Are We (Post) Human?

Facebook, the most popular social network in the UK at the time of writing (Modine 2009), is arguably built around a Cyborgian version of human friendship in which relationships are mediated by the machine which acts as both a passive and aggressively active agent. Facebook is a site allowing users to find and connect with other users but it also provides numerous updates and suggestions to each user to encourage activity and influence relationships with other users of the site. One of the reasons for the popularity of the site is that it rewards frequent revisits through a mixture of automated newsfeeds and automated email alerts to coax the user back to read and respond to comments, postings, messages etc. These are disruptive and invasive interventions that not only enable the user to carry out tasks in the space but actively pursues the user. However because the interventions request low level interactions many users embrace the space by taking advantage of invitations to tag, to comment, to tie an image to specific known individuals.

Indeed perhaps it is explicitly the usefulness of an intervention that decides those offering utopian possibilities (e.g. Rheingold 2000) from those causing disruption, discord and a sense of personal space invaded (e.g. Cashmore 2009):

"I notice some people get quite irate about explicit machine interventions (”people with this book/friend/paper also did x”) while conveniently overlooking the fact that the whole environment is an intervention that enables them to do with ease something impossible only a few years ago. So there seems to be an issue around perception of control and choice, and the explicit role of the machine: when it is seamless and unobtrusive, we like it, when it isn’t we don’t."

Richard M Davies' comments on my Blog Post about this assignment

View of a typical Amazon product page with prompts, related items etc.

It is perhaps inevitable that useful functionality is less objectionable than disruptive interventions however some irate reactions may be well founded. The potential for risk, fraud and threat on social sites is increased by sites designed within the Web 2.0 (O'Reilly 2005) “perpetual beta” (Wikipedia 2009) model and where the site design encourages users to unquestioningly interact with a range of materials appearing on a page – video clips, images etc. The trust engendered in social sites – where one feels that they are surrounded by known friendly people lending trust both to their postings and the surrounding space - can lead to vulnerabilities and opportunistic security exploits (Mansfield-Devine 2008).