Social Networking Gets Real, Adds Godlike Power
In the August issue of Wired magazine, journalist Clive Thompson has written an article considering a new field of social science being pioneered by the ‘Human Dynamics’ department of the Massachusets Institute of Technology (MIT), called ‘Reality Mining’.
‘Reality Mining’, described by MIT’s own publication Technology Review ‘as one of the top 10 emerging technologies of 2008 likely to change the way we live’, is a new method of measuring the social interactions of people within a society or company, and converting this information into hard data. This data is then used to ‘map’ people’s lives and help ‘tighten networks’ – i.e. simplify your social life and make you more productive at work.
Essentially, reality mining takes the model of online social networks, where the data of human relationships is directly measurable, and applies it to the real world, where our normal social behaviour is very different (check out this video from www.idiotsofants.com for a nice illustration this point).
Using special tracking badges, which have been fitted to the jackets of employees at an unnamed volunteer company, the team at MIT have been testing out their ideas and gathering data in this fashion.
By remotely tracking the location and duration of each employee’s movements, how they relate to the proximity of other employee devices, and then using ‘factor analysis’ (a statistical technique used to explain correlations amongst multiple variables) to identify patterns in the data, the MIT team have been charting the social relationships and information flows between company team members.
Through this process of analysis, Benjamin Waber, a PhD student in the Human Dynamics programme, tells Thompson that in almost every group he has found a secret ‘super-connector’ who plays a crucial role in transmitting news to multiple team or group members. These ‘super-connector’ employees are often unrecognised in a company, simply because no-one is aware of the significance of what they do, and consequently they are overworked, operating on the fringes of the management structure. This, says Waber, is counter-productive, as super-connectors are the most important catalyst for any successful team.
Discussing reality mining, Sandy Pentland, the head of Waber’s lab and MIT’s professor of Arts Media and Sciences, tells Technology Review that given enough data about personal conversations, his team can accurately predict when discussions will take place between specific employees in a working day. They can even deduce the time at which future meetings will take place – suggesting that companies might be able to sync the personal calendars of their employees to facilitate an optimum flow of information.
Ok, so what’s the significance of all this in the real world you might ask? Well, the likely future portal for accumulating data is the humble mobile phone. The technological sophistication and GPS capabilities of modern mobile phones make them a small fountain of digital information, an electronic spunge that absorbs your social habits and desires – and almost everyone has a mobile phone, right?
So with speech analysis software advancing by the day, and Google set to wade into the phone market with its Android software platform, and free, advertising subsidised mobile phone services rumoured to be on the horizon, reality mining’s potential is enormous, and has massive implications for everyone. Your movements, conversations, and physical habits could – through the use of an impressive algorithm – be monitored and analysed with unerring accuracy, creating a definitive profile of who you are, where you are, what you want, and how you think and behave.
This is, of course, enormous power, and threatens all traditional notions of privacy and freedom. If, as seems likely, reality mining becomes commonplace in the future, where will the limits of data collection lie? And do you have any right to opt out of being ‘mined’ if your mobile phone company starts to actively use your data for commercial purposes?
Reality mining might just be a natural extension of modern human communications though; in an era when we constantly and unthinkingly broadcast ourselves online, record our thoughts on personal computers, and pry on the lives of others on social network sites, perhaps the old boundaries that separate private and public worlds simply don’t exist anymore.
Posted by Jack Roberts in Sci-tech | August 22, 2008 4:44PM |