World Builders

COM1 is a special place to me. There are couches to sleep on, tables to study at, printers that go mmmmhhh every few minutes or so and a vending machine with green tea - green tea! - by the entrance.

Two weeks ago, I looked up from my Algorithms textbook and saw a man and a woman posing in front of COM1. It was late in the evening: there were golden slats of light from the main entrance pooling onto the lobby carpet, where the building was deserted, save me. I stared at them. The man was wearing a black suit, resplendent in tie and leather shoes. The woman had on a wedding dress - a white lacy one, though I don't remember more than that. They were beautiful, standing together, with their backs to the building and the photographer hunched over in front of them, waving his arm, asking them to put their arms out Titanic style. He photographed them with the pale pink stone-front of COM1 rising up behind them.

I remember thinking to myself: COM1 must've meant something important to them. Maybe they met there, or they fell in love while working on some project together, or he found her by the printer one day and offered to help print her notes, stole her matric number (and therefore: email address) and used that to ask her out for dates (yes, I know, I have an overactive imagination). Or maybe they just thought it would be a good place to take their wedding photographs. But the truth of it is that COM1 isn't a particularly beautiful building - I want to believe there must've been some other reason they would want to be photographed in front of it, especially when you think about all the other buildings on campus that might've looked better in a photoshoot. I didn't dare to ask - I had to study; but maybe it did. Maybe it did.

I've been thinking a lot about the places we live in, recently. Much of this thinking I owe to Jonathan Harris's seminal essay, World Building In A Crazy World, which I read last year and have been wondering about ever since. Harris argues that we now live in two places: in the real world, with charming buildings like COM1, and the digital world. He believes that we have a digital crisis on our hands: that while more and more of us spend much time on the Internet, we have failed to create digital worlds of meaningful value. In simple terms, we have failed to create COM1s of the Internet - places where people come together to create memories, shared experiences (even marriage).

Our Digital Crisis
Our online tools today are not made to create shared meaning. Instead:

Most online experiences are made, like fast food, to be cheap, easy, and addictive: appealing to our hunger for connection but rarely serving up nourishment. Shrink-wrapped junk food experiences are handed to us for free by social media companies, and we swallow them up eagerly, like kids given buckets of candy with ads on all the wrappers.

The problem with this isn't that we have less meaningful things to do on the Internet. Harris is not worried about that, per se. The problem with this is that more and more of us would be living our lives in the digital world in the near future, and unlike the world we live in - the real world, with beautiful cities and charming campuses - the digital world is not as good a place to spend time in.

Our online tools do a great job at breadth (hundreds of friends, thousands of tweets), but a bad job at depth. We live increasingly superficial lives, reducing our relationships to caricatures and our personalities to billboards, as we speed along at 1,000 miles an hour.

We trade self-reflection for busyness, gorging ourselves on it and drowning in it, without recognizing the violence of that busyness, which we perpetrate against ourselves and at our peril.

For the last 100 years—from letters, to phones, to faxes, to emails, to chats, to texts, to tweets—communication has been getting shorter and faster, but we are approaching a terminal velocity.

I believe that Harris is right. Twitter and Facebook - the two largest, most popular social networks of our times, are good only at creating short, superficial conversations. Twitter is - in effect - a never-ending ecosystem of water cooler chatter; Facebook as a tool is great for networking - for finding old friends and stalking new ones - but very bad for any form of meaningful communication. By extension, it is difficult - possibly impossible - to seriously maintain real-world relationships through the two sites. There are too few tools on the Internet today that would allow people to foster or even maintain thoughtful, meaningful relationships with each other. Worse, as Harris has it, the web does seem like a "giant cocktail party, full of chatter, gossip, and he said, she said". The web is less social than the social-media companies would have us believe - rather, it is more 'garrulous', more vulgar. Much of our digital interactions are built around surface chatter, not meaningful nor deep digital conversation.

But then, an interesting question: why is this so? Why are the majority of our communication tools short and superficial? Why is - as Harris says - our websites good at breadth ("hundreds of friends; thousands of tweets") but not good at depth?

One possible reason, I think, is that it is far easier to communicate at a superficial level than it is at a deep level. There seems to be a trend towards small, short, meaningless communication at the moment, with Twitter being the rage and Google launching Buzz. Short things tend to be more viral on the Internet. By that same logic, longer, more thoughtful sites exist but are limited to a smaller numbers of people. The irony is that if we continue doing chatter, there would be a point where we realize that we have built nothing of value for ourselves. We would realize that all that 'connection' has been for nought; we are connected now, more than ever before, but our connections mean nothing to each other.

I doubt there is a shorter means of communication than the tweet, unless we start to make monosyllabic grunts at each other or communicate silently, brain to brain. Brief gestures of communication can be beautiful, but can also be shallow. So what will happen next? Will we stop at the tweet, or will we bounce back in the other direction, suddenly craving more depth? I’d bet on the latter.

But even if we start to crave more depth, we cannot run away to a more primitive time. The momentum of technological growth is too strong for us to prevent it from defining our future. Like it or not, our future world will largely be digital.

Instead of fleeing to the forest, we must find the humanity in the machine and learn to love it. If we decide the humanity does not yet exist there in the ways we expect, then we must create it.

Harris believes that such places like Facebook can be done better for human relationships. I have been part of only two websites with shared meaning, and I know of only four others. I pine for such places, because I know - first hand - how incredible they may be.

World Building
COM1 is special to me because it is a place where I go to study, to program, and to suffer with friends. It does not, itself, have meaning, but it is designed to bring people together, who then do meaningful things with each other. If a married couple comes back right before their wedding to take pictures in front of COM1, then surely something somewhere must be right with it.

Websites are also like buildings. The form and function of a website and the actions you may do while you are in it determines the kind of memories and feelings you associate with the place. Websites by themselves do not have meaning - they are too cold and too machine-like to be of any comfort to us; instead, it is what websites allow us to do (often with each other) that matters. When you think of Facebook, you associate with it the splintered, second-by-second nature of the site, where you are bombarded by updates from your social network. I am not saying that this is not valuable - there is often value in the bombardment. But the kind of things you do in websites determine how you feel about them, and it is likely you will feel about Facebook the same kinds of feelings you do when you put an ear to a hollow pipe to eavesdrop on your friends, singing next door.

If websites are like buildings, then it stands to reason that people must build them. Harris points out that the world builders of the real world are engineers and architects and town planners, and they are responsible for the cities we now live in. Build a park and people will spend their evenings there; build a town square and friends will tell each other to meet at the center of such places - a phenomenon as old as town squares themselves.

The digital world also needs its own set of world builders. We need builders to create places of meaning - digital equivalents of town squares and gardens and parks. We do not need another Twitter, or another Facebook (or even the new Google Buzz). Twitter and Facebook are big sites, and successful ones at that, but I want to believe that there is space for smaller, more meaningful, more personal sites, places where people can come together to call their own.

There is a human need for meaningful communication that I believe exists in all of us, and too little of our world builders are looking for solutions to this need. Perhaps this is a problem that is unsolvable, like Harris suggests (is the online world a possible substitute for the real-world lunch?) - but I am inclined to believe that this is a problem that not many people are willing to tackle. And this is a marvelous opportunity, especially when we are near the point of critical chatter; it also leads me to ask - how would you build such solutions? How would they look like? And - most importantly - what may they be?

Looking for solutions
When I was 15 I created an online forum for my friends called Undergroundsquare. It was run on a PHPBB board - an old, ugly, clunky piece of software that was susceptible to spam bots and porn threads and terrible user-designed themes, and we decided to use PHPBB because none of us knew any better. We loved it to bits. Undergroundsquare became for us a central, online gathering point, a discussion place away from the classroom and the school(s) we were from. We would post questions to it, tease each other on it, and organize gatherings and movie-outings through the board, and we did so, whenever we could.

UGS died a silent death a couple of months after the founding members - my friends and I - left high school.

Shortly after that happened, I started writing this blog called Novelr, with which I eventually joined a blogging network named 9rules. 9rules was a startup, run by three Americans, most of whom have now moved on to different things. I mention this because 9rules was another one of those rare sites that Harris would like to see created. It was a close-knit community, with shared purpose and deep conversation, and till this day I know I can reach out (on Twitter, ironically) to these people, to ask for their help on any blog/design/programming-related matter.

There are other sites, of course, with such levels of deep conversation/meaning, but they are all (or almost all) limited in scope. Paul Graham's Hacker News is one of them; Craigslist is another. Slightly different, but in the same vein of improving human communication is Ustream, which got created when two American soldiers found out that there was no good way they could broadcast live video to multiple family members at the same time.

What do these sites have in common? If we leave Ustream out (for their approach to this problem is rather novel, and quite successful) we might conclude that the common denominator across all these sites is the fact that they're all forums, of some variation or another.

But here's the sad bit: all these sites, great as they are, are built on custom software. Generic, ready-made forum software hasn't change one bit from the time I first created UGS. And the truth here is that ready-made forum software sucks - not just the software itself, but the format of the forum hasn't changed, and it's still this ugly, heavy bulletin-board format that should be brought out and shot in the head. There's no threading, too many forums, no karma - all the new developments in community software that have been implemented in these successful sites (9rules, for instance, allowed members to earn points, to be used as goodwill currency) - all these developments are inaccessible to the person who wants to create a forum for his friends. I am one such person - UGS right now serves as a central gathering point for my friends, who are spread out across the globe in various cities and universities, and who almost never return home. (In fact, when I redid UGS a year ago, I had to hunt around before deciding on a heavily-modified version of bbPress - me doing the modifications, of course.)

Not everyone is geeky enough to do this. And while world building may involve creating new communities, or creating new, meaningful sites where people may cluster around, part of it may also be creating the infrastructure for people to do it themselves. If I had software that would allow me to quickly - and easily! - create an undergroundsqare for my friends, by gum, I'd use that.

Treehouse
There is much to be said for creating places of shared meaning between groups of people. But what of one-to-one connections? Harris points out that of all our human needs, the ones that have to do with authenticity, self-reflection, depth of communication, and real relationship-building are especially poorly answered online. Harris builds things that tackle the authenticity problem, and forums (new kinds, that are probably far removed from the Bulletin Board format) are an answer to the depth-of-communications problem. But what of real-relationship-building? How would a solution to that look like?

I have shown you that the forum format is one that works when you're trying to build shared meaning between a group of individuals. But what if - instead of giving people the tools for creating community, you take those tools and optimize it for just two parties? Say, people who love each other, who feel terrible when they are away from each other? Couples in long distance relationships, for instance, or best friends separated by distance (where one fears drifting apart, to the point where both parties don't recognize each other), or children removed from their parents? How might such an app look like? How would it work?

Text would probably be a major part of the solution. This has to be a specific kind of text - not Twitter level, 140 character messages, but long, blog-level posts. Lovers, friends, parents need to be able to express complex thoughts, or at least tell each other about their respective days, and text is the simplest way of doing this.

The problem with text, however, is that not many people communicate well in it - primarily because writing is a skill that has to be learnt. More people communicate through pictures than they do through words, so simple image uploading would have to be part of the solution.

But that still isn't enough. If you are to maintain a real relationship, pictures - while nice - are too superficial on their own to do any good for the relationship. There has to be an easier alternative to text, where people can share their thoughts and their day with one another; and luckily enough we do have a solution to that: video. In particular: live video, or video messages, which has recently become possible with Ustream's and Justin.tv's free APIs.

We've implemented text in Treehouse, and while we intend to do pictures and video, we are now struggling with the notion of doing it for our final project.

Problems with Treehouse
Most of the people with whom we have talked to about Treehouse cannot see the value in such an app. I do not blame them - on bad days, I think about the idea and wonder if we've got it wrong. But there are a number of things that I'd like to think proves otherwise.

I know a friend who is in a long distance relationship. She leaves private drafts in her boyfriend's blog, posts that he opens and reads when he comes online. This is clunky, and can be done better.

I have another friend who uses Treehouse. She regularly checks on it now, because she and her boyfriend would take turns telling each other about their days. They post messages, and choose moods, and complain to me that they would like an email notification feature to tell them when, exactly, either one of them has updated their treehouse.

Yet another friend has a boyfriend who doesn't write much, and she has asked for pictures to be implemented as soon as possible. She thinks video posting is a wonderful idea, though she's in Australia at the moment, and so is constrained by bandwidth limits.

I have learned, however, that Treehouse is currently in a quagmire. If we are to do it as our final project, we must be fairly certain that we're on to something, and the only way to be sure we're on to something is to be compelling enough to attract plenty of new users. The problem with that is that Treehouse will only be compelling if we implement three things: 1) if we take it out of Facebook, 2) if we implement photos sharing, and 3) if we implement video messages. We are not 'over the hill', as one might call it, and therefore we have no way of knowing if what we think is true in theory would translate to real world usage. Regardless, Treehouse is our stab at the problem. We'll see how it turns out in the end.

Conclusion
I believe we can do communications better. Friends drifting apart after going overseas, lovers falling out of love in a distance relationship - these are problems that are as old as migration itself, and the solutions to these problems would be very, very valuable if and when they are found. I believe that these solutions, when they come, would not look radically different from what we have as communications (online) today. They would instead be smart repackagings of certain elements, tweaked and optimized for the problems they intend to solve. The makers of Wave, at least, have got one thing right: email just doesn't cut it any more. It is time to find better, deeper communication channels, ones that (hopefully) do not look like Wave.

I'd like to close with Harris's takeaway, which he says at the end of the fourth section of World Building In A Crazy World:

Speaking especially to young students of computer science, art, architecture, and design—I would encourage you, as you imagine what you want to become, to consider becoming digital world builders.

Help construct our future digital world. Build honestly, naturally, authentically, beautifully, not motivated by page views or ad revenue but by what the digital world should be, in its purest, noblest sense. Articulate digital spaces that nurture the soul and the spirit.

Don’t leave it to today’s companies to solve these problems, as they will only perpetuate the same habits they have already adopted. There needs to be a new vision for the future of the web, one that is sensitive both to the human individual and the human collective, just like real life.

(...) The rest of the human race—the struggling journalists, the embattled authors of books, the makers of music, the normal folks who have been robbed of their individuality by today’s web—should expect its digital world builders to build them beautiful, honest, nourishing worlds.

We need good world builders. Builders to build the COM1 equivalents of the Internet. As humans, yearning for connection, we deserve better sites, better buildings in our digital world. And it's also likely that the world builders of tomorrow would be as rich as the world builders of today. Zuckerberg has done good, but Facebook isn't particularly meaningful. So, you know - why not us?