When objects become people and vice-versa.
Image via: http://www.flickr.com/photos/h-k-d/
Personification of objects is as old as language, nowhere is this clearer than in languages where every noun has a gender, often arbitrarily ascribing a male or female identity to things like tables, helicpoters and placemats. However, it has always been obvious that these were figures of speech (no pun intended). The gender was metaphorical not literal, the act of personification a literary or poetic construct.
This clear delineation is breaking down today via the Web and social media. In particular, it struck me the other day that things like Twitter and Facebook, flatten out the distinctions between people, objects, companies and ideas as all of these things (and more) now have the ability to create a profile, collect friends/followers, describe their tastes, preferences and affiliations and generally build data that describes them and their social graph.
Obviously, to the vast majority of applications and services on the Web (barring captchas), the data associated with an object or idea is not really that different from the data associated with a person. Therefore, it’s possible to see that objects, ideas and other abstract concepts could start interacting with us in the same way that our friends, family and associates do. For example, the year 2010 could start posting on your Facebook wall, “see you in a few months.” Or perhaps more usefully, an object called “Tax changes for this year” could look at your behaviour and suggest various ways to cope with it.
Clearly a lot of this stuff is happening. Things like phone bills and bank statements and even refrigerators now have a lot more intelligence. It’s easy to see how the data fields around these objects could be expanded to include more of the meta-data that Facebook or Twitter build around us. And it’s an easy step from there to see how something like a Facebook group – which is often representative of an idea and which already has a lot of meta-data around it – could be made more intelligent and set free to act on its own.
I think this is already really interesting, but it’s even more fascinating to think about the other side of the equation which is what’s happening to us – people. Where we have, up till now, been extremely hard to define and describe using simple statements that anyone can understand, this is no longer the case – as far as the Web is concerned we are as logical and simple as anything else.
This is another view into how the Web is shifting the framework of our concepts. The word “idea” carries with it a clear (ha!) sense of abstraction and intangibility, while the word “person” implies tangibility yet also indefinability. While our usage of these terms on the Web assumes these same meanings, their actual potential and behaviour no longer match. It’s interesting to speculate that our language may hold us back from seeing a lot of the new possibilities that come from objects, ideas and people interacting at the same level.
