Blog posts tagged as 'social'

A few years ago I read a book called Bowling Alone by Robert Putnam. It introduced me to the term social capital.

Social capital is an abstract measure that wraps up how many people you know, the information flow in your network, how many people owe you favours, that kind of thing.

High social capital goes hand in hand with being in groups, and with knowing your neighbours. People with high social capital have better jobs, live longer, and are healthier and happier. In areas with high social capital, there’s less litter, and car drivers behave better at road junctions. It’s big things and little things.

It’s a big deal. If you aren’t in any groups, and you joinjust one, your odds of dying next year are cut in half. If you’re a smoker and aren’t in any groups, statistically it’s about the same whether you should join a group or quit smoking. (Source.)

Many aspects of living are correlated with low social capital but a couple stand out. What damages social capital, at least that we know of, at least in the US, is two things: commuting, and watching television. Both stop you spending time with your friends and neighbours.

So as increased commuting times and TV dinners spread across the USA, social capital dropped drastically between 1975 and the end of the century. In that time, the average number of times Americans had friends over for dinner in a year dropped from 15 to half that.

I suspect, if we had ways to see it, we’d realise we just passed through a Great Depression of the social world.

Social software and Web 2.0

Social software was a buzz word a few years ago. It came from a realisation that websites, being online, could include people and groups of people in a way desktop applications couldn’t. Social software meant new design considerations and a renewed acknowledgement that different people use computers differently. Showing off, sharing, politeness and play would have to take their place next to usability.

I wrote a short summary of social software ideas back in 2004.

Web 2.0 is now another hackneyed buzzword, and it’s hard to remember what a shift it was when the modern Web started emerging. To me, Web 2.0 is social software releasing what it could be when social is baked in from the foundations, instead of being added as an extra to an old-school news site or online shopping catalogue.

Why social matters

It now feels natural to incorporate our friends into photo management, encyclopaedias and tracking our finances. I love that Web 2.0 has been so successful it barely needs to be pointed out and the ideas from social software are part of everyday Web design discourse.

But it’s important to remember that for ten years – a decade – the Web was not a naturally social space, where conversations and creativity could flourish side-by-side and hand-in-hand – and for many, now, it’s still not. That we’re prepared to give away our rights and privacy in exchange for leaving comments or joining a chat system in a game tells me that we’re still starved for social connection online.

The fact that our hobbies are social again is great. Flickr builds social capital, Twitter builds social capital. The fact that are hobbies are social again is important.

Social means showing off and sharing, and politeness and play, yes. But social also means healthier, wealthier and happier, and that’s a big, big deal. I believe that’s why social matters.

The bit of social I particularly care about is small groups, and my close friends and family, and I believe we’re still not designing well there. But that’s a story for another day.

One of the trends Jack and I discuss a lot is the internet sensibility hitting the world of plastic products. What happens when stuff is conceived of not as tools, but as participants in our own creative, social, connected lives?

I was talking about this with Nat the other week and spinning up concrete examples. One was what this new wave of product would mean to a fairly traditional technology device, like the printer. So here’s my first off-the-top-of-my-head product idea:

If my desktop printer understood the lessons of social software and Web 2.0, it wouldn’t be attached just to my computer or local network. It’d be accessible by my closest family and friends, too, regardless of where they lived. These people are my primary network, the folks for whom I’d put my neck on the line, and of course I’d let them use my paper and toner, just as I’d happily leave them with my house keys.

But what would this remote printing be used for?

My family would print me photos–currently the 3 of us have a shared folder just for pictures, because it’s easy to use and totally private, but an image landing in a folder doesn’t mirror its social importance to me.

My mum, instead of scanning newspaper clippings and emailing them to me (happily, her scanner has a single button that does that whole job), she would print them straight into my house.

My close friends would send me sketches, or print out long articles that I really must read. Yes, we can do this by email–but everyone in the world can send me articles by email. I have a much closer relationship with these people, so why doesn’t my computer support that?

It’s the desktop printer meets social software meets the fax machine, but in everyday life rather than the office. The printer is no longer a printer, it’s my social letterbox.

Jack drew what it would look like:

The social letterbox printer sits on the wall so that when it’s finished printing, the paper falls to the desk with a satisfying thump. It prints slowly, because it’s often going to be working when I’m not there and there’s no hurry. The paper is probably cheap, perhaps thermal paper.

This is because the new social interactions around the printer now influence its form.

And now we have this letterbox, what else would we see? Perhaps magazines, subscribed to like podcasts, sent as PDFs, that my computer picks up and prints overnight, ready for me to read in the morning–just like iTunes downloading shows for me to listen to on my iPod. I’d love a zine that collated the best of my friend’s essays in their blogs. We’ve got the technology, so why not? We might send sketches – napkin doodles – or hand-written notes more often, knowing they could end up pinned to a wall. For some people, the social letterbox might be the only way they like to receive messages and mails from their family.

All of this points to a very different product from the present-day desktop printer. It could be done today–printer manufactures could bundle social letterbox software with their devices, just as digital camera manufacturers bundle photo management applications. But I think that’d be missing the point: the social interactions change the physical device itself.

As well as having a fast laser printer on the floor, I’d have a smaller, cheaper, slower social letterbox on my desk. I’d buy two printers! And we’ve doubled the size of the printer market, at a stroke.