Abstract
The Social Machine: Designs for Living Online is a crisp and clear volume on online social interaction and the ways in which this data can be visualized. Donath, a fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Center, quickly moves through many examples of her and colleagues’ data visualizations through the lenses of art history and sociology.
Donath’s main argument extends from her desire to achieve a richer form of socializing with others online. She argues that the Internet has been a social place from the very beginning, showing how the U.S. Defense Department’s ARAPNET helped connect computer scientists leading to the development of e-mail. Even with the rise of technologies like video chat and virtual worlds, online communication is not the same experience as a face-to-face conversation. Media that is sociable is relational and cognizant of user emotion and visual cues all the while being embodied to a specific space and time.
In 12 chapters, Donath takes the reader through the various mechanisms of sociable communication and its visualizations, striving for a way to improve online interactions. Donath organizes the book into six sections, with two chapters in each and in two different categories, with the design chapter every even number and every odd chapter for theory. The section “Design” focuses on the visual representations of social data and often references to art history concepts such as color theory, figural and abstract representation, and the politics on how these designs could be used. The “Theory” chapters reference concepts like Dunbar’s Number, the number discussed by anthropologist Robin Dunbar, that describes the number of social contacts that one person can manage with standard social ability. These chapters explain the social implications behind Donath’s many example visualizations.
The design chapters are notable for their explanations on how best to represent data though many examples. Here the book shines with its presentation in full color and glossy pages. She uses art historical methods in chapter 8, discussing the ways in which personal data can be thought of as portraits. She links these data to the art historian Ernst van Alphen’s argument that nonrepresentational portraits are often better at conveying the semiotic structure of the subject rather than traditional portraiture. For example, the data that a user generates, like the number of entries the user posted on a forum, more accurately depicts the user’s online persona than say a picture of a favorite cartoon character.
The Theory chapters are accessible to the lay reader. In chapter 9, Donath uses a variety of theories to discuss the construction of identity, contrasting sociologist Erving Goffman’s theory of performative social roles to Judith Butler’s theory of gender performance to show that sociable media needs to see these role-specific and gendered performances in order to communicate fully. This highlights the problem with just text communication as the user will not see the social performances that were used to write the text and will have to decipher what the other user means. However, Donath cites and discusses Susan Herring’s work on online gendered interactions to a greater extent than both Goffman and Butler, giving the feeling the two scholars were inserted haphazardly because they both discussed social performances. This is not to say they are not relevant, but perhaps, they needed to be evaluated more fully than Donath allows.
Chapter 11 is on the demands of privacy and public space. Donath writes that privacy is good, but too much is restrictive to the sociable project. She laments the rise of ereaders as they hide the colorful images that make the public space in which they inhabit, inhibiting connections between people, and thus Donath elevates public space as the prime sociable sphere. This does not mean that all privacy is a negative; rather, one can remain private yet still be present in the conversation. Donath refers these people as “lurkers,” people who read online exchanges without participating, insinuating that they are the social equivalent of eavesdroppers and wants to bring them into the sociable field in the digital social space. In addition to these issues, Donath wants some form of augmented reality, like the ability to pull up a suspicious person’s data portrait in real time in order to see if they pose a threat and to adjust our behaviors accordingly.
Donath concludes the book with her desire for the concept of the stranger to become part of history, with the deviant not putting accessible data out onto the world. She writes,
Yet we may well become accustomed to knowing a great deal about the strangers around us, so much so that the days when we knew only the surface appearance of others may seem like a disturbingly dark age of social and civil ignorance. (p. 336)
This world will be open and honest and bring us to the utopia promised to us by the creation of technology.
The book gives the reader an insight beyond the now cliché Web 2.0/Social Web hoopla. The data visualizations that Donath provides show that we are deeply connected on the Internet, but also show that our communication is still fairly text based, yet without the benefits of social identifiers. Donath shows that a sociable form of online communication is within Internet designers’ reach if they think carefully about the social and the visual. The book might come off rather unsatisfying for those searching for a more scholastic point of view; however, for those looking for an accessible entry to social and visual thought this is a good resource.