User:Lidia.Pereira/GRS5/1C

Social Graph

A vast amount of our daily lives is now embedded within computational network logic. The Social Graph is precisely the attempt to map such network in an analytical, all-encompassing way. Initially introduced during the Facebook F8 conference in 2007 within the context of the Facebook Platform, the Social Graph has now expanded to become an attempt at the graphical representation of relationships between everybody and everything on the Internet. In 2010, just three years after its introduction, the Social Graph became the largest social network dataset in the world. The underlying ideas of efficiency and productivity the word "graph" entails, however, echo previous attempts at engineering the social, of which the sociogram might be the closest relative.

Sociogram

It was the late 1930's when psychologist Jacob Levy Moreno accomplished quite the successful intervention at the New York State Training School for Girls Hudson in an approach faithful to the principles of sociometry, a discipline for measuring social relationships which he founded. 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, which consists of a graphical representation of said relationships in terms of nodes and links, where every node represents a person and every link represents a relationship. 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 the students. This proved effective in solving the problem - through the re-engineering of the girls' social relationships, Moreno was able to create a better functioning, more productive network.
If at this phase it is already perfectly clear the formal parallels between the sociogram and social graph, it is necessary that we look further into the concept of social engineering to better navigate the consequences entailed for the mapped network, albeit on different scales.

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.

Social engineering is a discipline in social science respecting the efforts undertaken by governments, media or other private groups to influence popular opinion and attitudes.
In his work "Foundations of Sociometry" (1953), 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 him 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 at 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."(Moreno, J. Levy, "Foundations of Sociometry",p.19). 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. If this was true for the sociogram, it is also discernible within the Social Graph's long-standing goal of mapping the Internet.
In the ninth chapter ("Aestheticism, Perfectionism, Utopianism") of "Open Society and its Enemies", 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" (Popper, Karl, "Open Society and its Enemies", p.162) 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 connections between social engineering and Taylorism, also known as the scientific organization of labor, whose purpose is one of improving economic efficiency with 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 the 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.

Societies of Networked Control

If we are to agree with Manuel Castells, the birthplace of a new technological paradigm around information and communication technologies was greatly influential in its development, for it reflects the culture of freedom and entrepeneurship which characterized American campus culture of the 60's (Castells, Manuel, "The Rise of the Network Society", p.6). As the stronghold for individual freedom, "Atlas Shrugged" was especially influential amongst Silicon Valley entrepeneurs, where reading groups were formed to spread Ayn Rand's ideas. They saw themselves as Randian heros, that is, rational individuals who trace their own destiny. According to Adam Curtis ("Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace - Love and Power"), this project also intended to set the computer as a means to turn everyone into their own hero, thus encouraging the ideal that no central government was needed - order in society would be achieved through networking.
This shift in governance towards decentralization and modularity is described by Gilles Deleuze in "Postcript on the Societies of Control" as a system in constant change, whose language is quantitative. Its defining technology is the computer, and its management style is the protocol (Galloway, Alexander, "Protocol: How Control Exists After Decentralization", p.3). Within this context, Galloway defines the protocol, a standard for technological implementation, as that which allows control to exist after decentralization. It exists within the distributed network, of which the Internet is the most prominent example, which Galloway considers to be the diagram representing the society of control.
Deleuze's account of the society of control exists within an evolution of capitalism, no longer a capitalism "for production but for the product" (p.6). According to Castells's "The Rise of the Network Society", the information technology revolution was fundamental in the restructuring of the capitalist system that took place from the 1980's onwards, revolution which was, in turn, shaped by but not reducible to the logic and interests of capitalism. However, the close relationship between the restructuring of capitalism and the rise of informationalism does not automatically mean that both processes are indistinct from each other. In order to better understand what this assumption entails, it is necessary to distinguish between modes of production and modes of development. As defined by Castells, modes of production are rules determined by social structures regarding the distribution and uses of the surplus, whilst modes of development are the tecnhological conditions which define how labor shapes matter, thus determining the quality of the surplus. That which defines the mode of development is the primary source of productivity in the process of production. Being capitalism the mode of production, informationalism is the current mode of development associated with the new social structure. Its main source of productivity is the action of knowledge upon itself.
A relevant example of "protocolized control" (Galloway, Alexander, "Protocol: How Control Exists After Decentralization", p.8) would be the Open Graph protocol, which facilitates the integration of other pages within the Social Graph. It allows access not only to people and their interpersonal relationships, but also liked pages, events, photos and the links between them. This expansion of the sociogram to nonpersonal nodes opens up the question about the human subject - if social engineering explains the management of social relationships, how does one explain the management of the subject's notion of self?

Soul Engineering

"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"

In "Governing the Soul: the Shaping of the Private Self", one of the general problems that Rose proposes to address concerns the social shaping of the human subject. Social thinkers such as Karl Marx and Adam Smith reflected on the relationship between social context and its inhabitant subject; sociology and psychology were not separated entitities. Where these thinkers asked how human subjectivities were socially determined by the surrounding apparatus, Rose asks: "how have persons been shaped by prevailing ways of thinking about human beings and acting upon them?". With the "birth of a new area of expertise" in the area of the psy sciences, it has become evident the tendency towards the engineering of the soul - never before was human subjectivity so carefully managed, so instrumental to the general economical efficiency of society.
The choice of the word "graph" in Social Graph is everything but innocent, as it entails ideological assumptions of rational mathematical analysis - thus, representing one step further towards positivist ideals of fixed, simplified, predictable and rigid social structures. The Social Graph would be better described as an hybrid between a relational database and a sociogram. It is here interesting to understand the reason that witnessed the birth of the relational database, as introduced by Edgar F. Codd in 1970, within the realm of computation: intended to substitute the hierarchical database, the relational database 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.
If this is a rather contemporary tendency, these same ideas of studying the subjective preferences and traces of an individual appear in Moreno's experiment at the New York State Training School for Girls Hudson. It was by studying the girl's intersubjectivity that Moreno was able to devise the sociogram, the model through which he would re-engineer the school dormitory arrangements.
Is it possible that the Social Graph, then, is serving also the process of taking the governance of our soul a step further, to use Nicolas Rose's words? In the digital space, the management of the multitude of immaterial produsers calls for more efficient methods of classifying, analysing and engineering the psy. In that sense, the database, as a record of our digital self, captures our activities, preferences and even relationships, albeit in a highly bidimensional way. By feeding the algorithms that partially control the content of what we see in large social media spaces, it becomes the central model through which our "social" is engineered.

Bibliography:
Morozov, Evgeny. “The Net Delusion: the Dark Side of Internet Freedom”, 2011
Curtis, Adam. “All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace: Love and Power”, 2011
Curtis, Adam. “Pandora's Box: The Engineer's Plot”, 1991
Hui, Yuk and Halpin, Harry. “Collective Individuation: The Future of the Social Web”
Moreno, Jacob L. Moreno. "Foundations of Sociometry: An Introduction in Sociometry", 1941
Rose, Nicolas. "Governing the Soul: The Shaping of the Private Self", 1989