Slides from talk at Microsoft Research 2008 Social Computing Symposium

1. Bookmarks, Babies, Barack...
and other social objects
Jyri Engeström
(thinking by Ulla-Maaria)
zengestrom.com hobbyprincess.com
Google/Jaiku Thinglink
This talk is a deep dive after which I hope you understand why social objects are deeply
consequential to society, enterprise, and personal happiness.

2. 1. How social objects work
2. Social objects and power
3. Social objects and stickiness
4. Social objects and love
We’ll start with an example of how social objects do their magic. After this, we’ll discuss
three themes: how social objects give power to their makers, how they make you come back
to them, and how they can enrich or stifle human relationships

3. 1. How social objects work
Let’s start with an example of what makes an object ‘social’.

4. Delicious example
How I learned to love Delicious
In 2005 I was a grad student working on my PhD thesis. Much of my time was spent in the
library sifting through literature for nuggets of relevant theory and prior research. I used
Delicious to bookmark web pages relevant to my research interests.

5. Delicious example
Sometimes I bookmarked pages like this book review without even thinking they were that
interesting.

6. Delicious example
Later I noticed a few other people had also bookmarked that same review.

7. Here are those two other users, called just101 and P.Putter. I’m not really interested in who
they are though: I’m just mining for useful links.

8. One of them, P.Putter, tagged the page “ANT”, short for actor network theory. This
interesting: I am reading up on ANT. I clicked the tag...

9. ...and discovered a set of set of links to other references on actor network theory, collected
by P.Putter. Delicious proved itself useful by connecting me to reading lists compiled by
others.

10. People don’t just connect to each other
- They connect through a shared object
The Delicious example demonstrates how people connect through objects. A bookmark led me to P.Putter,
and P.Putter led me to valuable links.

11. Social network theory is good at
representing links between people
- But it doesn’t explain what connects those
particular people and not others
Now, the problem with social network theory is that it’s good at representing people and the links
between them, but it doesn’t explain why people connect in the first place.

12. The common definition of a social network consists of individuals and the connections between
them, but misses the objects that are the reason why people come together.

13. The common definition of a social network consists of individuals and the connections between
them, but misses the objects that are the reason why people come together.

14. Another tradition of theorizing offers an
explanation of why so many YASNS ultimately fail
Lev Vygotsky Pierre Bourdieu Karin Knorr-Cetina Bruno Latour Yrjö Engeström
Psychologist Sociologist Sociologist Actor-network theorist Activity theorist
1896-1934 1930-2002 1944- 1947- 1948-
Another tradition of theorizing considers objects as fundamental to the analysis of sociality as the people
themselves.

15. 2. Social objects and power
Objects give power to their makers.

16. Bruno Latour
Actor-network theorist
1947–
Actors are networks
The key insight of actor network theory is that actors -- whether human or non-human --
are ‘black boxes’ of network relationships.

17. Arborescences (Deleuze & Quattari, John Law)
Power relationships emerge when networks form treelike structures (arborescences in the
language of Deleuze & Quattari and John Law). This diagram, for instance, illustrates a
number of patents that all refer to one patent by Mycogen Plant Science, Inc.

18. Case studies in startup entrepreneurs
Louis Pasteur
Inventor of pasteurization
1822–1895
In a series of studies of innovators like Louis Pasteur (the French scientist who invented the
method of pasteurization), ANT theorists showed how entrepreneurship is about the crafting
into being of arborescent relationships of power.

19. Success = becoming an “obpop”
(obligatory point of passage)
Successful entrepreneurs turn their object into an obligatory point of passage (an “obpop”
according to my friend Azeem Azhar).

20. An obpop...
until the socio-material network that performs it changes
ANT emphasizes that nothing is stable and fixed, ever. The obpop exists only as long as the
socio-material network that performs it keeps re-enacting it.

21. 3. Social objects and stickiness
Next I want to talk about what drives people to return to objects.

22. Do you...
- blog
- microblog
- photoblog
- videoblog
- mmorpg
etc.?
What kind of personal publishing do you do?

23. Ever feel...
Guilty not updating as frequently as you should?
Ever get the feeling you should really update your blog more often?

24. Needies
Crying baby
Nurturing and cultivation (Claude Ciborra)
Social objects are needy. They demand our attention and require nurturing.

25. Lack or wanting
By virtue of completing a post, a new one is implied to be wanting.

26. Karin Knorr-Cetina
Sociologist
1944-
“We maintain that traders’ engagement with
markets is based on a match between the self as a
sequence of wantings and an unfolding object that
provides for these wants through the lacks it
displays.”
Karin Knorr-Cetina and Urs Bruegger studied financial traders. After each trade, the market
was different and demanded a new assessment of the situation. Traders were hooked to this
dynamic. It made them what they were.

27. the self as a sequence of wantings
Think about the idea that we constitute ourselves through a ‘sequence of wantings’

28. an object provides for these wants
We need objects, because they provide for our wants

29. through the lacks it displays.
The objects provide for our wants through their own lacks, which we can act on to fulfill
them.

30. Fulfillment is gratification... and contains the seed of a new want.

31. The Dow Jones Industrial Average
Oct. 8–14th, 2008
The stock market also has lacks and provides gratification.

32. “In this account, the ‘hooking’ power of the market
derives not only from the embodiment on screen ...
but also from the dynamic and incompleteness that
markets display.”
Let’s break this sentence down...

33. “In this account, the ‘hooking’ power of the market
derives not only from the embodiment on screen ...
but also from the dynamic and incompleteness that
markets display.”
Its hooking power derives from its incompleteness.

34. Unfinished tales unleash the imagination
J.R.R. Tolkien
Author of ‘Lord of the Rings’
1892–1973
To apply this to social software like Web services or gaming, it may be helpful to think about
the way storytelling takes advantage of incompleteness. Great storytellers like J.R.R. Tolkien
have a way of asking more questions than they answer

35. The Lord of the Rings, for instance, is a story with a beginning and an end...

36. But the world it implies is much broader, with its own languages and metaphysics

37. “Change”
Barack Obama
2008 U.S. Presidential candidate
1961–
Similarly, through their gestures, expressions, and presence, performers like presidential
candidates suggest more than they say. In our imaginations, we pick up on those cues and
tell stories about our future were those persons to lead the country

38. 4. Social objects and love
Lastly we will address enriching human relationships and love

39. The focus of social software has turned to
increasing our Dunbar’s number
150
The Internet is powerful at distributing information. It lowers the transaction cost involved in
social relationships and both developers and users have taken advantage of this to favor
communication with more people than we would ever communicate with face to face. Social
software has thus focused on increasing the Dunbar’s number of circa 150 people who we
are supposed to be able to have meaningful relationships with.

40. Zygmunt Bauman
Sociologist
1925–
Quantitative increase skews toward
“top-pocket relationships”
The sociologist Zygmunt Bauman called these ‘top pocket relationships’. The analogy is that
people are used like the pen in the top pocket of a dress shirt: it can be taken out quickly and
put back when it’s no longer needed.

41. Facebook in Reality
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nrlSkU0TFLs
Linda Stone recently drew our attention to this illustrative YouTube clip that the British
comedy trio Idiots of Ants aired on BBC.

42. Limits of platform APIs
Paucity of expression
Inability to discover true novelty
Loss of interest
The concern is that if all applications must conform to the same set of limitations across
services, the repertoire of possible expressions is limited across the board. The challenge of
social platforms in the long run is to design for really emergent behavior that enables rich
enough interaction that people are able to keep their relationships fresh.

43. Tim O’Reilly
Publisher
1954–
Stop and look around;
there is a world out there.
Tim O’Reilly recently issued a call for internet entrepreneurs to make meaningful apps
instead of continuing their ‘mad pursuit for the buck’. I would like to end with that. There is a
big social object out there called planet earth, and it needs us :)