Man is a social animal.—Baruch Spinoza
Back in 1996, Craig Howe, who was then director of the D'Arcy McNickle Center for American Indian History at Chicago's Newberry Library, wrote that "The Internet is either anti-social or asocial. It promotes the isolation of the individual." In his 1995 book Silicon Snake Oil, the astronomer Clifford Stoll described the Internet as "a guide of how to be anti-social in that it undercuts our schools, our neighborhoods, and our communities."
Sentiments such as these were easy to find back in the mid-90s when the Internet's accession to global domination was just revving up. Conservatives, curmudgeons, and schoolteachers with too-tight hair buns all decried what they saw as the Internet's corrosion of the social. Predictions of societal breakdown and individual meltdown were commonplace, but a funny thing happened on the road to ruination: nothing much. Society as a whole remains intact and, a few cases of Internet addiction notwithstanding, online users don't seem any worse off.
In fact, if the words and phrases dominating Internet discourse lately are any indication, then we're in the midst of the opposite phenomenon: the return and revitalization of the social. It all began a few years ago with the rise of social networking: using a Web site to connect with people who share similar personal or professional interests, particularly where the people in the site's database are connected to each other as friends, friends of friends, and so on. The impetus behind such sites is the famous (and grossly simplified) meme that everyone on the planet is only six degrees of separation away from everyone else. (The social networking patent used by sites such as LinkedIn.com and Tribe.com is often called the six degrees patent.)
The non-digital form of social networking — using a network of people to exchange information, enhance job prospects, or otherwise further one's career — began in the mid-70s (the earliest use of the phrase social network dates to 1976). It reached full flower during the go-go 80s, those heady quid-pro-quo, win-friends-and-influence-cocktail-party-people days. By the mid-90s, however, this form of networking faded from view, encrusted as it was in a thick layer of irony and comedians' jokes. That's not to say that the idea and practice of networking no longer existed; "It's not what you know, it's who you know" remained the received (if rather clichéd) wisdom. Nowadays, however, with millions of people registered on sites such as Friendster.com and LinkedIn, it's not what you know, it's who you can find online.
The last year or two has also seen the advent of MoSoSo — mobile social software — which is software that enables you to use your mobile phone to find and interact with people near you. People often use MoSoSo for approximeeting, getting together with one or more people by first arranging an approximate time or place and then firming up the details later on, usually via cell phone. Or they might engage in social swarming, the rapid gathering of friends, family, or colleagues using technologies such as cell phones, pagers, and instant messaging.
Another aspect of this social renaissance is one that I've mentioned in previous columns: the rise of sites that rely on user feedback and, increasingly, user generated content (UGC). The generic term for such sites is social media (although you also see we media or WeMedia). In all cases, what distinguishes such sites is the prevalence of social information. Whether it's links analyzed by Google, book reviews on Amazon, diggs on the social news site Digg.com, edits and entries on Wikipedia, the thriving virtual economy on Second Life, code added to an open-source software project, comments on blogs, or mashups that create social mapping services for locating rental apartments or whatever, the most vital and interesting sites on the Web these days are those that include a social component.
That's not to say that the emerging social Web is a more perfect virtual union. For example, you can now sense a kind of triumphalism that insists that social networks are the only way to go and that collectivist solutions will be the savior of mankind. The computer scientist Jaron Lanier calls this digital Maoism, and insists that individuals can still make a difference. Another problem is what sociologists call homophily, or a preference for people with the same tastes and attitudes. This leads to homogeneous networks where everyone has the same interests and to cyberbalkanization, the division of the Internet into narrowly focused groups of like-minded individuals. Finally, there's the unsurprising problem of social freeloaders, people who use social media, but don't contribute.
These are no doubt just the inevitable growing pains associated with the rapid rise of a new medium. One thing's for sure, though: no one will ever again be able to accuse the Internet of being anti-social.
This post appeared originally as my Technically Speaking column in the April 2007 issue of IEEE Spectrum.