The Social Network

The movie "The Social Network" missed the Oscar. But it has clearly defined a generation of people who are on social networking sites at ungodly hours. Even my mother claims its "awesomeness" and claims to spend 3 to 4 hours on it everyday. There is one question that keeps bothering me. Does being on a social networking site create economic value?

Before we get there, we probably need to understand what social networking offers to me as an individual. While most people may be accessing the site anything between once a week to once a day, there are others who are on these sites much more often.

For that group, it provides access to people, we call our "friends". As I reflect upon it, in the real world, as a person, I can say what is in my mind to my friends much more easily than I am with strangers.  While in the company of strangers, we go through our experiences quietly, whereas in company of friends, we reveal our fleeting emotions. When people experience something with friends, they react to a touch, a feeling, an object, a stranger, everything. They express their emotions about what is happening now under muttered breath.

"Cool", "Wow", "Moron", "Jerk".... And so on. We become overly sensitive to everything around us when we know someone we trust is listening to us.

Those reactions define us within a group of friends. We become clowns, advisors, agony aunts and coaches to our most trusted friends.

Maybe thats what make it valuable. However, apart from reducing our probable vulnerabilities by allowing us to express our reactions about everything, its difficult to see where and how economic value is created.

Meanwhile, everyone from corporations and advertisers realize that people are spending more time on these media than anything else. They understand the commercial value but economic value still eludes me. Maybe Mark Zuckenberg can answer that.

(Re)Thinking Policing

Rethinking policing.

What would it take to have a society that does not need policing? A group of people who mind their own business, and do not lie, steal or hit each other. That has clearly not happened, and as power structures in any group of humans creates haves and have-nots, eventual transgressions of some kind are inevitable. In any society, with any form of government, the Orwellian Animal Farm is inevitable. To remind, the moral of that story was that sooner or later, in any a society, a group emerges that is more equal than others.

Incidentally crime is lowest in places where everyone is an outsider and everyone has a strong dis-incentive against breaking the law in terms of assured jobs, food on the table, etc. Prime examples are cities like Dubai, Singapore, etc.

For a software system that helps the police to do their job, making the social inequalities visible is probably more important than the effect in terms of burglaries, car thefts, and more violent crimes.

Community policing is based on such a thought process, but instead of tracking dissent and causes thereof, it has chosen to focus on crime statistics. The part it may have got right is ensuring policeman on the street.

Modern surveillance systems such as CCTV and tracking devices on the other hand suggest to people that they are living in a police state. How does one get to a stage where people and police are simply roles that people have.