Skip to Main Content
Social Systems Engineering
book

Social Systems Engineering

by César García-Díaz, Camilo Olaya
December 2017
Intermediate to advanced content levelIntermediate to advanced
312 pages
12h 3m
English
Wiley
Content preview from Social Systems Engineering

5 ‘Friend’ versus ‘Electronic Friend’

Joseph C. Pitt

When engineering a social system, much thought needs to be given to how these systems could disrupt other important current social systems, diminishing human value, and whether that disruption can be systematically anticipated. I view Facebook as an engineered (i.e., designed) social system. It was designed as a means to facilitate communication among a group. Determining who was to be included in this group resulted in the use of the term ‘friend’. To become a member of the group, you ‘friend’ someone in the group – thereby creating, among other things, the verb ‘to friend’. Little or no thought was given to the negative implications of this decision. Here I examine some of those implications. I will also look at the impact the electronic world of information has on our understanding of information and its impact on the way we live. But first some preliminaries.

Social systems are rarely engineered deliberately and even when they are, there is no guarantee they will work in the way they were intended to. Consider a housing development. Planned living environments can be traced back as far as Thomas Moore’s Utopia (1516), but to refer to them as examples of social engineering is misleading. At best, a planned housing development creates an environment in which social systems can emerge. By ‘social system’ here I mean a set of relations among people with recognized rules of interaction, rarely set down on paper but understood ...

Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
and much more.
Start your free trial

You might also like

Netcentric System of Systems Engineering with DEVS Unified Process

Netcentric System of Systems Engineering with DEVS Unified Process

Saurabh Mittal, José L. Risco Martín
Systems Engineering in the Fourth Industrial Revolution

Systems Engineering in the Fourth Industrial Revolution

Ron S. Kenett, Robert S. Swarz, Avigdor Zonnenshain
A Practical Introduction to Human-in-the-Loop Cyber-Physical Systems

A Practical Introduction to Human-in-the-Loop Cyber-Physical Systems

David Nunes, Jorge Sá Silva, Fernando Boavida

Publisher Resources

ISBN: 9781118974452Purchase book