Let's support the oldest social network: Neighborhoods & f2f interactions

Wellbeing
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Thank you for your post. I agree that local communities and face-to-face interaction are the only real antidotes to the tyranny of digital scale. Perhaps the most pernicious of all modern media mythologies in the digital era is the imperative to think globally and act locally. Better we should invest our time and resources in efforts to think locally and act locally instead.

Albert Einstein once observed that no problem can be solved by the same thinking that created the problem. Our search for top-down technological and regulatory solutions to grassroots problems is just another example of the hubris amplified and exalted by digital scale in the first place.

The essential dichotomy posed by the founders of this site – that our digital devices currently offer only two essential choices, all in or all out, is terribly flawed. Addiction and abstinence are merely flip sides of the same extreme coin. Both argue against the only true and livable alternative: moderation.

Per your intelligent and compassionate focus on the healing nature of neighborhood and face-to-face interaction, institutions that historically promote moderation – like the family dinner table, the sabbath day of rest, town hall, local newspapers and faith-based organizations – are all intensely local. Increasingly rare and under sustained assault, they compel humility, civility, critical thought and human scale as opposed to the brute arrogance, incivility and mindless consumption of digital scale.

Don’t know that the solution to digital scale and digital addiction is another website, but I really like the way you think. Thanks again.

Jeff

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Many thanks for the good thoughts, Dave. Always been a big fan of serendipity, in part because I think the most eventful things in our lives happen to us, not because of us. They’re the momentous things, good and bad, we never see coming. Nassim Taleb called the bad events – the market crashes, tsunamis and other natural catastrophes – that find us “black swans”. But the good events, like love and inspiration and unexpected kindness, ride the same winds as serendipity. We can’t necessarily prepare for them, but we can clear our hearts and minds to provide a safe place for them to land when they find us.

That’s why I don’t like the wholesale plans of many urban areas to provide free wireless in all public places. Seems to me that people should pay for the option to avoid serendipity in public, simply because it so often manifests as the local charm and flavor and glue that holds communities together. Without it we are left with the smallest of worlds, reduced to the size of the screens in front of us.

Our fascination and obsession with efficiency is misguided in many ways. How many wondrous moments in our life journeys are encountered because of wrong turns and last-minute adjustments to unforeseen events? How many of those moments are lost when the fastest route box is checked between our own ears by default? How can we be found if we’re never lost?

Thanks again.

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Well, the reason is simply this: on facebook or twitter or whatsapp or whatever, we can swipe away faces and what they say until we find that which gives us the dopamine rush we’re craving for… even though we never find it. In real life we can’t do that. We’re given a few faces and it’s difficult to swipe them and their words away.

Having said that, I totally like the new app concept you’re talking about…

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You make some great points! Building a design is important, but the key is the facilitation of human relationships and connection. People do connect online, but it is through superficial means on social media. If we establish a way to connect face-to-face then, like you mentioned, we will be able to empathize and listen better. I would love to hear some more of your ideas. Feel free to email me at contact@thelowtechtrek.com!

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@zehnfischer

Wonderful observations. Having lived in Japan I can say Japanese really understand the importance of community. It’s sad to see community declining in Japan, in Europe, in the US and probably in other places to that I personally don’t know that well.

You mentioned a digital that could find activities and events. I personally know this area well because I’m the creator of one of the top 100 most popular map services in the world, and have been in this business for 10 years, and am also an expert in tech entrepreneurship. (By the way, no I’m not rich nothing even close.)

Unfortunately, the model for finding events and activities just doesn’t work that well. Currently each service has a separate list of events (Facebook, Yahoo Japan, Google, Meetup, whatever) and these lists are just not complete. The problem is that it needs to work in both geographic space and time, so the information is very thin except for a few select big cities. Events only happen once, and each one needs to be painstakingly entered, checked, and then maybe nobody will read about it anyway. There is also the network problem, where you need to have both a massive number of users, and a massive amount of content at the same time. In practice, I’ve seen it work mainly where people have to buy tickets like for a concert, a museum, or fitness class. But in general it seems to have limited uses. Currently I think the greatest aggregators of event info in Western countries must be Google and Facebook.

There is a great startup from New York founded in 2002 called Meetup which does this better than any service. Check out the philosophies and videos of Meetup founder Scott Heiferman as he is really the expert. There is also Couch Surfing. These are great services, but I think the complete solution which covers all events is elusive.

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Hey Jeff, thank you for your encouraging post. I really appreciate your kind words. One observation about the last decade of rapid innovation is that the digital dividend has been mostly paid to organizations (and its owners). We could indeed witness some breathtaking technological breakthrough. Yet, the situation of the individual and their communities didn’t improve in the same way, in many ways it has gotten much worse.
As all organizations, companies get very self-referential overtime, in the sense that each service wants to maximize the time a person spends with their product. The fault, I believe, lies in the underlying business model of serving ads to users. The important question to ask here is how this could be changed. How could one think about new business models that minimize the time a user spends with the service - and so maximizes the time spent with other people, face to face - whilst remaining economically sustainable. I still very much believe that the internet and digital technology can be used as a force for good, but we have to create ways that make them matter locally rather than globally per default.
In fact, I would even go beyond that. In order to compete with the Big Four tech companies and the media entertainment behemoth, we need to think about tools that matter instantaneous. The tools need to provide value on the spot. I believe this is possible particularly in an urban environment, but the solution is not obvious. What do you think, could be a good start to solve this wicked problem? Thanks again for sharing your thoughts. T

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I totally agree with much what you say. To solve the chicken-egg problem, the map needs to display information at any time, and it has to deliver ongoing updates. Just like no one wants to walk into an empty bar, a digital service without information is just useless. Having worked in the semantic web, when this still was a buzz word, and following the evolution of artificial intelligence relatively closely, I believe that it is possible though to compile this massive database and providing a map that is valuable already for the first, singular user and we can build it up from there.

In order to achieve this, we would need to do several things:
Significantly broaden the definition of events - I prefer to speak about public activities - to “thicken” the amount of information available. As you may know, one of the most important values for news is proximity: Something that happens close to me is meaningful to me - in a first assessment regardless of its content. People react to information that happens near them stronger than to something that is further away. The second value of news is immediacy, the closer something happens in regards to time the more relevant it is - nothing is older than yesterday’s newspaper as the saying goes. We can take these two insights from the laws of media (the where? & when?) and apply it to our problem of connecting the individual to the world around them: Information is most relevant when it happens here & now in relation to a user’s current position. Note that I didn’t speak of content yet.
What is relevant in terms of content ultimately lies in the mind of the observer and in our context, I believe, there is no need to limit the number of events or public activities we should display.
Hence, we should work with a bare minimum definition of events and everything that follows this format should qualify as an worthy information. I suggest working with this: Anything that has a title, an address, and a time/date.
I think when you thought about events, and mention the collection of Facebook, Google etc., you think about concerts, sports games, food markets and so on and these should definitely be in the collection. The format of
(title+address+date) offers a much, much larger pool of event & activity information. It includes traffic information, lunch offers, public announcements of the municipality, training hours of sports clubs and associations, cinema programs and so and on and on and on.

I am by no means a software developer, but I believe that, due to it is naturally structured format, this information can be found relatively easily and while it might be overwhelming in the beginning, it does solve the problem of too little information. Thus “all” you need is good filters and a system that allows the user to find information relevant to them at ease.
At the moment, most of the things that are happening around us are blocked by visual obstacles, mostly concrete walls, and the enormous fragmentation of the internet. Bringing it all back together, one could start with one city, would immediately provide viable alternatives to binge-watching and updating one’s Facebook timeline. It would provide reasons to the leave the flat, and offer opportunities to meet other people.

In my thinking, this would allow such a service a good start, it is of course only the first step in order to connect communities. Very interested in your feedback about this and happy to talk more.
Many greetings, Torsten

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I have been using Meetup for some time, I think its great, and am happy to say that the CTO of Meetup was one of the early users who subscribed to this forum :slight_smile:

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Where do you intend to find this information? I understand that since you’re looking for just title, location and time these things wouldn’t be copyrighted. But that information by itself, without any categories, could be just too disorganized. Without any photos and descriptions, they would also be too boring. Perhaps not even as interesting as reading the dictionary.

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This summarizes precisely the problem. In my short time on this site, I am seeing that there is a growing rift in thinking within this community. We all recognize that the mobile internet presents problems, but many people want to solve those problems with even further applications on the mobile internet.

Like you, I’m not so sure that this is the answer. The way I see it, the economic infrastructure that supports the massive workforce which created the mobile internet has grown to entirely depend on the three-part model of intentional addictiveness, borderline unethical data collection, and advertising. If the industry behind the mobile internet stays hooked into the model of advertising revenue, we won’t see any new app or website which will be able to break free. Our addictive apps act the way they do for a reason; they need to be profitable to continue existing. I question how we can construct a new internet without advertising revenue as the main driving force behind innovation.

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I think we all must take a step back and see ourselves while we (the most of people) stay all day at work, spend all energy there, go out at 7/8 pm and rush to go to gym or pool or cinema or another way to say it was a day well spent. In this context human relations can only fill the little empty spaces left: smartphone can efficiently do that, letting us keeping up with our friends by the same illusion we push extra real life activities in our job and self-achievement driven day. There’s a whole system to change if we want to go back to f2f relationships, they wouldn’t come simply devising new technology or removing some, unfortunately. The individualistic mentality has grown much deeper roots in ourselves: we struggle to study the perfect subjects, find the perfect job, buy the perfect shoes.

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Social Identity, everyone’s identity fundamentally relies on social feedback. Nothing can replace the way face to face interactions provide that feedback, nothing can replace seeing a smile with your own eyes on the face of someone else. We know the feeling of longing to meet someone when we talk with them over a video call. Now all digital application are designed to meet the needs of the individual, they apply psychological insights into creating patterns, hooks, feedback loops and so on.

What we need is the design of a community experience, that fosters the relationships between individuals. We need to apply sociological insights in order to yield these result, as the focus on the single user only provides short-term gratification, digital methadone of sort.

You are right, we need to take step back, come together and figure how we actually want to live. I see individuals do that, but that is a hard struggle that will not yield resounding effects. How do we lift this to the community level? How do we enable groups to make this search collectively? That is what I am trying to figure out here.

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This is information is scattered throughout the internet, on small and big repositories. I intend to collect all in one source. Just the minimal information, enough to make someone move.
At times, you may need more info, but I see no problem with linking to the original website, where more details, pictures, etc can be found.
Duplicates can be solved in the interface design and displayed on a map (at the same location) won’t produce too much clutter. Plus, as we agree on the problem at the beginning is not too much, but too little information.

In terms of copyright, I think, there is a sweet spot where you can apply fair use standards, and since you are linking to the original source it would actually drive some traffic to it.

On top of all that: My assumption is that if you would display public activities that can be reached in through just a few minutes of traveling, in many cases it might just be enough to make someone move and check the real things. After all, real life has so much more density than the most sophisticated website…

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Thank you for your comment. Part of the problem I find in a technological solution to a technological addiction is the false and self-serving assumption (applied to all addictions, regardless of the narcotic) that we somehow become addicts in spite of our values, when in fact the exact opposite is true. We become addicts precisely because of our values to the extent that they always reflect how we choose to invest our time and money in excess.

The truth is that we are nothing if not thoroughly complicit, emotionally and chemically, with our own addictions – a fundamental truism that every attitudinal survey about media consumption conveniently ignores. Our brains are chemically wired to avoid pain and pursue pleasure. In essence, we are hard-wired with a natural propensity for addiction. In the end, no one puts a gun to our heads and compels us to binge-watch Game of Thrones, just as no one compels us to consume news – fake or otherwise – on Facebook or anywhere else beyond the dinner table.

We already waste all of our time on all of our time-saving devices. The last thing we need is another, more efficient way to waste our time.

The hubris that suggests we can somehow technologize our way out of a state-sanctioned meta-addiction to all things media and all things digital ignores human nature and downplays the greatest threat of the digital technologies in our lives: that digital scale manifests most in the sheer size and impact of the immense unintended consequences (the black swans) it creates.

Addiction is just addiction as long as it remains the exception to the rule. But addiction becomes something else entirely when it becomes the default social condition, the rule rather than the exception. Then it becomes a Brave New Digital World. We turned that corner in the early 21st century. More inclined at this end to agree that Meetup represents a far better solution to our current dilemma than another app.

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Well said and you make many valid points. But nevertheless this is the plan, to make technology work better. Things can always be better, and that is undeniable.

In general we’re just arguing that there hasn’t been enough “humanity” in the tech businesses, that there should be a better understanding of the human side in the industry in order to try to fix the industry.

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Hi Torsten,

There have been preliminary developments, including field research and patents filed around methods to do just what you described: get people to have more frequent and better get-togethers in the real world, face to face, based on their preferences of what is of interest to them, who among their friends and acquaintances they’d like to include in these f2f get-togethers and when they tend to be available (of course all filtered by location).
The “engine” that enables this could be plugged into Facebook or Google or other platforms, if I could find a way to get them to listen… Tough because this is not a business yet, only an invention with solid intellectual property. The inventor is based in Israel and I am trying to help him out of my home base of Silicon Valley.

Patrice

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Amen my friend, a breath of fresh air!! Thank you.