Computing In Context: Is It Better To Be Connected?

“There is a huge need and a huge opportunity to get everyone in the world connected, to give everyone a voice and to help transform society for the future. The scale of the technology and infrastructure that must be built is unprecedented, and we believe this is the most important problem we can focus on.” — Mark Zuckerberg

Zuckerberg’s core idea here, that everyone should be connected, is an interesting one to unpack. Obviously, the immediate normative assumption here is that “connection”, writ large, is good, and the more of it there is, the better. This includes a couple other assumptions: that the interactions that social media and technology produce are synonymous with connection, and that the methods of connecting Facebook is building achieve the goal of “giving everyone a voice”.

I’m not necessarily opposed to connection, although I’d like a clear definition of it before I commit — somebody could punch me and connect with my face, but I probably wouldn’t be happy about it. But let’s give Zuck the benefit of the doubt and take a definition of connection in terms of Facebook’s functionality: the ability to digitally send messages and interact with the curated digital lives of other people. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but what troubles me is the idea that “everyone” should be connected. When you have a world full of different cultures, value sets, and base assumptions about reality, maybe it’s not for the best for everyone to be connected. Instead of “leading to a better understanding of the lives and perspectives of others”, doesn’t it provide an easy avenue for conflict, for solidifying existing prejudices and hatreds? Is this the connection we want with each other?

This is especially troubling given the disparate means of communication given to people. If Bengali speakers don’t have access to their whole alphabet, how can one expect them to be able to build an understanding of any value, no matter how connected they are? If disabled users have an experience more limited than abled ones, can they connect over a shared platform in meaningful ways? If the means of connection inherently privilege one form of communication over another, are they “giving everyone a voice”?

More than this, if the goal of this connection is to “help transform society for the future”, is this model the best way to do so? As Jo Freeman points out in The Tyranny of Structurelessness, an unstructured hierarchical model, like Facebook or Twitter, is often counterproductive to achieving a positive goal, especially when the group is as large as “everyone on the fucking internet”. Without organizational structure, the connection and communication Zuck believes in dissolve into a directionless morass. Almost no one can be heard over the din, and they’re left with “no place to go…[and] no way of getting there.” Those voices who emerge rarely represent more than a group of informal elites, one of many vying for status in a social media context.

Perhaps a model that would resolve some of these issues would prioritize connections at smaller scale, creating unstructured groups organized towards a specific goal, and for larger models of connection emphasize the importance of structure. The former has already started to happen — as Facebook and Twitter (rightfully) become reviled as discursive cesspools, people are beginning to retreat to group messages. This small-scale, small-group connection seems much more valuable and effective to me. The question, then, is how do we engage in larger-scale connection? What voices have to be privileged, if we require an organizational structure? Should we be trying to at all?