(Credit:
ABC)
Steve Rubel wonders if "the Interruption Economy sacks prosperity:" "Conventional wisdom says that technology -- and nowadays the Internet -- will always continue to advance and bring with it productivity gains and prosperity. That's certainly been the case for years. However, historically there are pauses. After the benefits of the Industrial Revolution were fully realized it took awhile for the next big era to begin. I wonder if we're about to enter a similar lull now that the Information Age is arguably almost 30 years old." Rubel demands "we need new tools for managing interruptions -- and they may not be technological, but social. Our prosperity may depend on it."
Rubel is not the only one who expresses concern about the World Wide Web hampering productivity. He refers to Mark Cuban, who has made a similar case, and Idris Moote, who points at research showing that "interruptions from e-mail, cell phones, instant messaging, and blogs take up nearly 30% of each day, which -- on an annualized basis -- represents a loss of 28 billion hours for the entire US workforce." Are we on the way to becoming the United States of ADD? Are we a nation of knowledge workers with very little but heavily dispersed knowledge and only a bit of attention capital left? Will there be an information backlash, as a result of a new digital divide "between geeks and those who are blissfully and decidedly low tech" (Rubel)?
There are some serious signs indicating that the new generation of digital citizens, the twenty-somethings who have grown up with the Internet and are accustomed to ubiquitous information, may already be one step ahead. Gone are the days of 'net pour le net.' Although the number of new blogs (more than 120,000 new weblogs are created each day) is staggering (as is the number of deserted blogs), blogging has not become a social norm -- it remains the passion (or addiction) of a few. Furthermore, the average time users spend on social networking sites is on the decline, and the once explosive growth of social networks has stagnated. In fact, a certain Facebook fatigue has set in, and users (including, reportedly, Bill Gates) are leaving the site, deactivating their accounts (if they can). In its heyday, social networking was an activity, now it may finally be turning into what at least Facebook, according to its mission statement, has always claimed to be: a utility. (Of course, the ironic truth is that Facebook would never have experienced such explosive growth if its claim had been true).
The new digerati have brokered a new online/offline balance as they find their "first life" in the real world unexpectedly attractive: face time trumps Facebook. They do not respond to emails on the weekend, as they are hiking, traveling, or engaging in some world changing social endeavor -- from running an AIDS marathon to volunteering for the Obama campaign to founding their own non-profit. They share the sensation that one's fortune is not made in front of a screen and that "quality of life" is the prerequisite of a good life. The new digerati want to be connected but only for a reason. They build their own social networks and take advantage of the communication tools at hand -- but they have matured their use of them. They scoff at those who spend their time chained to the PC, while they themselves enjoy utmost mobility. Applications that aim to succeed with the new digerati need to provide utilitarian value for social users on the go: Take, for example GyPSii, a new social networking platform designed specifically for the mobile phone. It connects people, places, content, and events, but it is no longer a destination.
One can interpret this as the second reformation of the Internet -- in the first one, users emancipated themselves from a closed set of service and content providers, realizing that they held the power of the web in their own hands. And now, online identities, objects, and connections detach themselves from the grid of the web that constrains their movements. Relationships are disenfranchised from the "container" in which they're held.
Berners-Lee writes: "Biologists are interested in proteins, drugs, genes. Businesspeople are interested in customers, products, sales. We are all interested in friends, family, colleagues, and acquaintances. There is a lot of blogging about the strain, and total frustration that, while you have a set of friends, the Web is providing you with separate documents about your friends. One in facebook, one on linkedin, one in livejournal, one on advogato, and so on. The frustration that, when you join a photo site or a movie site or a travel site, you name it, you have to tell it who your friends are all over again. The separate Web sites, separate documents, are in fact about the same thing -- but the system doesn't know it. (...) There are cries from the heart (e.g The Open Social Web Bill of Rights) for my friendship, that relationship to another person, to transcend documents and sites. (...) It's not the Social Network Sites that are interesting -- it is the Social Network itself. The Social Graph. The way I am connected, not the way my Web pages are connected. We can use the word Graph, now, to distinguish from Web."
And further:
"In the long term vision, thinking in terms of the graph rather than the web is critical to us making best use of the mobile web, the zoo of wildly differing devices which will give us access to the system. Then, when I book a flight it is the flight that interests me. Not the flight page on the travel site, or the flight page on the airline site, but the URI (issued by the airlines) of the flight itself. That's what I will bookmark. And whichever device I use to look up the bookmark, phone or office wall, it will access a situation-appropriate view of an integration of everything I know about that flight from different sources. The task of booking and taking the flight will involve many interactions. And all throughout them, that task and the flight will be primary things in my awareness, the websites involved will be secondary things, and the network and the devices tertiary."
Not everyone is happy about the term "graph." The most fervent rebuke stems from Dave Winer: "Before we talked about social graphs we called them social networks, and you know what -- they're exactly the same thing, and social network is a much less confusing term, so why don't we just stick with it? (Answer: we should, imho.) So if you don't want to sound like an idiot, call a social graph a social network and stand up for your right to understand technology, and make the techies actually do some useful stuff instead of making simple stuff sound complicated." Robert Scoble, on the other hand, points out that your social network is who you know, while your social graph is who you're connected to based on interests, location, work, etc.: "The Social Graph is NOT my social network," Scoble writes, "My Social Network is my friends list. But the Social Graph shows a LOT more than that."
Berners-Lee would agree with that. For him, the Giant Global Graph is the natural evolution of networking: from computer (net) to documents (web) to things (and friends). Call it Web 3.0, the Semantic Web, the Open Social Web, the Hyper-Social Network, or the Giant Global Graph -- the idea isn't really new, but it appears as if this paradigm is slowly becoming mainstream thinking. As the Global Graph, or whatever you want to call it, is replacing the traditional World Wide Web, new players will want to influence its composition, as they did with hyperlinks and traffic boosting mechanisms on the "old" web. Will we soon see "graph designers"?
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