Here, have a (very long) conversation with dopplr’s matt jones « Second Verse:
MJ: Well - let’s dial back the Delorean a little to Jyri’s coinage of “social objects.” He was coming at it from social science, specifically “Actor-Network Theory” where sociologists consider everything to act on everything else - people, environments, tools, and consider these systems to understand how people socialise with each other, mediated by tools, objects, environments etc. So the ’social object’ in Jyri’s thinking is the centre of gravity of some social transaction. And it’s also the trigger… and the transmitter of sociality. The canonical case being a photo in Flickr.
RF: It functions as both artifact and instigator?
MJ: Yep. In dopplr’s case it’s the “trip.”
RF: It’s the thing I’ve created, and placed into the network for others to react to and generate from.
(Edit 1:57 PM, Monday; April 14, 2008: Alex De Carvalho says, via Twitter: ’social object’ had been coined in sociology papers before @jury and I discussed the term at Reboot7
. He links to this blog post on the subject, where he details the origin of the phrase.)
The conversation is worth reading, and skips from topic to topic. It’s hard to pin down what I took away from it, so I’ll just point and gesture wildly at the interview in the hopes that someone else will see what grabbed my attention. Or, you know, not.
MJ: I think this is somehow the consolation of these personal informatics. We find data about ourselves - these patterns, somehow affirming.
RF: All of this data is hidden from us, and we’re the one’s generating it… we aren’t equipped, cognitively, to learn anything more than impressions from our own actions. In attempting to gather more complete pictures of our behaviors - and gain better analysis of ourselves - what’s our motivation?
MJ: Well - coming back to the social aspect. The overlays of these patterns with those of others are a new kind of feedback we haven’t had at any scale before. And we do flock well. So perhaps that’s how we will learn and change our behaviours… in a “supercontext” if you will…
In a low-tech way, that’s what Dave Seah’s Printable CEO is good for. It provides an accumulated data set for introspection. It’s a low-tech, explicit tool… meaning, you have to decide to capture the data, it isn’t captured for you.
That’s not a bad thing, mind: the act of stopping, thinking about what you’ve done, then noting it is itself valuable, I think. I wonder if the PCEO would be so effective if the data capture was automatic.
Anyway, go check it out.
(Via Matt Jones (again).)
