Umair Haque, who has a talent to write provocative-sounding texts, has recently derided social media in a text called «The Social Media Bubble». His hypothesis:

Despite all the excitement surrounding social media, the Internet isn't connecting us as much as we think it is. It's largely home to weak, artificial connections, what I call thin relationships.

These introductory sentences already reveal a fundamental problem with many critiques of the internet or digital technology: unrealistic expectations - and then disappointment when they're not met. How much, exactly, did Haque think the internet would connect us? And what he calls "thin relationships" are, in my view, nothing else than the "weak ties" that play a crucial role in forming social networks.

Haque then goes on to explain that, while relationships and friends have "nominally" multiplied, trust in the world has not been increased greatly. Now, it is difficult to assess if trust has risen (Haque circumvents this difficult problem by just completely ignoring it), but there is also a semantic problem here: We use words like "relationship" and "friend" to describe what are ultimately completely new forms of communication and social interaction. And while semantics are hugely important, I believe it is a mistake to draw the conclusion that "friendship" as a concept is changing altogether because the connections on Facebook are all called "friends", even the ones who don't really fit into that description. I just think people are smarter than that.

Next in Haque's panopticon of misguided cultural pessimism is the disappointment that the internet has not removed gatekeepers, but just installed new ones. I'd argue that things are at least not that clear-cut. Haques problem, again, is that he attributes a normative power to a technology. However, the technology cannot be inherently "good" or "bad". And while it is true that the internet can help authoritarian governments control the people, it can also have opposite effects. As for corporate communication, the desperation with which many companies are trying to engage in "real dialogue" with their stakeholders online is for me at least a sign that some gatekeepers have indeed been removed.

Finally, Haque brings out the elitist argument: "Farmville ain't exactly Casablanca." As if low-quality hadn't existed before the internet. The assertion that Farmville is "socially useless" is downright stupid. True, it doesn't feed the children of the world; but stating that games, online or not, do not have a social function is to ignore popular culture altogether.

Haques demand that the internet foster meaningful relationships is right to the point. But his critique is misguided, partly because he sees "thin" and meaningful relationships as two mutually exclusive, dichotomic possibilities. But the line between them is blurry, and it's absolutely possible that a thin relationship "matures" to become a meaningful one. But the main problem with Haques text is that he - as many critics - seems to think that the internet is downright bad and evil just because it didn't make everything better.

I for my part do truly believe that the internet has had many positive effects, and a few very negative ones. It's up to us to make the best of the technology available to us. So far, the signs I'm seeing are encouraging.

I've had an interesting chat with a good friend of mine who is thinking about changing careers, leaving the security of a job at a big company to - maybe - go freelance or start her own business. There are many reasons for her to take this decision - the long hours and the frustrating hierarchy at the big company - but when we talked, it seemed that the most important reason was just that it was time to change, time to try something new because the current job, although demanding and interesting at the beginning, had started to become dull. It seems to me that this is a quite widespread feeling: More and more people opt for a career and lifestyle where they change directions more often, take more leaps - and more risks.

Shortly after the conversation with my friend, I watched this TED Talk by behavioral economist Daniel Kahneman (embedded below). In it, Kahneman notes that there are two "selves": an experiencing self, and a remembering self. They work very differently: The remembering self, which creates our memory and, in Kahnemans words, tells us stories, places more emphasis on changes than on sheer length of an experience. For example, while the experiencing self would see a significant difference between a one-week vacation and an equally good two-week vacation, the remembering self would rate them almost equally if nothing had changed from the first to the second week.

One could argue thus that people who often want to try "something new" are more driven by their remembering selves than their experiencing selves. I wonder whether that's true, and whether there's actually a bigger shift in this direction.

(Somehow, this also relates to one of the six big themes of 2010 that we identified at Sandbox: Do what you love and get paid for it.)

The term theory tends to evoke for most people the concept of a set of interconnected ideas that are coherent, rigorous, and clear, and from which one may derive explanations of empirical reality. The term theory however also denotes the end of a process of generalization and therefore of closure, even if only provisional. In the construction of adequate or plausible explanations of complex phenomena, proclaiming that one has arrived at a theory often imposes premature closure on scientific activity, and therefore can be counterproductive. The more complex the reality, the more this tends to be true. What I believe it is often better to do in such cases is to explore empirical reality using spectacles that are informed by theoretical hunches but not bound by them.

[...] empires do not in fact appear, rise, reign, decline, and fall according to some recurrent and predictable life cycle. It is historians who retrospectively portray the process of imperial dissolution as slow-acting, with multiple overdetermining causes. Rather, empires behave like all complex adaptive systems. They function in apparent equilibrium for some unknowable period. And then, quite abruptly, they collapse.

The presentation isn't new, but I've been talking about it yesterday with Fabian and just wanted to make sure I'll find it again in the future, so I'm posting it here.