How Technology Makes Us Better Social Beings | Smithsonian Magazine

Megan Gambino via

Keith Hampton, a sociologist at the University of Pennsylvania, is starting to poke holes in this theory that technology has weakened our relationships. Partnered with the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project, he turned his gaze, most recently, to users of social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.

“There has been a great deal of speculation about the impact of social networking site use on people’s social lives, and much of it has centered on the possibility that these sites are hurting users’ relationships and pushing them away from participating in the world,” Hampton said in a recent press release. He surveyed 2,255 American adults this past fall and published his results in a study last month. “We’ve found the exact opposite—that people who use sites like Facebook actually have more close relationships and are more likely to be involved in civic and political activities.”

Hampton’s study paints one of the fullest portraits of today’s social networking site user. His data shows that 47 percent of adults, averaging 38 years old, use at least one site. Every day, 15 percent of Facebook users update their status and 22 percent comment on another’s post. In the 18- to 22-year-old demographic, 13 percent post status updates several times a day. At those frequencies, “user” seems fitting. Social networking starts to sound like an addiction, but Hampton’s results suggest perhaps it is a good addiction to have. After all, he found that people who use Facebook multiple times a day are 43 percent more likely than other Internet users to feel that most people can be trusted. They have about 9 percent more close relationships and are 43 percent more likely to have said they would vote.

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This has been of particular interest to Hampton, who has been studying how mobile technology is used in public spaces. To describe how pervasive Internet use is, he says, 38 percent of people use it while at a public library, 18 percent while at a café or coffee shop and even 5 percent while at church, according to a 2008 survey. He modeled two recent projects off of the work of William Whyte, an urbanist who studied human behavior in New York City’s public parks and plazas in the 1960s and 1970s. Hampton borrowed the observation and interview techniques that Whyte used in his 1980 study “The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces” and applied them to his own updated version, “The Social Life of Wireless Urban Spaces.” He and his students spent a total of 350 hours watching how people behaved in seven public spaces with wireless Internet in New York, Philadelphia, San Francisco and Toronto in the summer of 2007.

Though laptop users tended to be alone and less apt to interact with strangers in public spaces, Hampton says, “It’s interesting to recognize that the types of interactions that people are doing in these spaces are not isolating. They are not alone in the true sense because they are interacting with very diverse people through social networking websites, e-mail, video conferencing, Skype, instant messaging and a multitude of other ways. We found that the types of things that they are doing online often look a lot like political engagement, sharing information and having discussions about important matters. Those types of discussions are the types of things we’d like to think people are having in public spaces anyway. For the individual, there is probably something being gained and for the collective space there is probably something being gained in that it is attracting new people.” About 25 percent of those he observed using the Internet in the public spaces said that they had not visited the space before they could access the Internet there. In one of the first longitudinal studies of its kind, Hampton is also studying changes in the way people interact in public spaces by comparing film he has gathered from public spaces in New York in the past few years with Super 8 time-lapse films that were made by William Whyte over the decades.

“There are a lot of chances now to do these sort of 2.0 versions of studies that have been ongoing studies from the ’60s and ’70s, when we first became interested in the successes and failures of the cities that we have made for ourselves,” says Susan Piedmont-Palladino, a curator at the National Building Museum in Washington, D.C. Hampton spoke earlier this month at the museum’s “Intelligent Cities” forum, which focused on how data, including his, can be used to help cities adapt to urbanization. More than half of the world’s population is living in cities now and that figure is expected to rise to 70 percent by 2050.

“Our design world has different rates of change. Cities change really, really slowly. Buildings change a little faster, but most of them should outlive a human. Interiors, furniture, fashion—the closer you get to the body, the faster things are changing. And technology right now is changing fastest of all,” says Piedmont-Palladino. “We don’t want the city to change at the rate that our technology changes, but a city that can receive those things is going to be a healthy city into the future.”

Actually, cities change at all rates of speed at the same time. Some aspects of the city change very slowly, like the streets and major buildings. But people come and go, stores and restaurants launch and then close, buildings are renovated, sidewalks replaced.

And technologies also change at different rates. Subway tunnels are relatively permanent, while traffic lights are less so. Telephone cables get laid, and used for decades, while people are connecting to each other through wifi and cell connections that didn’t exist ten years ago.

And the newest change is the degree to which people are overlaying their social interactions in space with social interaction in time. We are folding time by remaining connected to people with whom we are not sharing space, and increasing the social density of cities enormously as a result.

The intermixing of urban life and liquid media — ubiquitous connectivity, streaming social tools, genius mobile devices, social operating systems — might lead to an unequaled socially-connected society.

This new sort of urbanism, where the physical landscape is becoming overlaid with unparalleled degrees of social participation, is what I am calling the connective city.

Cities have always been the wellspring of innovation and change, but this is hotting up, and social technologies are the key. Urban density is growing as more people move to the cities, but this is being increased exponentially by the increase in social density that liquid media is enabling.

And oh, by the way, here’s more proof to stick in the mouths of the buffoons that make a living writing about how social tools are harming us, are diminishing our ability to meaningfully connect, or are decreasing our intelligence or our capacity to reason.

When they say they are afraid of technology, they are actually afraid of the effect of these technologies on the society that exists. They are afraid of autonomy. They are worried that we will defect from the mass identity of the past, that we will reject their parceling out of power and privilege. And we will, so they are right to be afraid. But understanding that doesn’t make their arguments sound. It just means we understand their motives, which are not ours.

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hm3 said: The web is hypercity - an extension (in mcluhan speak) of the entire urban environment - so the seamless merging of web and city was probably inevitable. bit.ly/bUc3hu bit.ly/adcKXw
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