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best understood through the analogy of the fax machine: a world
with one fax machine has no use for faxes, but every time you add
a fax, you square the number of possible send/receive combina-
tions (Alice can fax Bob or Carol or Don; Bob can fax Alice, Carol,
and Don; Carol can fax Alice, Bob, and Don, etc).
But Metcalfe’s law presumes that creating more communica-
tions pathways increases the value of the system, and that’s not
always true (see Brook’s Law: “Adding manpower to a late softer
project makes it later”).
Having watched the rise and fall of SixDegrees, Friendster, and
the many other proto-hominids that make up the evolutionary
chain leading to Facebook, MySpace, et al, I’m inclined to think
that these systems are subject to a Brook’s-law parallel: “Adding
more users to a social network increases the probability that it
will put you in an awkward social circumstance.” Perhaps we can
call this “boyd’s Law” for danah boyd, the social scientist who
has studied many of these networks from the inside as a keen-
eyed net-anthropologist and who has described the many ways
in which social software does violence to sociability in a series of
sharp papers.
Here’s one of boyd’s examples, a true story: A young woman,
an elementary school teacher, joins Friendster after some of her
Burning Man buddies send her an invite. All is well until her stu-
dents sign up and notice that all the friends in her profile are
sunburnt, drug-addled techno-pagans whose own profiles are
adorned with digital photos of their painted genitals flapping
over the Playa. The teacher inveigles her friends to clean up their
profiles, and all is well again until her boss, the school principal,
signs up to the service and demands to be added to her friends
list. The fact that she doesn’t like her boss doesn’t really matter:
in the social world of Friendster and its progeny, it’s perfectly
valid to demand to be “friended” in an explicit fashion that most
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