Social Media have been in my face a lot lately. From trying to follow my older sister's death through posted snippets on Facebook to listening to my wife's reflections on the addition of social media to their company's pr portfolio -- social media has played an unexpectedly intimate role in my day to day.
At the same time, I have dialed back my personal and professional involvement in social media considerably. After three years managing to keep about 1500 twitter followers following me, maintaining a blog or two, and keeping track of a widely dispersed family through FB, I have shifted my free time interest to Flickr.
It coincides with my committment to film photography as the hobby du jour.
So having taken a few weeks off all social media, blogging etc now, I am suddenly struck by the parallels between social media and the skyway system. But more to the point of my title, what about the skyways AS social media. What insights can we find here that help the aspiring politician know how to approach the future of skyways, or the skyways as a potential campaign issue?
I wanted to explore this a bit, so I took out a piece of paper and decided to make a list. The very act of writing on paper was so disconcerting that I raced back to the keyboard to do a core dump as usual, instead of actually thinking anything through.
So what have we got on social media?
1. Social media are more media than social. This isn't a drawback, and it doesn't place the blame for unsatisfactory social relationships on social media. It just means, that if you don't know how to socialize, you aren't going to learn on FaceBook or Twitter.
2. Broadcast and narrowcast media amplify flaws in communication. If you say something stupid to one person you know, they have probably heard it before and the net effect is small to nothing. If you say something stupid to 5000 twitter followers or 5,000,000 YouTube watchers, well, there you go. This tells us that social status is a brittle commodity in our society.
3. We don't know that media amplify strengths in communication. You might turn a perfect phrase in a tweet and it could sink through the attention cracks of a vast number of literate followers for no particular reason.
4. People with few or no people skills will tend to do more harm than good in social situations of any consequence, but that simple fact hasn't figured into the design of any social media. The new meme of "curating" information is addressing this issue by finding ways to badge curators according to the value of their info product. Facebook hasn't started a weighting system that will help you know if a stranger is a fool or a knave, however. As far as facebook goes, nobody knows if you are a dog on the internet. Still.
5. A reasonable conclusion to be reached from observing the social media revolution over the last decade is that they are effective at decentralizing existing information power, while they don't offer a values-based core on which to build a new information power base. This meme is making its rounds as "Social Media are good at revolution but they are no good at governance." They only offer a technology, which is pretty agnostic when it comes to socializing, or social values, or anything else involving consciousness, morality, intent, etc. They can't really help make better decisions. If they could, we could just elect Justin Bieber as president and move on to more important things.
6. Human nature requires a power structure. It prefers a local, stable power structure that can mediate with larger, more volatile structures. This power structure is instituted and maintained by yin energies that are flexible and attentive -- they manifest as emotional currents that move in large rivers, but which have rapids, local eddies, and can overflow their banks on a periodic basis. Another way of saying that is "if mamma ain't happy ain't no one happy". The yang component of the power system is instrumental. Another way of saying that is that men are tools.
So what are the parallels to skyways here?
1. The skyways are more practical than stylish. They are, thereby, more instrumental (yang) than status and power oriented (yin). They appeal to men for their efficiency and solid design, and appeal to women for protection and efficiency, not for fun, beauty, style. The corollary of this axiom is that skyway issues won't help get a politician into power.
2. A skyway system will not create a good street life in a city, but it won't suck the life out of an existing street life that is authentic. And it certainly can't be blamed for a street life that doesn't exist.
3. Skyways are a brilliant example of public-private collaboration toward a greater good. Just because they are brilliant doesn't guarantee anyone will recognize this in time to save them.
4. We don't purposefully screen out anyone from using the skyways. They are as accessible to the criminal and psychopath as to the average citizen or civil leader. There is an incidental tendency to screen out poor people, the homeless, etc but it is not a feature of the system or the interface to the system. Attempts to create a criteria, or profile, of unacceptable users of the skyway will be resisted on principle, and also taken as a bid for power by the class of person defining the criteria. There is a kind of cultural schizophrenia lurking in this fact, but that isn't our issue here.
5. The skyways are not about power. Land is power. Contracts are power. Shifts in demographics create new power bases depending on land use. Skyways join places the same way ligatures join notes in a score. They are important to the sense and continuity of the composition, to the transitions, but they are not the notes themselves. A politician interested in power must concentrate on the spaces the skyways join, and the people that are deselected or selected to move through them. The skyways should be allowed to continue to take care of themselves.
6. Urban dynamics have been measured by economic means for centuries, and by entropic measures of distance and changes in value for decades. By these measures, the skyways are practically invisible. The new urban politician must create useful metrics from the intuition of amenity...the sense of what is liked and likable. That will create a power base on what has been called affinity in the anthropology books. Over the long run, affinity is the glue that holds communities together. Another word for it is friendliness. And we haven't gotten our heads around that most basic of social qualities yet when it comes to politics, economics, technology. But we will. It's human nature.
