This article is based on the presentation ‘Designing for the social: avoiding anti-social networks' given by Miles Rochford to the Information Architecture Summit in Miami, Florida in April 2008. All opinions expressed in the article below are the author's own and do not necessarily represent the official view of Nokia. You can view the presentation slides at
The panopticon was first proposed as a ‘model prison' by English philosopher Jeremy Bentham in 1785. It was seen as a solution to managing large volumes of prisoners - England was about to settle Australia and transport its petty criminals there.
The main objective was minimising unwanted behaviour, whilst keeping costs under control. The panopticon was built around two main ‘rules':
The ‘watcher' is in a position enabling continuous watching; and
The ‘watched' are in positions where they cannot determine if they are being watched.
Architecturally, this led to the creation of a multi-story tower for the ‘watcher', located in the centre of a round building, with cells for the ‘watched' on the outside looking in. Using bright lighting on the tower, it is easy for the ‘watcher' to see the ‘watched' but not vice versa.
Essentially the panopticon changes the behaviour of the ‘watched' prisoners, because they are unable to tell if the ‘watcher' guards are able to see their behaviour (and subsequently punish them for it).
A number of panopticon prisons were built, including some still in operation in the United States and the Netherlands (the Dutch responded particularly well to the concept). Fidel Castro was famously imprisoned in one on Isla de Juventud in Cuba.
Social Networks as panopticons
So what does the panopticon have to do with social networking, and sharing?
Today, social networking, and in particular sharing, provides us with a model similar to that of the panopticon. ‘Watchers' are in a position enabling continuous watching, and the ‘watched' are not aware of the watching that is taking place (although they may have some degree of control through privacy settings).
Unfortunately, privacy is often an afterthought - a long form to fill in, which is then promptly forgotten. Human relationships, and the context of individual items being shared, are also considerably more complex than social networking systems currently model.
Foucault suggested in 'Discipline and Punishment' that the panopticon creates a form of ‘internal subjugation' leading to a ‘docile body'. Adam Greenfield, the Head of Design Direction for my team at Nokia Design, has described the new panopticon as a ‘continuous fabric of observation' - ranging from surveillance (for example, the CCTV systems of the United Kingdom) to sharing (the archetypical social network, Facebook). We place our information in the cells, and we all take turns in the central tower, looking out on others.
Taking the panopticon a step further
Social networking, however, provides three additional elements that make sharing more seductive: ubiquity, eternity and serendipity.
Ubiquity has come around through the combination of cheap computing power, miniaturisation, ‘limitless' storage and widespread network connectivity. Together, these elements combine to provide a comprehensive platform for documenting peoples' lives. The mobile telephone is already using this platform to reach out to billions of people - more than refrigerators, bank cards or even the polio vaccine have managed to achieve (even though a mobile phone costs more than a month's salary in many countries).
Eternity, in technological terms, doesn't mean forever. However, digital content is cheap to acquire, easy to keep and highly discoverable (thanks to the work of information architects, who are great at creating ‘fact patterns'). This means that we now have ‘distributed persistence' - data can be found in a number of different locations, and there is a lack of control over the ongoing and future use of data. Eternity also raises the question of whether it is right to ‘remember' everything - because forgetting acts as a filter, a fuzzy social memory, which allows for forgiveness and other human responses.
Serendipity is magic - literally a fairy tale about the three princes of Serendip. Traditionally, it has been seen in an ambient way - something which happens around you and cannot be created. Today, social networking provides forms of ‘mediated' serendipity, which tries to generate social luck and deliver joyful coincidences in everyday life. Dopplr (which one of its co-creators, Matt Jones, described as a ‘social physics engine') is a good example of the move toward serendipity in social networking.
Nowhere to hide
From an information science perspective, however, many of these benefits are counter-intuitive. Archiving is one of the greatest challenges in library science, and it is noteworthy that the best archiving mechanism currently available - in terms of longevity, data density and storage cost - is microfilm (an Australian project archiving email for future research took this approach to ensure readability in 2100). One of the greatest achievements of mankind - the first journey to the Moon - was comprehensively documented, but today no hardware or software exists to interpret many of the magnetic tapes used for NASA telemetry data.
‘Eternity' then, is about a social context, not an historical context. With Facebook now the largest digital collection of photographs on the planet (in essentially a ‘walled garden'), maintaining the historical record is an even greater challenge. Ubiquity presents similar challenges - often the perception of data storage is that ‘near enough' is good enough. As more human output is stored and documented in a digital form, this is a frightening prospect - enormous archives controlled by corporations which could disappear overnight, taking large swathes of knowledge with them. The closure of DejaNews, a USENET newsgroup archiving service, could have taken more than 15 years of postings with it, had Google not purchased the archive at the last minute.
There are also issues at a personal level, in terms of the moral rights of creators and participants in digital media. Digital Rights Management (DRM) is a good example of the challenges around ‘distributed persistence', reflected by the ongoing failure of the music industry to reduce casual piracy. It also highlights the issues around sharing content - for example, photos which feature a person are outside the control of that person. It is all too easy to create copies of content and distribute them widely - without respecting the moral rights of the creator.
So with these elements brought together in today's social networking systems, we have a panopticon, ubiquity, eternity and serendipity. Essentially, we have created our own version of The Truman Show. A world which is simultaneously painful and seductive, with relentless honesty, where it is impossible to hide. (Or, as I suggested at the IA Summit with just a hint of hyperbole, ‘a prison for humanity').
Social networking tools are redefining the way that social networks operate, especially in terms of sharing information. Privacy used to be a physical concept - social delays controlled the distribution of information to an extent. Sharing, too, was limited by space and time - you needed to be in the same physical space to share an experience. These physical limitations meant that the line between public and private was more clearly drawn.
The role of the information architect
Today we delegate privacy to other people, and other systems. Cause and effect are separated, ‘possession' of information means nothing, and there is no central way of managing information. Combined with rapid, even real-time, delivery (no social delay), there is a greater risk of unwanted information sharing. As we know from the panopticon, ‘knowing' something changes the way people behave - and there is no reason why our social networking tools will not have a similar effect. We are simultaneously making it easier to share information and making it harder to control the distribution of that information.
Adam Greenfield also noted that the ‘...great preponderance of people who are designing [social] functionality are not in fact aware that this is what they are doing'. Enter the information architect.
Information architects, and designers generally, have an important role to play. We can encourage positive outcomes through persuasive design and empathy for others. We can minimise negative outcomes, in part simply by making sure people are aware of the consequences of their actions. But ultimately, we need to ensure that the most important elements of offline social behaviour are supported in the tools which we develop for online social networking.
I've created an eclectic list of techniques which can help designers to understand how to address these issues:
Managing the consequences (surfacing the obvious ones and addressing the possibility of unintended consequences - especially those harmful to people)
Defaulting to harmlessness (making it harder for harm to come to either individual people or the communities to which they belong)
Requiring reciprocity for sharing (using ‘bartersharing' - essentially ‘you show me yours, I'll show you mine' - to avoid lurking and stalking behaviour)
Enabling plausible deniability (allowing people to use ‘lies' to manage social conflict - especially in relation to when and where an event took place
Using different levels of granularity (imprecision through blurring, zooming and anonymising)
Enforcing accountability (empowering people to exercise moral rights over content - whether they were a creator or an actor)
Supporting emergent behaviours (flexible design to minimise designer ‘bias' and allow communities to define their own use for tools)
Being less evil (designing out opportunities for ‘anti-personas' to harm others but maximising the opportunities for good people to do good things)
Encouraging difference (through empathy and understanding as a designer, and recognition of the wonderful diversity of people)
Thinking globally (virtual actions have real-world consequences, and persuasive technology can be an enabler for change).
Although this list is by no means exhaustive, it provides a starting point for designers to recognise and address the complex issues surrounding social networking tools, especially those involving sharing. As more designers create tools which meet peoples' needs, our expectations will change and ideally, social networking will be something which helps us be more human, rather than being a ‘prison for humanity'.
Miles Rochford has been designing interactive experiences for more than fifteen years. As an information architect, he has worked on projects for government, non-profit, corporate and startup clients based in the United States, Europe and Australia. He specialises in service design, spatial data and mobile delivery - from systems to map toilets across Australia to keeping track of scientific vessels in the Antarctic.
He is currently working for Nokia Design, based in London, where he is a Design Specialist in the Service and UI Design team, developing service and interface concepts for future Nokia products and services.
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This article is based on the presentation ‘Designing for the social: avoiding anti-social networks' given by Miles Rochford to the Information Architecture Summit in Miami, Florida in April 2008. All opinions expressed in the article below are the author's own and do not necessarily represent the official view of Nokia. You can view the presentation slides at 
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