For instance, Jason writes: “There are things which I could share around with work colleagues and friends that I might not be too keen about sharing with family and kids at home – at the moment, Facebook does not provide a mechanism to separate these different aspects of a person’s personality.”

This is just plain wrong. You can control very precisely who will see your status, image or album: you can direct what you post to a particular group of users or you can block a particular groups of users. Denying this is just plain silly – as is not knowing it in a discussion about Facebook

Relationships among people and content are fuzzy and need to be integrated.

These relationships can be made to automatically adapt based on experience.

The result is The Learning Layer. Available now at http://www.learninglayer.com

There are things which I could share around with work colleagues and friends that I might not be too keen about sharing with family and kids at home – at the moment, Facebook does not provide a mechanism to separate these different aspects of a person’s personality. If we had the ability to create Persona’s, I would create 3 tags, Family, Friends and Work.. then whenever I shared a status update or video or link etc, I would be able to tag it with one or more persona profiles to indicate who could see it.

I went thru some similar introspection last week when analyzing the various ways people reached out with birthday wishes.

Happy Birthday! Love, Your Wall

To get to some fundamentals:

At root all social groupings whether a band of hunter-gatherers or a global social organism… are products of what might be called Social Energy

social energy:individual and collective decisions operating within the limits of  available resources and natural law which (quite literally) result in the product you see as a civilization. A decision here is defined as an idea + an action. Decisions can be motivated by any number of factors.

(Money, btw, in this context can be seen as a necessary but inherently imperfectable technology for the storage and allocation of this social energy.)

For a number of reasons there are difficulties in scaling decision mechanisms which relate directly to a loss of proximity (whether physical, psychological, social, etc.) that have been a problem since that move from hunter-gatherers.

Perhaps the single greatest issue is the problem in the boundaries of biological altruism which have relation to Dunbar’s Number. (the natural group size so central to this discussion)

The role of the Internet in addressing this problem is central and timely.

I’d suggest that it’s at least possible that this scaling problem in biological altruism may be quite literally universal.

Brief post on this here:
The Problem in Scaling Altruism: Where’s the Intelligent Life?

There’s a vital role that Internet capabilities offer not previously available. Loss of mis-design of this potential may be catastrophic.

I make a specific suggestion:

The Individually-controlled / Commons-dedicated Account*

*A Commons-owned neutral platform for both political and charitable monetary contribution… which for very fundamental scaling reasons must allow a viable micro-transaction (think x-box points for action in the Commons). The resultant network catalyzes additional functionality for co-ordination of other ‘social energy’ utilization. (P.S. Its the most neutral and ultimately politically viable method for the public finance of elections.)

It’s a simple idea. But so was the lightbulb… just heat up a wire until it glows.

I could be a fool… and there are certainly significant entities for whom such a structure could prove disruptive… but maybe not so disruptive as they think.

Nevertheless sometimes you have to shake things up a bit…

Personal Democracy: Disruption as an Enlightenment Essential

Decision Technologies: Currencies and the Social Contract

Extinction requires only inertia.
We’ve reached that critical point now where…
Evolution requires tools…
Carefully thought out tools.

Of course MK was smart to use the Wisdom of the Language — at any rate smarter than a lot of people who still seem to have difficulty grasping the idea.

It seems to me humans are accustomed to evolution, and attempts to engineer perfect initial experiences tend to fail (as countless real-life ‘perfect society’ experiments attest). In a weird way, this is the equivalent of the uncanny valley phenomenon applied to groups.

So the best way to achieve the objective is to focus on a purpose that already galvanizes individuals in the physical world: http://www.comradity.com

Katherine Warman Kern
@comradity

And we certainly did develop a new set of mores. In the western world, this culminated is what many call “Victorian” society, with elaborate principles of etiquette and relationships. In the US anyway, we’re still deeply effected by Victorian culture..