Networking and relationships

This note was handed out at the end of the workshop, to provide further insights into how to interpret the implications of change. More on the briefing to groups here.

Types of relationship

William J. Mitchell’s book E-topia describes different categories of relationship from close to distant, personal to organisational. In the past, transport and telephony has changed the nature and distribution of these relationships — which are the very sinews of our towns and cities.

Tomorrow’s telecommunications will again change these relationships — and so the way our urban places develop physically, socially and economically. Relationships are categorised as:

Primary: direct personal relationships with family and close friends. Likely to remain substantially home-based, and face-to-face. Telecommunications enables us to maintain and enhance contact, but generally does not replace interactions.

Secondary: relationships with people we regularly encounter — friends, associates, work colleagues, trades people — where our interaction is mainly with them in a particular role. Some work and trade relationships may move from neighbourhood to ‘virtual’, while we may develop new face-to-face relationships as more people work from home and socialise in the live/work neighbourhood.

Tertiary: relationships with organisations rather than particular persons we can name. The Government says all its transactions will be online by 2005; more and more retailing and commerce will go the same way; so will interest groups. The extent to which organisations are ‘trusted brands’ will probably determine the nature of our relationships with them. Online interest group relationships, initially tertiary, may be translated to secondary through our desire to meet.

Quaternary: relationships that exist between observed and anonymous observer. Will we be happy that hospitals and hotels, for example, may be able to offer services based on observations and monitoring of our behaviours? How much networked scrutiny will we want? Will we seek to avoid some of those relationships — enhance others? Will we be able to?

Quinary — relationships with artificial entities. Agents, artificial guides, home-helpers, medical assistants may become almost primary in our relationships…. in other instance they may mediate relationships. They will change the need and nature of these relationships by doing some of our work for us… just like ‘real’ personal assistants and researchers. Which of our other relationships will we let them handle?

Planning and Network design issues

Towns and cities developed through our need for social and economic relationships. Power supply, transport and telephony then changed how closely we had to live to each other, and how close to workplaces, restaurants, cinemas, theatres. Telecommunications will make further changes. Just which way those change go will be influenced by which category of relationship is important…. and this will again be determined by our age, health and wealth. The changes will also be determined by who controls network development.

From this analysis it follows that certain types of network will reinforce certain types of relationship. For example, one might hypothesise:

Council intranet-extranets will probably focus on mainly on tertiary and then secondary relationship, There may be an element of quaternary through surveillance. They will not generally be designed to enhance primary or quinary relationships.

Commercially designed local networks will at first focus on secondary relationships. They may offer facilities useful in primary and other relationships — but there may be a price to pay in terms of advertising and commercial ‘skew’.

Non-profit, local community networks will focus mainly on non-commercial aspects of secondary relationships, with links to tertiary. They will be complemented by community of interest networks.

In fact, categorisation is not so easy. Commercial organisations like koz.com and moonfruit.com provide individuals, groups and families with ’primary’ tools of web and forum building. Koz even brands it ‘family shoebox’.

Public-sector initiatives concerned with lifelong learning and social exclusion will aim to enhance person opportunities, and design systems and content to that end. Community networks may find they have to engage in more revenue-generating, semi-commercial initiatives to sustain their activities. Land use planning, urban design and other professions have developed ways of modelling these dynamic changes. Town managers of the future will need additional tools.

David Greenop and David Wilcox, Partnerships Online