Social Technology Page
Social Technology Notes and Links
Technical Information
Temporary SocialTechnology.ca Index Page
Urgent Needs