2020 Visionaries Part VI: Clay Shirky, Cory Doctorow, Philip Zimbardo, and Helen Fisher

Two Internet experts, a psychologist, and an anthropologist explore our multiplying connections.

The Network and Its Contents

What is a social network? A few years ago, the social network would have referred to our immediate acquaintances, the people we lived with and worked beside, perhaps individuals we identified as similar to us in age, income, politics, or consumption habits. They may simply have been classmates, just as Facebook was originally designed to cater to the student body at Harvard University. (A new film directed by Aaron Sorkin provocatively chronicling the rise of Facebook is called The Social Network.)

Take a look at the average Facebook page today and you’ll find millions of networks overlapping one another in a grand circuit. Personal and intimate postings from daily life—details of a child’s first steps, a disappointing day at work, a spousal argument—mingle freely with bits of political activism, amateur journalism, small acts of civic engagement. Our every human relationship, from the way we interact with one another at the most personal level to the way we relate to institutions, are interwoven into a single fabric that we now wear in public. Our social network is everyone with whom we interact; and that, increasingly, is everyone.

The question becomes, how do we make the most of these new connections in order to become better citizens, better life partners, and better people? We attempt to provide some insight in this final installment of the 2020 Visionaries series.

In true futurist fashion, we’ve tried to cast our net wide. We begin with a broad discussion about the new relationship between individuals and institutions.

First, New York University telecommunications professor and best-selling author Clay Shirky says that the greatest challenge of the Interconnected Age is also its greatest asset: cognitive surplus. We have more creativity, more data, more art, more content than any publisher, editor, or news producer could ever use effectively. The onus is on each of us to participate and make something useful with the new tools at our disposal.

Following, we present our account of a remarkable conversation. In one corner, Cory Doctorow, best-selling science-fiction writer, creator of the popular technology blog Boing Boing, and one of the world’s most vocal advocates for network freedom, liberal copyright policies, and open-source creative collaboration. His conversational partner? The network, in person: 60 people with whom Doctorow spoke over the course of two days of touring the mid-Atlantic region. The discussion ranged from science-fiction scenarios to the future of e-readers to the Google versus Viacom copyright fight and what it means for the future (hint: a lot). Here are the highlights of that discussion.

Coming Changes in Our Concept of Self

Next we’ll look at our deepest impulses toward moral action, love, and fidelity. Two of the world’s foremost experts on this subject will assess how these central aspects of our humanity could evolve over the next 10 years.

Stanford University psychology professor Philip Zimbardo describes his most recent endeavor, The Heroic Imagination Project, an exploration of the psychology of heroism. Zimbardo is uniquely qualified to speak on the strange ways that people can play off one another when they’re suddenly thrust into new networks and asked to take on new roles.

In 1971, Zimbardo gathered together 24 Stanford undergraduates to perform a mock prison experiment in the basement of the university’s psychology building. Participants were randomly assigned the role of guard or prisoner. The experiment was stopped after only six days when the students assigned to be guards began abusing their classmates. In his new research, he looks at “what pushes some people to become perpetrators of evil, while others act heroically on behalf of those in need?”

Finally, Helen Fisher, Rutgers University anthropologist and author of Why We Love: The Nature and Chemistry of Romantic Love (Henry Holt 2004), examines the institution of marriage and discusses how our understanding of love and fidelity will change in the next two decades. The amount of new data we are gathering about the chemical and biological roots of romantic partnership will challenge our traditional assumptions about these most important connections in our social web, presenting new obstacles and creating new opportunities in the decades ahead.—Patrick Tucker, senior editor, THE FUTURIST

Download a PDF of the entire Visionaries 2020 Part V article.