Human-scale Inventions

My thoughts bounced around quite a bit as I was reading the last chapter and the epilogue of Clay Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody. There are so many intriguing paths that I was finding it difficult to focus on just one or two. I contemplated pursuing licensing and Creative Commons but that had the potential to turn into a dissertation. Shirky mentioned that “the most profound effects of social tools lag their invention by years…” (270), but I suspect that the gap is going to begin to narrow more and more rapidly. We probably won’t be sure until we can look back and say, “oh, yeah, now that was an amazing use for Twitter.” The implicit and explicit bargains made by and for tool users got me thinking about the episode of 30 Rock where two of the characters hijack the Janis Joplin Wikipedia page in order to convince a method actor to behave strangely (Retreat to Move Forward, January 22, 2009). By the next day, according to this possibly questionable blurb, Wikipedia itself was hijacked by “fun-hating administrators”.

But it was the mention of “human-scale inventions” (300), that put most of what we’ve been discussing in perspective. Shirky contends that the transistor and the birth-control pill had a greater effect on society than nuclear power “because no one was in control of how the technology was used, or by whom”. Actually, plenty of people and organizations put themselves in control of the Pill, but as with Prohibition, full restriction proved a losing battle in the United States. Social tools are about as human as a human-scale invention can be. They allow creativity, collaboration, organization, deception and a gazillion other human necessaries. They can be misused as in cases when “enough people’s behavior becomes antisocial enough to wreck things for everyone” (283) or they can be used with extraordinary effectiveness as in Shirky’s example of the Chinese parents expressing anger over school construction in the wake of the 2008 Sichuan earthquake (295).

These examples are on a manageable or at least conceivably useful scale, yet I am often overwhelmed by the amount of information out there. I never tweet and I rarely check my Twitter account because so much is just a tedious account of what’s going on right now by people who are too bored to do anything else (“plane is delayed”, “still in the airport”, “on my third latte need plane to arrive at gate now”). I try to follow far too many RSS feeds and have learned to appreciate people who write descriptive headings so that I can ignore subjects that aren’t quite within my realm. My delicious bookmarks are chock full of sites I find funny or useful, but I sometimes catch myself getting absorbed by something trivial like Regretsy or PassiveAggressiveNotes.

I’m currently trying to decide if this overload is a result of my age (I have personal experience with rotary phones, handwritten thank you notes and TRS-80’s) or my Meyers-Briggs personality type. I’ve been giving that last one a lot of thought lately. For some reason, it has been coming up in conversations. I’m typically an INTP (Introverted, Intuitive, Thinking Perceiver). The introverted, which I’ll touch on here, means that too much interaction exhausts me, not that I don’t like people or can’t be outgoing and friendly when a situation calls for it. Still, I definitely prefer small groups, whether they are virtual or corporeal. Virtual groups do have an advantage of being avoidable. I can bring even the most ponderous wiki into my own personal human scale by a finely-tuned search or by simply ignoring it. I don’t have to read blogs or contribute to wikis or tweet if I’ve reached my personal threshold. It’s much harder to ignore the people who complain about campus parking. In person. Every day.

Through endless choices and options for customization, social networks and online communities are a boon for both introverts and extroverts. The extroverts can create/antagonize/organize/share and quite possibly get input from other extroverts. The introverts can ingest or reject as much as they need to. In fact, they can even meet with extroverts on their own terms. What can be more human than a completely customizable interactive experience?