Multi-Level Perspective Mapping
Transition Design Seminar — Spring 2018
Group Members
Yidan Gong, Robert Managad, TC Eley, Christi Danner
Assignment Brief
Using a project canvas with the Multi-Level Perspective (MLP) tool, we will look at the anatomy and dynamics that form the large, historical context for the wicked problem. We will then develop a visual map that situates the wicked problem within a socio-technical (MLP) context. We will start by working with post-its on the MLP project canvas to map answers to questions such as: What are historic and current factors at the landscape and/or regime levels that are creating/exacerbating the problem? What are the factors at the regime level that might be barriers to solutions proposed at the niche level?
Introduction
“We define social network sites as web-based services that allow individuals to (1) construct a public or semi-public profile within a bounded system, (2) articulate a list of other users with whom they share a connection, and (3) view and traverse their list of connections and those made by others within the system. The nature and nomenclature of these connections may vary from site to site.”
With this assignment brief, we faced a similar challenge from the previous assignments; our wicked problem is so expansive and is so rooted in every aspect of society that it can be difficult to frame the problem or focus research.
We observed at the end of assignments 1 & 2 that there is no central problem. In order to set a rough trajectory for the Multi-Level Perspective Map, from the outset of this assignment, we selected what appeared to be the most prominent problem area that arises from social networking sites: the unhealthy relationships among communities, telecommunications systems, corporations, and individual mental health and identity.
The Commercialization of the Internet
The internet began as a military and academic experiment and grew to include other people and their social connections. A major shift was the commercialization of the internet. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and the National Science Foundation, the funders of the internet, had rules so that the internet could only be used for research and educational purposes until 1991, when they decided to privatize the internet because of the demand and the desire to reach a wider audience than academics and researchers.
With the privatization of the internet, businesses looked for ways to make money and in 1994 the first banner ad was implemented in Wired Magazine’s website HotWired. Ads became a way for businesses to keep content free for users, while still making money. These ads created an incentive for new websites to create content that would keep users’ attention and get them to click through their site. At first there was only information-based media, but that began to change when SNS appeared in 1997 with the creation of sixdegrees.com. The social aspect of SNS meant that users had reasons to return to the website, generating more traffic and money for the SNSs.
With the passing of time, the function of SNSs changed. The early SNSs were about establishing relations and finding people who were connected to your friends. This began to change with the surge of new SNSs (e.g. Friendster, LinkedIn, and MySpace) in the early 2000s. These new SNS platforms created spaces for large-scale social networking. The relationships changed from close personal bonds and maintaining connections through messaging to public forums where individuals posted about themselves and connected with a larger network. These larger networks meant more people were connected to the sites, which gave the SNS companies more money. As certain SNSs gained more popularity (e.g. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Youtube) they invested more money and resources into making their sites keep users’ attention for longer to maximize their profit by employing cognitive psychologists and behavioral economists. Their SNSs became addictive by design and because of the desire to monetize attention to increase ad revenue.
Charting the history of the commercialization of the internet helps us understand the reasoning behind the desire to keep users’ attention, which has led many people to display addictive behaviors when using SNSs. The commercialization of the internet has incentivized companies to exploit human vulnerabilities to capture and maintain their attention for profit. This major theme has influenced the development of the internet and specifically the way the SNSs work. It tells us that SNS companies are not very likely to change their ways, unless pressured from an outside force, the hardware required to access the sites is changed, or the profit-oriented nature of the company through advertising is altered.
The Entrenchment of Physical Lives in Digital Infrastructure
“We’re post-geographical beings, attentional proximity has been decoupled from physical proximity, collapsing geography.”
— Jason Silva
The aforementioned commercialization of the internet grew in tandem with the digitizing of labor services. Music, home security, and health and quality of life have evolved with the development of niche innovations such as wearable technologies (e.g. the Fitbit), smart furniture, and artificial intelligence. To track these metrics, people connect their desktops, laptops, and mobile devices to a connected cloud system via an app — often, this data is live-fed to connected people. The effect of this constant connection is apparent — by giving people a means of instantly tracking personal information about themselves, they are more inclined to continue to use the internet for those particular purposes.
SNS companies have profited from this data through an expansion of their own services. Like the phone through its variety of apps and its access to a web browser make it no longer used for just communication, social networking services and other online-based services are no longer used for just social networking. Google (through its parent company, Alphabet), for example, has developed massively-used services within the navigation, translation, and shopping domains. It’s also expanded into the live-video calling territory through Google Hangouts, which is used for both casual and professional contexts.
Ultimately, this redefines the role of the smartphone and the desktop/laptop computer as a central hub for all connected technologies — the smartphone for its mobile affordances and the desktop for its more elaborate ways of communicating data. Through both channels, information on the physical lives of users are embedded into the digital realm as soon as that information is collected and stored, which can occur in less than a second for those with high mobile data speeds. In other words, a sociotechnical ecology has formed between connected devices, user data metrics, and the commoditization of those metrics — we call this system “Internet for Sustaining Social and Working Livelihoods” on our MLP chart. Understanding the internet as a multi-level, multi-domain digital landscape environment that can contain (seemingly) any number of services and data types owned by corporations leads to the implication that digital social lives are entrenched into our physical beings. This breaches into the landscape phenomenon of digitally-exacerbated mental health issues, which tie directly into the dynamics of SNS usage on digital personalities and social isolation.
The Shift in SNS from Community-Building to Isolation
The qualities of pre-internet technology were sufficient to keep people in touch over long distances, but served only as a supplement to, not a replacement for, face-to-face interactions. Talking by telephone and writing letters were the most popular forms of remote communication, and both held remnants of human tangibility. On the phone, you can hear the voice intonations of the person you’re speaking to. When you receive a letter, you can touch the same paper that the sender touched and see their handwriting or printed typeface. With the advent of the internet, the potential for less tangible forms of remote communication arose. Simultaneously, the new medium quickly began its ascent to become equal to or greater than in-person interaction for many people, industries, and activities.
Unlike the physical world and the general paradigm of human social interactions, which developed over many centuries, the social sphere on the internet developed more rapidly and in a more controlled manner. Due to the commercialization of the internet and the way that advertisers and platforms generate revenue with user data, SNS has always been incentivized to collect as much user data as possible. Prior to SNS, cable companies collected user data in a similar manner; however, this data was much less complex than the data gathered from SNS users because television viewers passively interact with the channel, unlike SNS users who actively can create content about themselves and express more nuanced preferences. The high value placed on user data created from the onset a SNS ecosystem that encouraged its users to engage as much and as often as possible.
As SNS and the internet rose in popularity, becoming a daily and even essential activity for many people in the world, attitudes around physical technology also shifted. Before cell phones, households generally shared one phone line. Similarly, before wi-fi became widespread, families had to share one internet connection. Generally, a family would own one computer that connected to the internet via a dial-up connection. After smart phones became popular in the late 2010s, the paradigm of device and internet sharing shifted to a more individualistic view of technology. Not only did people begin to carry internet capabilities in their pockets wherever they went, but their devices became personal accessories. The intimacy of a cell phone today meets or even surpasses the intimacy of a diary.
The development of SNS and technology since the 1990s has juxtaposed these dynamics: a new social sphere created and powered on user data; a new social sphere that came into existence rapidly and with little intentional or conscientious design; a new social sphere with little tangibility; a new prevalent attitude that this social sphere shall be constantly accessible; and a prevalent attitude that one’s cell phone is a deeply personal object, almost an extension of one’s body and mind. Today’s internet citizens are both intensely attached to SNS and also deeply detached from the social realm. They create intricate online personas that are constructed to impress others. The engine of SNS compels them to continually check and recheck the sites, adding to their own online persona, and absorbing others’. These things in conjunction have had a profound negative effect on public health, both physical and mental. While communities were once bound by in-person communication and events and tangible forms of remote communication, we are now living in a profoundly isolated age. Although globalization has made every corner of the earth accessible, the individualistic nature of our internet use is isolating us like never before.
More On: Sociotechnic Regime Systems
As the internet developed we identified four distinct phases on the regime level that relate to Social Networking Sites:
1. The internet for data storage and knowledge exchange
2. The internet for establishing relations and discovery
3. The internet for social networking and maintaining relationships
4. The internet for sustaining social and working livelihoods.
Internet for data storage and knowledge exchange
To fully understand the development of SNS, we need to trace the history of the internet. The internet began as a collaboration between the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and academic research institutions. In 1969, researchers at UCLA sent the first communication via connected computers to researchers at Stanford University. Other academic institutions began using the internet to share research findings and communicate via electronic mail. In 1990, Tim Berners-Lee invented HTML and a text browser, in addition to hypertext graphical user interface browsers, thereby starting the World Wide Web. These inventions allowed people unfamiliar with coding to be able to use the internet.
Internet for establishing relations and discovery
Websites grew as more people began using computers at home. In 1997, sixdegrees.com, the first Social Networking Site (SNS), was created and the history of SNS began. At this time SNS was used for staying in contact with people that don’t live nearby and finding long-lost friends. Users could send messages and post to bulletin boards, as well as see the connections they had to other people on the site (six degrees of separation theory). Other social networking sites were created after sixdegrees.com. These developed during the Dotcom Bubble from 1998 to 2001. As you can see from the diagram below, after the crash, more SNS companies began to pop up and this is when SNS really took off and became a part of the regime.
Internet for social networking and maintaining relationships
SNS initially rose to popularity as a means to reconnect with people from your past and to keep in touch with people who live far away. However, as it became more popular and platforms such as Facebook became more powerful, SNS came to supplement day-to-day interactions with friends, family, and acquaintances. Eventually, SNS became a parallel social sphere that exists only online. Today, SNS exists as a preferred means to maintain relationships with many people in our lives, serving as a main social hub. Many people choose to interact over SNS rather than in-person. The rationale varies. SNS takes less effort than in-person interactions and more notably, many people who have grown up with SNS are not comfortable forming and maintaining relationships in person. For these people, SNS is just as “real” as the “real world.”
Internet for sustaining social and working livelihoods
We are currently in a stage where SNSs still function as a place for people to maintain relationships, connect with new people, and post about themselves and their friends, but one major difference is that the internet and SNSs contribute to sustaining social and working livelihoods. The nature of work is changing and connecting with potential employers becoming more important. 35% of the total US workforce are freelancers in 2017. SNSs connect these workers with employment opportunities and these connections are going to become increasingly important as the workforce continues to move to freelance.
Approaching Interventions
Existing Interventions
The negative effects of SNS and the internet is just gaining awareness in the public eye, but the public still holds these companies in high esteem in polls that have been conducted. There is potential for the current regime to be broken in the near future, which means that niche activities need to be mature enough to fill the void that will be left after the break. Below is a list of some of the current interventions. Each of these are relatively new.
Center for Humane Technology (formerly timewellspent.io)
- A group started by former technology employees and investors who want to stop the negative effects of the technologies that they were formerly a part of.
- Spreading awareness through media
- Increase the research on the negative effects of SNS on people, specifically with a focus on protecting children
- Try to influence the hardware creators to change their interface designs
- Partner with the government to apply political pressure to technology companies
- Inform and engage employees in SNS companies about the negative effects their products are producing.
- Partnered with Center for Humane Technology to focus on the negative effects of technology on children
- Ran The Truth About Tech Conference in 2017
- Created a roadmap for reducing the negative effects of SNS on children
Academic studies of SNS and its effects
- Research started in 2004
- Only recently started focusing on the negative effects
- There will be a future US-government funded research on the negative effects of SNS focused on children.
Governments that are regulating technology companies
- Regulators in Germany recently filed preliminary findings that Facebook is unfairly using its position as the top social network to collect massive amounts of data..
- The US government proposed legislation that would require Facebook, Google and other digital platforms to disclose more information about political advertisements and the buyers behind them.
- European governments leads the way on restricting SNS companies.
News and blogs spread information about the negative effects of SNS and some ways to reduce or eliminate the negative effects
- The public is becoming more informed about the problems inherent in SNSs.
- Employees of and investors in technology companies use news and blogs to speak out against what SNS companies are doing and how they are intentionally manipulating people to increase their profitability.
A variety of apps exist that users can download and install in an attempt to control SNS use
- Examples include Moment, BreakFree, and Flipd, although countless apps have been released for this purpose.
- Some of the apps block your access to SNS after a certain amount of usage per day. Others are less invasive and merely track time spent on SNS apps.
Psychological treatment centers have begun to pay attention
- The Center for Internet Addiction and Recovery offers treatment resources and programs for affected individuals, mainly using cognitive-behavioral therapy methods.
- Dr. Kimberly Young founded the Center for Internet Addiction and Recovery in 1995. She foresaw many of the issues that we are facing today.
- Psychologists compare Internet addiction with eating disorders in the sense that patients are not instructed to cut the internet out of their lives entirely, but rather unlearn toxic behaviors and build a new, healthy relationship with the activity. This approach speaks to the fact that the internet has become an essential resource and one cannot realistically cut it out of their life entirely.
Holes and areas for further research opportunities
- Not much is being done right now to tackle fake news.
- Individualized targeting of voters by political campaigns is leading to a reduction of the public sphere in which civic debate takes place publicly.
- Data privacy
- Decreasing harmful and illegal activity (terrorism, child pornography, etc.) on SNS.
We believe that the existing efforts to combat the negative effects of SNS are, for the most part, all beneficial. The effectiveness of these interventions could be increased if they were given more publicity. The target of many of these interventions is simply awareness and discussion around the issue.
Potential Areas for Intervention
During our last meeting together before Spring Break, we came up with some solutions and decided to use Donella Meadows’ 12 intervention points to help us focus on possible ways of addressing the negative effects of SNS.
Here are the solutions we came up with during our meeting:
- Sharing smartphones and other devices that allow users to access SNS. By sharing the devices people will be on their phones less and view them more as tools rather than needing them for constant access to the internet.
- Reducing the number of friends that a person can have, so that users are more intentional with where they are getting their information and aren’t as overwhelmed by information.
- Making SNS more place based by connecting people with parties, receptions or other activities. These activities could also be the platform for socializing and networking, which are much more place based and contextualized than the current SNS model. And it is important to have series and organized activities to keep this positive connection rolling which gives people positive feedback loops of physical connections and let people rethink about the negative effects of SNS compared to in-person networking.
- We want to improve the awareness of the negative effects of SNS. It is becoming more common to see articles on this topic, but it hasn’t reached public awareness. To be able to change the regime, we need to change the landscape, which will only happen through raising awareness. The possibilities we came up with was an ad campaign using social media and the media in general.
Using Donella Meadows’ 12 intervention points (in increasing order of effectiveness), we ideated different solutions.
12. Constants, parameters, numbers (such as subsidies, taxes, standards).
- Governments set guidelines for how much data SNS companies can collect about users
- SNS companies agree to show fewer ads
- SNS companies hire more people to patrol their sites for inappropriate and illegal activity
- SNS companies are taxed and that money is used for research and/or measures to reduce the negative effects of their services
11. The sizes of buffers and other stabilizing stocks, relative to their flows.
- Reducing the amount of information that users receive. Requiring companies to not have infinite scrolling and instead have the user click a button to go to the next page like Google search results.
10. The structure of material stocks and flows (such as transport networks, population age structures).
- Changing the hardware that people use to access SNS to reduce the addictiveness
- Changing the way SNS companies make money so that advertisements aren’t the main way of making money. Some possibilities are users paying to use the site and fewer ads that are more expensive for advertisers.
9. The lengths of delays, relative to the rate of system change.
- Giving feedback about how much time a user is spending on a site. People may not be realizing how much time they are spending and can’t change their behavior to reduce the amount of time on SNS.
- Bringing awareness to the negative effects of SNS so that people don’t have to wait a long time to experience them themselves. For example, educating children and parents through a campaign by giving specific examples of how SNS addiction can negatively influence children’s life and techniques for reducing the negative effects.
8. The strength of negative feedback loops, relative to the impacts they are trying to correct against.
- A feature on SNSs or the digital hardware they are using, where users set an amount of time that they want to use the site or the hardware they are using to access the site and after that amount of time they are blocked from using the site.
- Informing children in school about the negative effects of SNS and practicing techniques to reduce the problems
- Members of watch groups like Common Sense Media working at big technology companies to keep technology companies from creating products that are too addicting (especially for children)
- Quarterly reviews by the government and/or media groups of SNS companies to make sure the new features of their products aren’t too harmful to users.
7. The gain around driving positive feedback loops.
- The positive feedback loop that creates the negative effects of SNS is the competition for attention between the different SNSs and the drive of each individual SNS company to maximize its profits by keeping users’ attention.
- Regulate the addictiveness of the SNSs. Have tests that measure how addicted people get and if they pass a certain threshold the company has to change their products or suffer a fine.
- Reducing the economic growth of SNS companies, so they aren’t as incentivized to make money, so there will be fewer ads and less manipulation of users’ attention
- Another area of intervention could be the attention that SNS companies capture. The more attention, the more money they can make from one person. This can be decreased by placing user-chosen limits on how much they can use the site. Or before beginning to use the site they decide how long they want to stay on the site. This also reduces the chances that users stay longer on a site than they mean to, which is another form of a positive feedback loop since the longer you stay on a site the more things you can see, which lead you to more places.
6. The structure of information flows (who does and does not have access to information).
- New rules that require SNS sites to show users the data that they are collecting on them and how it is used
- New rules that require SNS companies to track users’ usage of their site and display that information to them as a reminder.
- Government or user pressure to have SNS companies explain how they are making their services so addictive, the number of illegal content posted, and the number of inappropriate content posted. This data can then be compiled in one place so the public can see how all the SNS companies compare to each other and there can be a list of the worst offenders, which would incentivize companies to reduce some of their practices depending upon what information was shown. The companies could also be taxed differently depending upon how they measure up
- All SNS companies need to test their products on their own children before they can release them to the public (many tech CEOs don’t allow their own children to use their products).
5. The rules of the system (such as incentives, punishments, constraints).
- The rules of the system: increase profits, ads create profits, the internet is a commercial space, the internet is no longer neutral
- So what if SNS companies competed to make the most useful tools, as opposed to the most addictive service? The rules change from competing for addiction to competing to render the most useful service.
- What if the goal was to increase the happiness/satisfaction of users (similar to how Bhutan measures Gross National Happiness instead of Gross Domestic Product)? The products would function differently
- Creating an internet that is not reliant on ads, but requiring people to pay when they access different websites. This model would greatly decrease the amount of time people spend on their devices, in addition to the amount of time spent on SNSs.
4. The power to add, change, evolve, or self-organize system structure.
- Innovation groups in SNS companies that are tasked with reimagining the services in a way that does not rely on getting user addicted to their products
- Creating space for employees to rethink the services the company provides and taking it in a new direction
- Giving workers more information about the products they are helping to make and allowing them to choose the direction the company is going
3. The goals of the system.
- Current goals: increase profit, reach as many people as possible, continuously grow, keep users for as long as possible on the site. So if we flip those goals:
- Increase satisfaction and enjoyment of life, expand at a slow rate and maybe decrease our size when necessary, keep users for as long as they want to be on the site and no longer, have SNS be one tool that people can use to enrich their lives
- Having a conference with SNS executives about the current goals of their companies, the negative effects they are having, and ideating possible futures.
2. The mindset or paradigm out of which the system — its goals, structure, rules, delays, parameters — arises.
- User engagement is the source of profit, SNS companies want to maximize profit, even though tech executives won’t give their children access to technology and specifically SNS it’s ok to give it to everyone else.
- One way to change paradigms, which is learned from the philosopher of science, Thomas Kuhn, is to point out the failures in the old paradigm from the standpoint of the new paradigm, which you need to define first. Then you need to find people within the current system who agree with you, and teach them about the new paradigm, while also inserting people with an understanding of the new paradigm in public visibility and power. This is similar to the approach FlipLabs and the Future of Fish take, as well as the recommendation of Gill Seyfang in her plenary address at the 2015 European Society for Ecological Economics Conference. Find people who are doing activities similar to what you want to do and organize them together so that their voices are amplified. To do this we could work with the Center for Humane Technology to help them place people in public visibility and positions of power.
- Create a task force that models the system as it is right now, which is the work we are starting in this class. After creating the models, the group would need to show those models to other people. Then in a larger discussion, new possible models would need to be thought up and implemented. Or even better, have the SNS companies themselves model the behavior.
1. The power to transcend paradigms.
- This is a level of enlightenment that we have yet to experience, so we are currently unable to think in this way.
Working Process
Our approach to creating the Multi-Level Perspective Map was much less regimented than our approach to creating the Wicked Problem Map, perhaps because the guidelines themselves were more abstract. Rather than dividing the terrain of the problem into five distinct sections and drawing connections among those connections, we were faced with the question of how to synthesis our accumulated knowledge and insight into one or a few cohesive narratives.
Perhaps the most distinct feature of this altered approach is the ownership we each claimed over the project. While creating the Wicked Problem Map, we each claimed one or two sections among Social Issues, Environmental Issues, Infrastructure Issues, Political Issues, and Economic Issues. This method allowed us to each follow our own cohesive threads of research while combining our findings and drawing connections among them. We did not divide the workload up quite so much for this assignment, but rather each attempted to wrap our minds around the entire prompt from the start of the process to its completion. One feature of this method was less deliberate meetings, but rather meetings where we would simply exchange ideas and come to agreements about the most important and distinct themes.
After using post-it notes to organize our thoughts on the MLP, we created a tentative initial sketch of our narrative, as you can see below.
After drawing this sketch, we used our research and reviewed each node of the Wicked Problem Map as a way to identify missing pieces. We agreed upon our three main narratives: the commercialization of the internet, the physical embedded in the digital, and the social change of SNS from community building to isolating. Independently, we each drew our own version of the MLP, identifying areas that we each felt were important. We came together for a final meeting in which we compared our diagrams, and came to one final consensus on which features it should display.
Reflection and Insights
“You have to work hard at it, whether that means rigorously analyzing a system or rigorously casting off your own paradigms and throwing yourself into the humility of Not Knowing”
This quote captures what we are doing in this assignment and in this class. We are “rigorously analyzing a system” through our respective projects and through that rigorous analysis, we are throwing ourselves into the humility of not knowing because we are trying to fully grasp the complexity of the problem and the many interrelated parts. As students, this feeling of humility and not knowing as the product of learning is counter to the educational paradigm we are used to. Normally, we expect to complete a project and feel like we are mastering a skill. For this assignment, our group struggled to create a Multi-Level Perspective map because we got lost in trying to understand our problem. When presenting in class, I, TC, felt like we weren’t able to weave together a cohesive narrative because there were so many disparate parts. We learned from that presentation that we should focus on one narrative, but we also knew that by focusing on one narrative we weren’t addressing the whole problem. The deadline required us to construct a partial narrative. But, our main finding from this exercise has been the humility of not knowing. I walked away from the presentation in class feeling like we didn’t know enough to create a narrative and questioning if one narrative was even possible. Of course to sell the idea and get others on board we need an enticing narrative that is memorable, but that is a superficial and possibly dangerous approach from a systems perspective, unless we dug deeper and created the simplistic narrative only for the sake of communication.
Understanding history is important for making future interventions. Without making a Multi-Level Perspective map we wouldn’t have realized that the regime is starting to break and that now is a good time to organize niche activities to be able to add them to the regime when the opportunity presents itself. Before starting this assignment, our possible solutions would have been extremely uninformed and naive. Now that we have mapped out one interpretation of a Multi-Level Perspective map, we humbly acknowledge the complexity of the problem, and by using Donella Meadows’ 12 leverage points as a reference we have come up with some tentative places where we may be able to intervene and have a positive effect. Using Donella Meadows’ checklist of leverage points was very helpful in ideating possible solutions. Before thinking of using the 12 leverage points, we had only come up with a few interventions and had trouble thinking deeply about such a complex problem. We recommend creating a checklist of the 12 intervention points with examples from Donella’s text and adding to the examples as designers come up with other solutions. Having concrete examples help ideate new solutions because there may be something transferable from one situation to another.
The current SNS regime seems like it is about to break. There are a number of niche activities that are beginning to come together to influence the landscape, as evidenced by governments proposing legislator and research funding. The Center for Humane Technology is attempting to organize some of these niche activities and trying to tackle the problem from multiple levels: working with the government, attempting to change the public’s mindset through media campaigns, and interventions at the scale of of everyday life (e.g. turning off notifications of all apps except for those for messages coming from other humans). If this trend continues, in the next 5–10 years the regime could break down and allow opportunities for niche activities to become the new regime.
Organizing many niche activities is a powerful way to make a change. Earlier in the Transition Design class, we talked about how FlipLabs, Future of Fish, and Gill Seyfang in her plenary address at the 2015 European Society for Ecological Economics Conference emphasize the importance of organizing niche activity, especially when the regime is starting to crack under the pressure of the landscape–which it is starting to do right now. That’s why we think there is a lot of potential for the Center for Humane Technology and similar groups organizing niche activity to make a difference. They may not know a lot about Systems Theory and probably aren’t aware of Transition Design, but we think educating them in different approaches to transitioning could help them create a network that overthrows the current regime.
For our next steps, should we build on the momentum of the current interventions, e.g. the Center for Humane Technology, or address topics that aren’t currently being discussed, like fake news?
Understanding the landscape requires a lot of research from many sources that are then integrated to understand the larger picture. At first we found a lot of information about the regime and niches as we learned about the development of SNS and related technologies, but the landscape was mostly bare. We used historical documents, primary sources, data, and the news about the technology, infrastructure, and culture to create a picture of what the landscape was like. This was no easy task. Since this problem developed while we were alive, we also had to work with and against our own biases. Researching the landscape was the most difficult because there was so much information to wade through and each piece could contribute to the overall puzzle. After getting a good idea of the overall landscape, we then needed to focus on what works with the narrative that we are trying to tell for communication purposes.
One question that we are left with: Is the negative effects of SNS a new transition pathway? SNSs don’t fulfill a previous need, but augment in-person socializing and create new ways to connect with people. During our research, we recognized that the development of SNS is a combination of a reconfiguration pathway with a de-alignment and re-alignment pathway, according to socio-technical transition theory. It is a reconfiguration pathway because SNS slowly came into existence through the development of other niche technologies, like the internet, personal computers, and smartphones. The de-alignment and re-alignment occurred during the sudden landscape change after the dotcom bubble burst when there was less investment and interest in the way that internet companies were developing. Right after the burst, many SNS companies cropped up and competed for dominance, as can be seen in the SNS timeline featured earlier in this article.
We see the problem of the negative effects of SNS as currently following a transformation process (although it is hard to tell because the transition hasn’t occurred), and we hope to create a reconfiguration transition pathway by adding niche innovations to the current regime. SNS isn’t inherently bad, so we aren’t proposing a technological substitution, but an improvement to the current way of working by adding new pieces to the SNS regime over time.
Additional Resources
Collected below are a series of videos, articles, and diagrams that can provide further information on the history of and current thinking on the internet environment and social networking services.
Jason Silva’s Physical vs Digital Existence
Pewinternet’s Data Metrics
