https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2018/10/11/pack-experience/
INTRO: We experience and navigate the world in packs. Families ride in cars together. Groups of coworkers take elevators together. Dating couples go to movies in pairs.
The pack is a unit, the unit, of operational coordination and everyday problem solving in human life. Pack behaviors always involve some technology, and can involve non-human participants like dogs and cats, but they are human first. The pack is a little sociophysical robot. A transient biological assemblage animated by a tacit, embodied consensus about how to inhabit the environment, and shaped by a shared exposure to the constraints of materiality. Perhaps the strongest of these constraints is the constraint of a shared temporality: A pack is more simply defined as a transient social unit on a shared subjective clock.
The pack is where the rubber of sociality meets the road of materiality. The pack experience strongly shapes, and is shaped by, the built environment. Conversely, every kind of built environment is shaped by a real or theorized pack experience.
There is one kind of built environment that is a huge and crucially important exception. One that is growing so rapidly in scope that it threatens to become the rule. I’m talking, of course, about the internet. The internet is a virtual built environment where individual experience reigns supreme, and pack experience has hitherto been clumsily accommodated in a shallow way as an afterthought. We have to specify the adjective social with respect to shared digital technologies because unlike shared physical technologies, they are not social simply by virtue of being shared or publicly situated. Online, social has to be explicitly engineered. It does not emerge as an epiphenomenon of shared materiality as it does in physical reality, or simply by virtue of being not-private and not-personal. A shared temporality does not automatically emerge out of the demands of coordination.
In the physical world, we have to specify non-sociality for shared, publicly situated technologies, as in private elevator or single serving, to indicate individual versions of experiences that we would expect to be public and social by default. Offline, natural pack experiences have to be broken up with technology to create synthetic individual experiences. Online, natural individual experiences have to be assembled together with technology to create synthetic pack experiences.
Almost all the societal disruption caused by the internet can be reduced to one huge effect: it disrupts our expectations of pack experiences, especially expectations about the amount of assembly work required to create them. Disruptions of higher-order social realities, at troop, tribe, or nation-state levels, can all be traced back to pack-level disruptions.
The fix in almost every case boils down to the same thing: enable better, richer, deeper virtual pack experiences. The promise of the internet as a next-level social scaling and problem-solving technology rests almost entirely on the possibility of effective virtual packs, because packs are the problem-solving social units of our species. And to realize that possibility we need to understand traditional, physical packs better.... (COVERED: Packs, Patches, Pixels; The Social Stack)
MORE: https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2018/10/11/pack-experience/
INTRO: We experience and navigate the world in packs. Families ride in cars together. Groups of coworkers take elevators together. Dating couples go to movies in pairs.
The pack is a unit, the unit, of operational coordination and everyday problem solving in human life. Pack behaviors always involve some technology, and can involve non-human participants like dogs and cats, but they are human first. The pack is a little sociophysical robot. A transient biological assemblage animated by a tacit, embodied consensus about how to inhabit the environment, and shaped by a shared exposure to the constraints of materiality. Perhaps the strongest of these constraints is the constraint of a shared temporality: A pack is more simply defined as a transient social unit on a shared subjective clock.
The pack is where the rubber of sociality meets the road of materiality. The pack experience strongly shapes, and is shaped by, the built environment. Conversely, every kind of built environment is shaped by a real or theorized pack experience.
There is one kind of built environment that is a huge and crucially important exception. One that is growing so rapidly in scope that it threatens to become the rule. I’m talking, of course, about the internet. The internet is a virtual built environment where individual experience reigns supreme, and pack experience has hitherto been clumsily accommodated in a shallow way as an afterthought. We have to specify the adjective social with respect to shared digital technologies because unlike shared physical technologies, they are not social simply by virtue of being shared or publicly situated. Online, social has to be explicitly engineered. It does not emerge as an epiphenomenon of shared materiality as it does in physical reality, or simply by virtue of being not-private and not-personal. A shared temporality does not automatically emerge out of the demands of coordination.
In the physical world, we have to specify non-sociality for shared, publicly situated technologies, as in private elevator or single serving, to indicate individual versions of experiences that we would expect to be public and social by default. Offline, natural pack experiences have to be broken up with technology to create synthetic individual experiences. Online, natural individual experiences have to be assembled together with technology to create synthetic pack experiences.
Almost all the societal disruption caused by the internet can be reduced to one huge effect: it disrupts our expectations of pack experiences, especially expectations about the amount of assembly work required to create them. Disruptions of higher-order social realities, at troop, tribe, or nation-state levels, can all be traced back to pack-level disruptions.
The fix in almost every case boils down to the same thing: enable better, richer, deeper virtual pack experiences. The promise of the internet as a next-level social scaling and problem-solving technology rests almost entirely on the possibility of effective virtual packs, because packs are the problem-solving social units of our species. And to realize that possibility we need to understand traditional, physical packs better.... (COVERED: Packs, Patches, Pixels; The Social Stack)
MORE: https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2018/10/11/pack-experience/