Free The Happiness Industry by William Davies Page A

social media sites offer users strict limits to how they can define themselves romantically (‘single’, ‘in a relationship’ or ‘it’s complicated’) or in relation to each other (‘friend’ or ‘unfriend’, ‘follow’ or ‘unfollow’), Moreno’s sociometry would only succeed if nuance were stripped out. The price to be paid for exiting the restricted limits of the Freudian office was that the depths of the human psyche started to disappear from view. To carve a path between a science of society and a science of the isolated individual, sociometry necessarily had to simplify both substantially. Of course such simplification can also be attractive, as Nicholas Christakis’s visualization demo in London that day testified. To act scientifically upon the social world, elites need to have nuance and culture removed.
    Secondly, what to do with the reams of data that resulted fromviewing society as a web of interpersonal relations? How to cope with it all or make sense of it? Moreno had no answer to this. The fact that social network analysis would not really take off until the 1960s wasn’t for want of an adequate underlying theory, but for want of sufficient power to crunch the numbers. As we have seen, the mathematical challenge that Moreno laid down for the social sciences was onerous. Social network analysis developed slowly in the United States during the 1950s and 1960s, impeded by the problem of processing complex bodies of data. Algorithms were developed which could discover patterns in social data, but universities lacked the computing power to automate them.
    It wasn’t until the 1970s that a succession of software packages was developed for purposes of social network analysis. 18 Of course these still required academic researchers to go and collect data to feed into the computers. This was still a laborious way of analysing the social world, which – compared with statistics – had little hold over the public imagination. All it took was for a broad mass of individuals to become regular users of networked computers, and Moreno’s methodology could become a dominant way of understanding the meaning of the term ‘social’. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, this was the very situation which had arisen, the opportunities of which were seized by the ‘Web 2.0’ companies which emerged from 2003 onwards. The sociometric studies which Moreno had conducted through interviews with a few dozen people, producing hand-drawn diagrams, could now be carried out in Facebook HQ at the flick of a switch, with a billion participants.
    But methods of social analysis are never as politically innocent as they appear. While social network analysis purports to be a simple, stripped-down mathematical study of the ties that bind us, it’s worth reflecting on the philosophy that inspired itsfounder. As far as Moreno was concerned, other people are there to prop up and please individual egos. A friendship is valuable to the extent that it makes me feel better. Once the study of social life is converted into a branch of mathematical psychology, then this produces some worrying effects on how people start to relate to each other. The narcissism of the small boy playing God surrounded by his angels has become another model for how pleasure is now manufactured and measured.
    Addicted to contact
    The main charge that has been levelled against the DSM, since the introduction of the DSM-III in 1980, is that it converts everyday forms of sadness and personality quirks into illnesses. This has been particularly pronounced in the identification of ever more forms of addiction. Until the early 1970s, addiction would only have been understood as referring to syndromes which affect the metabolism, such as alcoholism, and even then its social and cultural dimensions would have been recognized. In the era of the DSM-III and since, new