Social Protocols

= "Social protocols are codified procedures that coordinate human behavior". [1]

Description

From Joseph M. Riegle, Jr. at http://www.w3.org/Talks/980922-MIT6805/SocialProtocols.html

"Social protocol" is a term I use to discuss protocols (or their applications) that enable individuals and communities to express social capabilities. This would include tools necessary for creating rich content, managing trust relationships, making verifiable assertions or recommendations, and enabling agent assisted (or automatic) decision making. The ability to make verifiable assertions, to build reputation, to solicit advice, and defer to a trusted source are all real world capabilities. This is what meat space relationships are built upon. If we want sophisticated cyberspace relationships, we will need similar mechanisms.

Social protocols have substantive policy issues related to their development -- as do many other protocols, such as DNS. However, the key difference between a social protocol and something like DNS is that little social behavior, cues, or relationships are carried through DNS. The key function of social protocols is to express and operate upon such information for users and their computer agents."

(http://www.w3.org/Talks/980922-MIT6805/SocialProtocols.html)

Example

Time as a Social Protocol

Saffron Huang:

"Timekeeping is a device-mediated social protocol—various forms of timekeeping, supported by different tools, dictate how one may mark or tell time. In ancient times, shadows commonly denoted temporality: Aristophanes’ play Assembly of Women features a woman who asks her husband to return when his shadow reaches ten feet. Today, our timekeeping is based mostly on constructed standards of seconds, minutes, and hours, not accessible natural phenomena. Our modern infrastructure of precise clockware based on the oscillations of atoms and crystals enables people to show up for work at the same time, give directions, align on temporal measurements, and coordinate distributed software systems.

How does timekeeping affect our lives and are some forms of timekeeping better than others? All protocols constrain—the Catania sundial made this fact obvious to the Roman citizens.

...

When Roman war hero Valerius Maximus Messalla brought back a sundial from Catania after capturing the city in 263 BC, the crowds cheered—but this symbolic triumph over the Sicilian city soon became an ironic triumph over the lives of Roman citizens. The foreign timekeeping device, installed in the Roman Forum, heralded many more that were soon erected across Rome. People resisted the new technology—criticizing them, as the playwright Plautus did with reference to the superior timekeeping of his stomach, and calling for them to be torn down with crowbars. According to David Rooney—a horologist who shows how timekeeping has shaped our lives and society in the book About Time—the sundials stood for Rome’s ruling classes."

(https://summerofprotocols.com/control-and-consciousness-of-time-web)