Social Technology's "Hyper-Status"

Connect to Check | 1

Hyper-Connectivity

It is almost a trope to say that we humans are social creatures, but let’s face it: look around; we are. When an entire carriage has their eyes fixed to phones; we love to connect, almost hyperly so. Hyper-connectivity, from the cities we live in, to the social technology at our fingertips, envelops us.¹

With 96% of teens² using the internet daily, and with 63.8% of the world's population using social media in some capacity, it might be safe to say that online social platforms like TikTok, Instagram, and X/ Twitter have transformed what we can call “traditional sociability”. Instead of being restricted to interactions with those in their immediate, physical locality, social platforms have created global virtual communities, where collections of geographically and culturally dispersed people can, with relative ease,³ interact on a daily basis.

The New Age “Town Hall”

Breaking traditional moulds, we may instead label this phenomenon “hyper-sociability”.⁴ In the nouveau fashion of the emerging Gen Alpha, global virtual communities are replacing traditional “brick and mortar”. Crowds will no longer gather inside the town hall next to the square. Meetings are no longer confined to the physical. Virtual communities are converging, instead, within the digital.

Social technology (s.tech), then, is what makes these new age town hall meetings possible. Consider it the brick and mortar foundations - if the bricks were made of bits and the mortar the flow of electricity that holds it all together. Not only is s.tech the infrastructure necessary for the hall to be built in the first place, it is the hall itself. It is the ability for the community to be heard. It is the ability for information to be shared, for changes to be made, for things to get done.

Far from a brick facade, however, digital niches are quickly becoming a permanent meeting point for 21st century communities.⁵ Whilst clearly a lot has changed since the turn of the century, architecturally, digital town halls still, just like their physical counterparts, require a sturdy stack of technological bricks and informational mortar to stand.

Sharing Media

One essential component to any town hall meeting is the sharing of media, to be discussed and deliberated upon, for decisions to be reached. Included within the digital building blocks of s.tech is “social media”, defined here as the ability to capture moments across a range of media (camera, audio, video etc) and share it (with some optional level of pseudonymity or anonymity) locally or globally.

Platforms with asymmetric sway over such digital media space include “Technological Leviathans” like Meta/ Facebook, Instagram, X/ Twitter and Snapchat. From these platforms the ability to share media, once delegated to mainstream media and news outlets, can be done by any individual with a camera, smartphone or internet connection. As of 2023, 69% of people aged between 18-29 source at least part of their news stream from social media. What was once limited to a once-a-month town hall discussion is now shared as quickly as your thumb can hit “send”.

Communication, historically, has equated to the deliberate acoustic design features of the hall itself, allowing individuals to shout and be heard from one end to the other, or the physical communication networks like telegrams and postal services which allowed messages to reach the town in the first place, has now been outsourced to other scaley giants like Zoom, Teams and Whatsapp. Just look at the post-pandemic rise of global remote working, which has risen from 13% in 2020 to 28% in 2024. Sure, there are still a lot of untouched gems in the world, where working from home still consists of setting up a grill in your front yard, but mostly, as the 21st Century rolls on, it is some digital nomad in a cafe somewhere.

Transparency

Downstream effects of hyper-connectivity and -sociability include shifts in various fields, like the increased transparency⁶ - the ability for information to reach people so that they can accurately observe and be a part of the decision making process - we are witnessing in the educational space, be that physically, or across the digital network. Hyper-connectivity encourages hyper-sociability, and the movement between these two network-based structures helps develop new ways to effectively integrate education-technology and digital learning, what was once at the will of the individual school and, oftentimes, teacher, now has the potential to shift dramatically.

Underpinning this transparency and, to a large degree, hyper-connectivity itself, is peer-to-peer communication. In the most basic sense, getting a message from “a to b”. The network structure inherent to s.tech has exponentially increased the peer-to-peer communication process, and professional and educational interactions are simply being reshaped in the process.

Being Heard

Whereas before we would send letters by post, or make long-winded connect calls powered by switchboard operators, now, as 3G networks give way to new legions of 5G towers, the physical infrastructure necessary for you to Facetime your best friend whenever you so wish is all around us, at all times. No longer do we trudge through the mud down to the town hall. Hyper-sociability, whether we acknowledge it or not, is all around.

And that takes us to transportation, quite literally getting to the town hall. A key component influencing the manner in which sociability scales, whilst communication technology has cut the need to travel at the knees, people still need to get around, and ride platforms like Uber, Grab and Bolt increase the mobility of people in a given area, saving you from being late to that all too important meeting. People can congregate easier than ever in history. Whatsmore, the deep connection between transportation and economic development means technologies supporting social mobility can grow into economic networks in their own right.

Tapping Into Economic Streams

Not only do economic structures develop locally (e.g. with the increased efficiency when moving goods and services around a specific area), but given the ease of international transactions through services like PayPal, Shopify or WePay, these economic networks can scale both “local→global” (e.g. workers who immigrate to a country and send money home to provide for their families) as well as “global→local” (e.g. say, for example, a criminal organisation making money internationally and funneling it back to one specific region). Considering mobility is integral to sociability, without the ability to reach a meeting point of voices in the first place there would be no town hall, there would be no sharing of ideas, there would be no change.

Hyper-Sociability

Inspecting the technological building blocks of the new age town hall it quickly becomes clear that the physical space should not overshadow that of the digital. For sure s.tech has physical components, like the 5G towers or the smartphones. Sure, those physical components have both physical and digital infrastructure and supply chains behind their production.

More importantly, however, there is now an even bigger desire, through some form of global virtual community, to connect socially in the digital space. Be it within digital rooms, forums like Reddit or Quora, “chat” platforms like Discord or Telegram, on digital stages, blogging sites like Substack or Medium, whether gathered around in a circle with a simple “GC” on Whatsapp, or what was once mahjong on the corner now a shared gaming experience on Xbox and Playstation, even, some point sooner or later, belonging to a tangible community built solely in the Metaverse.

Whilst I am still two steps away from evoking a complete Upload-adjacent scenario, the digital and technological spaces are clearly overlapping with our physical and biological spaces in a hyper-novel fashion.⁷

We humans are social animals. There’s the trope. It becomes less of a trope when we realise technology, an extension of us, also increases sociability, even if it is not in the conventional sense.⁸ Hyper-sociability is on the rise. But with society comes organisation, and with organisation comes governance. And given the hyper-connectivity we all experience on a daily basis, and given the deep interrelation between society and technology, s.tech no doubt sits as a keystone in the various bridges between systems of societal organisation and the governance structures built around them. That last part - organisation and governance - is where we head now.

Thanks!

1. What do I mean by hyper-connectivity? Well, just take the following anecdote: me and my friend were sitting at a cafe the other day, sipping coffee and chatting. The TV screen on the wall was playing, of all things to be playing on a Tuesday lunchtime, professional wrestling. Well, the coffee and the atmosphere was good, and being in a remote part of Thailand we went back, once a day, for the next three days. As it turns out, that particular cafe is very fond of pro wrestling. The same TV screen was playing, for the entire time we were sat at that cafe, nothing but pro wrestling. Neither of us have any affinity to pro wrestling. But, low and behold, on the fourth day, the day we did not go back, what began to pop up on our social media suggested feeds? Yep, pro wrestling. That is one surface-level way to imagine the type of hyper-connectivity I am referring to here. The others will be discussed shortly.

2. Survey demographic taken from the United States.

3. Having said this, the global inequality problem and its relationship with social technology will be explored later.

4. Whereas a single, concrete definition for “hyper-connectivity” is difficult, when it comes to identifying “hyper-sociability” in the world around us, I will be a little more clear:

1. Excessive Frequency of Social Interactions: The entity engages in social interactions at a significantly higher rate than is typical or necessary for its context or species. This includes an almost compulsive drive to seek out and maintain social contact, even when such interactions may not serve an immediate practical purpose. Given that around 210 million people worldwide are currently addicted to social media, the estimation that over 6 billion people will be using social media by 2027 suggests that a continuation of this trend is inevitable.

2. High Emotional Investment in Social Bonds: A strong and disproportionate emotional dependency or prioritization of maintaining social relationships. This might manifest as heightened sensitivity to social cues, a need for validation, or difficulty functioning in isolation. Echo-chambers are a poignant example of this.

3. Compromise of Other Needs or Goals: The level of sociability directly or indirectly interferes with the entity's ability to meet other basic needs, achieve personal goals, or maintain balance in other areas of life. For example, hyper-sociability might lead to neglect of rest, work, or self-care in favor of constant social engagement. Studies have shown that excessive screen time disrupts sleep patterns and mental health, and so-called “crazes” are just that: crazed. When I was growing up the “Cinnamon Challenge” was doing the rounds, and I even attempted it myself (not on camera fortunately). Or, an equally ridiculous yet a lot more dark example, “The Tide Pod Challenge”, got participants (almost always teenagers) to film themselves biting into or eating laundry detergent pods, the toxicity of which is no joke. Through memetic mechanisms, these participants, myself included, unknowingly became part of this phenomenon of hyper-sociability .

Modern society’s reliance on social technologies has fostered a culture that meets all the criteria for hyper-sociability. Frequency of interaction, emotional dependence on social feedback, and the prioritization of connectivity over other needs have collectively transformed humanity into a hyper-social collective.

5. Agreed that the permanency of digital spaces can be brought into question; just how feasible is it to completely stop every source of online connection, everywhere, just short of a full scale nuclear armageddon, huge solar flare or other natural catastrophe on the same scale? Part of me sees the integration of the digital-physical spaces as past the event horizon. The other part of me, perhaps the more optimistic of the two, sees the future as green, regardless of the relationship between the digital and the physical.

6. For more on transparency in the educational sector, see: Fairbanks, 2024 and Gonsalves & Lin, 2024

7. Hyper-novel in the most basic sense of extreme increases in new experiences and scenarios. I pattern-match this to the Paradox of Choice - where an oversupply of choice decreases effective decision-making and increases rates of anxiety.

8. Kids meeting on the corner of the street now meet in a party on Xbox. Partly this comes from increases in health and safety concerns, partly from physical ease, and partly because of the increased short-to-mid-term dopaminergic and adrenal stimulation that shooting zombies brings with it.