social brutalism

In shockingly Germanic fashion, Facebook has gifted an entirely new verb to the English-speaking world. What do you do if you choose to 'like' someone's comment, link, photo or whatever, and then change your mind? Of course: you opt to unlike it. (Facebook doesn't grant you the chance to go as far as disliking it, but then I guess you simply opt to hide people you don't want to see).

It strikes me that we will need many such new verbs in the future. How else will we prevent our society gradually moving towards the ultimate synoptical inter-connection of every digital node in the world? How to tackle all the social pollution that's arising? Hence we need more mechanisms and norms to untag, unfriend, unlike, unsend, unreceive, untwitter...

You could look at this as just another example of privacy technologies in action. I've long believed that breaks in informational networks are just as valuable as links (I mean that culturally and politically, but if you prefer an economic explanation read Ronald Burt's paper [pdf] on this). Privacy is one way of understanding the value of disconnects. But things are more complicated than that now. 'Private' sits in opposition to 'public', in parallel to how 'economic' sits in opposition to 'political'. But can all efforts to unconnect really be understood in terms of this opposition? The problem of spam, for instance, doesn't really feel like a privacy deficit. Efforts to opt out of information networks aren't necessarily motivated by privacy.

Instead, the spirit of unconnection is fuelled by the Miesian aesthetic, 'less is more'. Unliking, unfriending, unconnecting will one day emerge as acts of social brutalism, analogous to architectural brutalism. They won't seek to alienate or criticise anyone, simply to minimise and cleanse. We have the phenomenon of undesign in web design, which I assume shares a similar aesthetic principle. The problem is that we're not talking about objects, buildings or pixels on this occasion, we're talking about people. It's all very well being a modernist when it comes to non-human actors, but what about where non-non-human ones are concerned? At some point we'll need it to be OK to say "it's not that I dislike you, it's just that I unlike you..."

Comments

[yesman]

"If I unlike you, it's because I am unlike you. Because I am unlike you, I do not want to be linked to you. I do not want to be produced by you. I do not dislike you; I'm just not like you. Not linking to you makes me different from you."

[Lee Bryant]

The word is 'ignore', surely, which isn't new. Hey - it's better than marginalise, dispossess or exterminate. Not necessarily brutal.

[Bruce Davis]

Having been 'unfriended' myself recently - a long story - I would say that it is more akin to 'not talking' or cyber-sulking than actual social disconnection. I would say it adds to the social pollution rather than cleanses as a result (I can still 'see' them - we are just not talking). You get the same effect in small, tightknit, slighty over related village communities perhaps?

[Will Davies]

Lee - I guess I was wondering if brutalism could be divorced from brutality... As a sort of style. But probably not. After all, people are not buildings or any other type of object. Actually, the whole notion of transporting a design aesthetic to social relations is deeply unattractive now I come to think of it!

[pete]

So now I await your efforts in unblogging. :-P