Japan’s New Social Network
Earlier this year, a new Japanese social network platform called Lemon was launched, exclusively targeting students attending universities all over Japan and accepting only the top one-percent of applicants. The founder of Lemon, Yusuke Matsumura, who earned a PhD in Artificial Intelligence in just a year and a half, designed an artificial intelligence program to sift out that top one-percent. Among qualities the program weighs are applicants’ social standing, potential, desirability, and overall likeness to the existing member base. It searches through applicants’ pre-existing social network presences as well as their overall Internet footprint. An applicant must be deemed compatible with at least 30% of the site’s current users to be considered. According to Matsumura, “people cannot verbalize or understand their own preferences,” which says something about what he believes his design does.
Lemon takes a completely original take on the contemporary model of a social network. The vast majority of social media sites advertise their incredible flexibility and openness to customization and personalization. Users are in charge and they are allowed to utilize the platform in whatever manner they wish. With Lemon, users essentially apply and merely wait for the site to work for them—creating the social network that they would traditionally be creating themselves. This is established by the core structure of Lemon—users have limited say in who else can join the network, only that as existing members, new members will be selected to join based on a collaborative affinity.
In class, we discussed the structure of social relationships and the connections between both individuals and between groups of individuals. We talked about the relevance of the strength of ties between members of one component (group) and the bridges that may or may not exist between components; about how these factors contribute to the natural interactions of “friends.” The design of Lemon ignores all these sociological constructs. Lemon does not allow for the natural development of “edges” or “bridges”—rather, it artificially does it all for the user. In fact, on top of the site’s selectivity about members, Matsumura hopes to program the current software to create “parties” and automatically invite users, as opposed to the traditional system where users select and form their own groups. This would be Lemon creating “edges” of friendship between members they deem compatible.
If Lemon is successful, what does this say about all that we have learned about the structure and constructions of social networks and they manner in which we believe components and individuals function together? If Lemon, is successful and artificial intelligence is able to pair individuals well and create one large component as functional as the global friendship network, then our understandings may not be as concrete and observed as we believed.
Source: http://www.vice.com/read/japan-has-a-new-social-network-for-the-one-percent-521