How to measure the utility function of the Internet; OR why we flock here, my fellow birds

After my husband completed his architecture degree, he conceded what the rest of us had known for a while: his interests were broader. When he decided to pursue another degree, this time in economics, a lot of people were surprised. What's economics got to do with architecture? Everything.

Architecture considers what the people demand, how to supply and fulfill that demand, and how to balance the environmental and space needs with the human demand. Architects use natural and created elements to manipulate space, light, dark, and shadow. What they create is not simply a structure, but is also a reflection of who we are as a culture:

Architectural works are perceived as cultural and political symbols and works of art. Historical civilizations are often known primarily through their architectural achievements. Such buildings as the pyramids of Egypt and the Roman Colosseum are cultural symbols, and are an important link in public consciousness, even when scholars have discovered much about a past civilization through other means. Cities, regions and cultures continue to identify themselves with and are known by their architectural monuments.

According to Lionel Robbins, economics is, "the science which studies human behaviour as a relationship between ends and scarce means which have alternative uses."

Economics---resources, ends, supply, demand, means which have alternative uses---is the foundation in many ways for the types of architecture a culture and society produce. To my mind, there is a natural marriage among architecture, economics and sociology.

(Consider what our main architecture in the US reflects about our society, and its economics.)

Considering how these fields work together corporeally, I am not at all surprised that the same titles and principles have been employed in the technological---or cyber---world.

System architects perceive the three dimensional overall structure. They consider space and demand much as building architects consider it. When architects designed and engineers built the Internet, they did so because of an economic problem called scarcity.

"Scarcity means that available resources are insufficient to satisfy all wants and needs. Absent scarcity and alternative uses of available resources, there is no economic problem." (Source: Wikipedia)

These forward-thinking designers perceived the scarcity of a needed means of sharing and collecting information, noted the increasing demand for this, and observed that available resources had been maxed out.

Therefore, they incredibly thought of and created...the Internet.

Is the Internet as lasting and concrete as the Pyramids?

Only time will tell, but for now, it fulfills as culturally important a role as the Pyramids did.

At this point the Internet---as with a building---is in the hands of the users. You and I are now the architects of this space. We are maximizing its utility function, generating a high util measurement.

A utility function, as per Stephen Carter, is "a measure of a consumer's preferences expressed by the amount of satisfaction he or she receives from consumption of a set of desired goods or services."

I believe we receive a high degree of satisfaction from our use of the Internet, thus it is our preference, and the demand and supply curves would show dramatic rises---particularly in the social sector.

Carter goes on to say, "Economic theory assumes that people make rational efforts to maximize their utility. Sometimes one person's utility is dependent on another's."

And there we hit just past the how to the why: why are we so satisfied by the Internet, why are we so driven to it instead of to our corporeal society, and why does our demand continue to increase?

The reason we turn to the Internet is because of scarcity; we lack in our corporeal life the resources to fulfill our needs.

Why is that scarcity there, and why do we apply our own personal resources to developing goods and services that fulfill demand on the Internet instead of in corporeal life?

I say simply it is because of preference and satisfaction.

As the architects of our space, with a broader group of resources to draw upon, more market choice and 24/7 availability, it's easy to see the appeal.

It's also easy to apply the science. It's harder to apply the human element, which is the base of all of this.

So let me apply my human element, and you tell me if this is your why, too.

I don't live where I'm from. I'm surrounded by a lot of people who live here but also are not from here. Within our personal similarities are cultural differences, and vice versa. These can lead to misunderstandings, and because we do not know one another so well (through a lifetime), agendas and motives might also be misunderstood or hard to grasp, at least. Our relationships---which range from barely know to nodding acquaintances to social buddy to friend to close friend---don't go back very far or very deep. Out of need, we form quick intimacies, which occasionally lead to sharer's regret. We dance an awkward country line, coming together and drifting back apart as our lives, schedules, personal demands, and emotional issues and needs come into play.

I'm used to this. I attended four elementary schools (in six years), two junior highs (in three years), and one high school (in three years). By the time I hit high school, I wasn't at all enamored of our location, and after repeated pleas for boarding school somewhere northeast fell on deaf ears, I made the best of it, knowing it would all be behind me in a few years. When I ran into people I knew from high school in college, it surprised me that (a) they still got together with one another and (b) they wondered why I never did.

I saw no point; they were simply people I knew. It was easy to meet people and get to know them. It's easy to create a long list of people you know. Making friends...now that's the real challenge.

If after, for example, the three years of high school you and I were still not friends, the likelihood that we would be so was slim, therefore I had little motivation to seek you out when I could easily fill my life with other people I knew but who were not friends...and who I didn't need to go out of my way to see because they were already there, crossing my path regularly. Does this sound cold and cruel? It was a lesson my life brought to me.

Longevity was not in my vocabulary. In my mind, I had moved on. I had learned by seventh grade that long-distance friendships when you are young are nearly impossible to maintain (despite a few attempts) and it's better to just bucket sections of life and let the past remain in the past and move on to the future.

Although I think this cheats me (and some people I know) in some ways, I also think it better equips me to deal with the modern life I think most of us lead.

Our lives are completely portable now.

Jobs transfer us, opportunity far away beckons, even if we stay where we are, our friends and neighbors often move. People simply don't settle as they once did.

We also don't live out of homes in any sort of consistent fashion, as we once did.

I recall one halcyon neighborhood where we lived from about 1974 to 1978, or so. My father was, at the time, a Captain in the Army, and he had transferred from the active service to the reserves. He had an MBA and loads of skills from his military service, including how to deal with traumatized people. This all goes far in the corporate world. Therefore, he easily got a great job that came with stability as a benefit. So for these years, in this neighborhood, all the moms were stay at home moms and all the dads were home by 5 p.m. During the summer, the kids rotated through the houses and yards on the cul-de-sac with occasional forays to the convenience store for PopRocks and baseball card gum. During the school year, we walked (without parents) to the local elementary school in a big pack. In the afternoons the moms sat out front and the kids rode bikes and played and screamed like banshees. On Fridays we gathered at one neighbor's house and made homemade pizza. Adults ate in the dining room and the kids ate in the kitchen, then we resumed the outdoor playing. On the weekends someone hosted a barbecue. Once a week my mother took me and my sister to ballet. Now and again, I went home with a school friend. On the whole, though, our life revolved around and within our little neighborhood.

Somehow, for some reason, all of us hit this one space at this one time and were in sync. But this didn't surprise any of us. At the time, we expected it. That's typically how life was.

Now, finding that is unusual.

The world seems so much more dynamic. And I say that coming from a very dynamic childhood! But, I was the unusual one, you should understand. Everywhere I moved I was an anomaly, The New Kid. When I tried to go back to my last place, I found that while my departure had initially created a hole, it had quickly closed up, and we were all awkward with my de trop presence. When I tried to fit in to the new place, I found the same thing.

In general, I made friends with the few other transients. We all had the same sort of mentality: finish out the sentence in this location, then get our personal belongings, catch a bus and move on the the next place.

As I said, by high school we had all realized that friends are usually the here and now, not so much BFF as BFFN (best friends for now). Mr. Right? No, Mr. Right Now.

A boy I dated in high school kept talking about the future. I'd hum and haw, plead youth, and finally one day I said, "Seriously, neither of us even knows where we'll be in a year much less what we'll be doing...how can you think and plan about the future this way?"

It was a shock to him. He had lived in the same house in the same neighborhood in the same town since birth. Life, from his vantage, was stable, predictable, plannable. Foundations were solid. You could count on the essential elements always being in place.

I saw life as something you responded to more than controlled.

And so, this current life---of people coming and going; companies changing names and merging and diverging every six months; schedules always on different patterns and rarely crossing; taking friendship where you find it and knowing it will likely end in some way when your paths diverge---is no surprise to me, although I suspect it is for some people.

With little depth and history to our relationships, the investment in each other is, I theorize, lesser. Additionally, the personal demands within life are greater. Therefore, I believe the limit on what we can offer to one another emotionally, as support or going out of our way, is lesser. In fact, I don't know that this is a strong value within our society any longer. As Gwen recently said during our school discussion, there is a high value placed on individualism, and at what cost to society as a whole?

The problem is, the need doesn't decrease.

We still need those friendships, that place you go where everybody knows your name, where you can find friendship and support---and we expect much of it. Because we know there must be someone out there just like me or in my same boat, we seek that at times.

I believe more than ever in an increasingly diverse world, we crave similarity. More than ever in an increasingly mobile and dynamic world, we crave stability.

The Internet offers that.

Bloggers can move countries and that is transparent to us! (Yes, I am referencing Joy.) Our different patterns of life and complicated schedules are transparent. The amazingly and increasingly complex world---with more and more objects demanding our attention and the instant and constant accessibility we carry with us everywhere---that can overwhelm our senses are, ironically, quieter on the Internet.

In the dead of night or quiet of morning, at nap time, lunch time, whatever time we find, we can sit, and focus our thoughts into written communication of needs and ideas...uninterrupted. We can respond to one another in the same way.

We can control our investment, how close or how far we get with other people.

We are the architects of our socialization on the Internet.

We create the demand, maximize our utility, allow online social networks to succeed by our preferences and satisfaction received, and the demand grows. At some point there must be some market clearing, equilibrium...or maybe not.

Why do we prefer this? Because it's here on our time and on our terms. It provides goods and services we can't find in our daily life. And why doesn't daily life provide this? Because as our specific demand and expectations of need fulfillment grow, our sense of community and societal cohesion shrinks, ironically, through the expansion of the world.

Moreover, rather than simply having to dig deep sometimes or move on, however unfulfilling that might feel at first, on the Internet, we can feed whatever our need is, endlessly. The near infinite level of supply, through rotable people,keeps our emotions feeling as fat and happy our our middle-class bellies.

My thesis was: Support and sympathy can understandably be in short supply in daily life. If I find myself impatient with my own lingering problems, I can only imagine how my friends---with equally full and busy lives---run out of top priority space for my issues. It's no surprise then that sympathy runs out or is distracted before need ends. The Internet offers an unending supply of near-endless support. But that's not the only reason I turn to it for friendship...

So how would you respond to this question? How do you respond to my answer?

Copyright 2007 Julie Pippert
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