Brains working towards machine consciousness

In Folksonomological Reification (Parslow, Øster Lundqvist, Porter-Daniels, Hussey & Williams), I described how Activity Theory can be adapted to study social networking services (SNS) or tools.  One may consider a service such as Twitter or Delicious as tools.  I want to challenge that view.

 

A tool is something used to perform a task, or necessary in the practice of a vocation.  There are many online dictionaries, and you are welcome to check their definitions and make sure I am not cheating - if I cite one, the reader is less likely to find a view which challenges mine, which makes for a duller blogosphere, so I leave it to you to look it up!

 

OK, so Twitter is a tool in the sense that you use the underlying service (which is in itself a range of different tools: a database, a web server, networking gubbins, your browser, your screen driver, your operating system etc.) in order to communicate with others.  Unless you use it purely as a broadcast medium, however, you are using something more than that as a tool whenever you tweet.  The same goes for any social networking service - you are not just using the 'system'.

 

So what are you using? I would argue that you are using the information in the system as a tool.  Primarily, if you get useful answers and insights from using SNS, you are manipulating relationships with others to extract information.  The network is the tool, which you use to obtain the results you need.  The specific interface you use, be it Twitter, Delicious, Facebook or any other, is just a window of opportunity through which you have access to the real thing.

 

A SNS is of little use to anyone before it is populated.  In its early days, it is reasonable to see the SNS itself as a tool for helping build the network.  But once the information is there - the links between people, as well as the actual 'content' which is submitted to the system - the SNS becomes a mere conduit, as much of a tool as the air is between speaker and listener.  The network itself becomes the tool.

 

As you (and others) contribute to the SNS, relationships form and change.  The network molds itself to the cognitive hands of the operators - the users of the service. 

 

Of course, this is no ordinary tool - it cannot be found in any one place, and can have many people seeing different views of it, and using it in different ways, at any one time.  It is, by its very nature, a highly distributed system, made up of many fallible components - people.  But despite the fallibility, the system as a whole is very robust.  It can lose individuals, or even sub-netwoks, and still continue to provide practical use to the remaining participants.

 

Individuals within the network can operate in different roles.  Some people tend to be Explorers, finding information and sharing it with others.  Some are Commentators, and others are Editors.  Some act as Curators, some as Ambassadors (negotiating between different sub-networks).  In Twitter, for example, there are people who post many links to material they have found, and some who discuss ideas with their network, whilst others re-work the material to produce outputs.  Each of these gains some form of benefit from using the network - whether it is recognition and validation, help crystalizing their thoughts, or source material for their new blog post.