Modern Towers of Babel.
Monday Feb 25, 2008
In
the original Tower
of Babel story, all the humans on earth spoke a single language
and lived in a single place. They decided to build a structure that
would reach into the heavens and implicitly show that humans were as
powerful as God. Well, God had other plans. He invented a multitude
of languages and scattered the people across the world. The Tower of
Babel project was abandoned.
In the 21st century remake of
this story, humans accidentally invented social network sites.
Millions of people, primarily college-aged adults, join the
communities. They start engaging in the communities in an attempt to
build as large a “Friends” list as possible. Well, it's hard to
interact with millions of people, so members create groups within
these larger communities. (Facebook
now hosts thousands of groups
appealing to every interest conceivable, from Burritos
in Oxford to Friends
of the Sun Microsystems Foundation.) Sometimes they create
separate communities altogether, such as LinkedIn
(for professional networking). In fact, many people lose confidence
in these new "Towers of Babel" and try to leave them, only
to discover that leaving
isn't as easy as joining.
Yet social networking as a
technology is a powerful extension of the quintessential human
strategy of banding together for a common interest. Think of the
cavemen, who had to work as a team to take down the larger and more
powerful wooly mammoths. How can organizations—be they corporate or
academic—use this technology without losing the trust of their
members? As Facebook and MySpace attempt to become a platform upon
which others build their communities, what assurances do we need that
our members won't be exploited beyond their willingness to be
exploited? Should we instead build our own communities on stand-alone
technology platforms where we can assure our members are protected?
Answering these questions is one of the key objects of our
annual Worldwide Education & Research Conference this week in San
Francisco . We've got an incredible array
of speakers on the power and limits of communities. We're
streaming the main
presentations over the Web if you want to watch in real time (the
link will be live on February 27), and we'll make them available
asynchronously for later playback as well.
The first Tower of
Babel didn't work out so well because of divine intervention. Perhaps
these modern-day Towers can be effectively harnessed for productive
use, but not without changing the fundamental compact that exists
between a community and its members. Because unlike the real world,
it's much easier to scatter on the Web if the Tower starts to
crumble.
By the way, here's the original story from the Book
of Genesis:
And the whole earth was of one language, and of one speech. And it came to pass, as they journeyed from the east, that they found a plain in the land of Shinar; and they dwelt there. And they said one to another, Come, let us make brick, and burn them thoroughly. And they had brick for stone, and slime had they for mortar. And they said, Come, let us build us a city and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven; and let us make us a name, lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth. And the Lord came down to see the city and the tower, which the children builded. And the Lord said, "If as one people speaking the same language they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them." Come, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another's speech. So the Lord scattered them abroad from thence upon the face of all the earth: and they left off to build the city. Therefore is the name of it called Babel; because the Lord did there confound the language of all the earth: and from thence did the Lord scatter them abroad upon the face of all the earth.
(Image: The Tower of Babel by Pieter Brueghel the Elder (1563), courtesy of Wikipedia.)
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Tags: community facebook internet socialnetworking web
