User:Lidia.Pereira/GRS/SG

Abstract:
Studying the genealogy of the sociogram it is possible to begin to fathom the patterns which pervade contemporary modes of production. From the concepts of cybernetics/governance, abstraction of complex social subjects into sterile graphic representations and an ideological attempt to enforce positivist paradigms in normative structures, the history of the sociogram guides us through the concepts of social engineering, sociometry, relational databases and other tools for governance.

Sociogram

What is it?

The sociogram is a graphical representation of social relantionships in the terms of nodes and links, where every node represents a person and every link represents a relationship.

Merriam-Webster Dictionary:

History

In the late 1930's, Jacob Levy Moreno, psychologist and the founder of sociometry, accomplished quite a successful intervention at the New York State Training School for Girls Hudson, whose drop out rate was way above average. Diagnosing the problem as one embedded in the existing network of social relationships between the girls, he conducted a simple survey to help him "map the network" - thus creating a sociogram. By studying the girls answers (e.g.: "Who do you want to sit next to?") and juxtaposing them to the current dormitory arrangements, he was able to avoid conflicts by re-allocating them. This proved effective in diminishing the runaway rate. By re-engineering their social relationships, Moreno was able to create a better functioning, more productive network.

Social Engineering

"The aim of social engineering was to make society rational and train the state for maximum efficiency in the same way my father trained workers. He believed society could be controlled like a machine. The aim was to install these social engineering machines all over the USSR. These machines would make society function totally rationally. Man would become a rational component of the machine." Alexei Gastev Jr.

The oficial definition of the term social engineering describes it as "a discipline in social science that refers to efforts to influence popular attitudes and social behaviors as a large scale, whether by governments, media, or private groups."
In "Foundations of Sociometry", Jacob Levy Moreno aknowledges the importance of informational technologies over networks by observing the distorting effect of the printed page over human spontaneity. Such observation made Moreno realize the effects of the superimposition of a "mechanical-social network" upon a "psycho-social network" in removing society from human control.
Being human spontaneity the core of social sciences, it is important for the construction and planning of human society, according to Moreno, to have full knowledge of the central infrastructure of human relationships. This is the fundamental aim of any given sociometric experiment. "The social scientist must, of necessity, acquaint himself, in the research phase, with the individuals themselves and the interrelations between them. Analysis and action, social research, and social construction,are interwoven.". This research is all the more accurate if every social atom participates. Participation entails better tracing of patterns, habits and relations, in this way making social engineering all the more fine-tuned towards general productivity.
In "Open Society", Karl Popper distinguishes between Utopian Social Engineering and Piecemeal Social Engineering. Utopian Social Engineering dictates that all rational actions must be taken in light of a ultimate aim. Thus, this aim must be the first thing to be specified and only then can a plan be drawn. Politically speaking, this aim represents the Ideal State. Piecemeal Social Engineering, on the other hand, may or may not have an idea of the Ideal State, but takes such stage as distant. Therefore, it aims to search and fight the immediate problems in society, avoiding unhappiness whenever possible, doing the possible to "improve the lot of men" instead of postponing action until more favourable conditions are reached. In Popper's opinion, this approach is the most methodogically reasonable.
It is interesting to note the utilitarian connection of social engineering to the Taylorist system, also known as the scientific organization of labor, whose purpose is one of improving economic efficiency by the application of positive scientific laws to the analysis and implementation of workflows. Taylorism enjoyed widespread acceptance in the early stages of the Soviet Union, namely by Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky. Alexei Gastev, the founder of the Central Institute of Labour whose work most contributed to the spreading of taylorist ideals, believed that revolution could only be recognized as such if the workers were empowered to control the work processes. He trained workers to behave and think in a rational way, going so far as to build a social engineering machine, whose ways nobody, to this day, understands.
Ayn Rand, another Russian, fled the country in the 1920's to move to California. Her philosophy was that of "objectivism", deriding human altruism and propagating, instead, the "virtues of selfishness". Like Gastev, she was obsessed with the idea of rationality. However, instead of rationality being seen as a means of state control, the only rational option, in the objectivist point of view, was to free human kind of all forms of political control and live life according only to one's own selfish desires. Despite the bad reception of her book "Atlas Shrugged" in the time it was released, for her ideals were perceived to be dangerous, forty years later it was the second most influential book in America. Especially influential amongst Silicon Valley entrepeneurs, reading groups were formed to spread her ideas. They saw themselves as Randian heros, that is, rational individuals who follow their own path despite everything else. According to "Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace - Love and Power", this project intended also to set the computer as a way to turn everyone into their own hero, in that way encouraging the ideal that no central government was needed, because order in society would be achieved through networking. Was this the ultimate goal of Gastev's social engineering machine? (Nikolas Rose and the positive science of subjectivity)

Database Abstraction

"The larger-than-life personalities of fearless dissidents that melted the icy heart of the Stasi officer in The Lives of Others are barely visible to the Internet police, who see the subjects of surveillance reduced to one-dimensional, boring database entries." Evgeny Morozov, "The Net Delusion"

The introduction by Edgar F. Codd, in the realm of computation, of relational databases as a substitute to hierarchical databases, was yet another means towards the goal of increasing productivity. Instead of presenting data in a navigation unfriendly hierarchical way, where one's means of addressing data is by position, relational databases present the data and relationships between them in a table format, where information is accessible by value.
When concerned with logging subjects and their related "values", databases follow the same model as the sociogram of over-simplification and flattening out of otherwise complex relations, thus providing a very high level of abstraction perfectly tailored for effective data mining.

Social Graph

In the year of 2007, during the Facebook F8 conference, the term Social Graph was introduced. The choice of the word "graph" was everything but innocent, as it entails ideological assumptions of rational mathematical analysis - thus representing one step further towards positivist ideals.
In 2010, Facebook's social graph becomes the largest social network dataset in the world. In this sense, it effectively approaches Moreno's ideals of participation as being key in the process of re-engineering the social. Most of this participation, however, is what Mirko Tobias Schäfer would classify as implicit, reliant on design choices to allow for our leisure time to be commodified in big chunks of data extracted from our interactions and habits online. (add still some more)

Bibliography:
Stuff goes in here as well.

Outline:
- Social Engineering as enforcing the positive science model (ideological extension of self-regulatory economy)
- The abstraction of the social graph + Facebook API
- The abstraction of the database and objectification of the designed subject ("The larger-than-life personalities of fearless dissidents that melted the icy heart of the Stasi officer in The Lives of Others are barely visible to the Internet police, who see the subjects of surveillance reduced to one-dimensional, boring database entries." The Net Delusion, Evgeny Morozov)

READ/WATCH/RESEARCH:

"Pandora’s Box: The Engineers Plot", Adam Curtis
"All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace", Adam Curtis
"Provocative Containment and the Drift of Social-Scientific Realism", Signe Vikkelsø
"Foundations of Sociometry: An Introduction in Sociometry", J.L. Moreno
Otto Neurath and the Isotype (Keynesianism, state capitalism, social democracy, welfare state)
"Governing the Soul: the shaping of the private self", Nikolas Rose
Behaviorism