Mark Zuckerberg is serious about changing the very architecture of his social network. So why isn’t anyone taking him seriously?

The world’s reaction to Mr. Zuckerberg’s 5,700-word manifesto has been quite telling. Lukewarm at best in their coverage, the media seem to suggest that the thirty-something perhaps isn’t supposed to ask questions about what we want from our society, our lives or our planet, notwithstanding the fact that he controls one of the highest valued corporations in the world, one that is responsible for $227 billion in global economic impact. Pundits were quick to make the vastness of Zuckerberg’s sphere of influence the main reason for undermining any desire or ability he has to do anything meaningful, or good, with it, choosing instead to dismiss the post as “lip service” and “a nice idea.”

These media are missing the point.

On February 16th, in the only (and very public) amendment ever made to Facebook’s mission, Mark Zuckerberg published a post titled Building Global Community in which he posed what he believes to be “the most important question of all: are we building the world we all want?” A very important question indeed, and we ought to be asking ourselves what we should demand from Facebook, or what we ourselves must do, if the answer is “no.”

As a business anthropologist, I spent 20+ years getting up-close and personal with some of the world’s leading finance, healthcare, CPG, hospitality, telecommunications, and technology corporations with the express purpose of helping them more meaningfully connect with their customers, influence the culture, and shape the future. Over the years, I developed time-tested branding, positioning and communication strategies for culture-setting brands like Coca-Cola, American Express and Yahoo!, and category-disrupting companies like Chobani, Ally and Capital One. My career depended on my ability to apply my understanding of the fundamentals of human connection to the increasingly technologically-mediated relationships between humans and brands. And it is my experience investigating, experimenting with, and formulating these B2C and B2C2C relationships that compels me to say that the answer to Mark’s question is “no, we are not building the world we want.”

No, the technology we’ve built is not building the world we want—the very same technology that allows us to connect across vast distances has inadvertently, and too frequently, increased the emotional distance that divides and isolates us; no, because we spend more time talking “@” each other than with each other; no, because the social infrastructure that anchors us in the real world hasn’t found its way into the digital one.

But we needed to get to this place in order to figure that out. Brian Christian, the bestselling author of The Most Human Human and Algorithms to Live By, makes this important point in an interview with The Paris Review:

“ Indeed, some see the history of AI as a dehumanizing narrative; I see it as much the reverse. We build these things in our own image, leveraging all the understanding of ourselves we have, and then we get to see where they fall short. That gap always has something new to teach us about who we are.”

So what does the real-digital gap teach us?

1. That handing us the gift of connectivity and access doesn’t mean we’ll use it to foster empathy and forge meaningful connection and relationships;
2. That we thrive when we have a sense of community, not just the trappings of one, however sophisticated they may be (e.g., shared spaces, messaging tools);
3. That, when missing a strong sense of community, we tend to default into 2 main modes of social media behavior: broadcast (one to many), and lurking (one from many), because we don’t like the idea of being just one of many;
4. And that the transfer of social norms from the real world to the digital one does not happen automatically - it must be carefully ushered, planned.

What do we need to do to bridge the gap?

Though our virtual society is embryonic, we are fortunate to have thousands of years of history, research, wisdom, and insight into traditional, real-life interpersonal relationships to lean on, learn from, and refashion as we build, support and maintain a new digital social infrastructure. The team at my company, betwixt.us, has spent the last few years immersed in the literature and studies surrounding this topic—the psychology, sociology, biology and philosophy of community—with the express purpose of identifying the foundational elements that can transcend the real world environment and be meaningfully applied to, and incorporated into, the wild wild web.

The pattern that emerged is this: inclusive, supportive, informed, safe and civically-engaged communities are born of the strong bonds formed by their members. In order to become a community, a social network must shift its focus from extending its reach or deepening its own relationship with its members to building social capital among those members. Robert Putnam, Malkin Professor of Public Policy at the Harvard University John F. Kennedy School of Government and the author of the bestseller Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, defines the concept of social capital as “referring to connections among individuals...the norms of reciprocity and trustworthiness that arise from them…(it) is closely related to what some have called ‘civic virtue.’ The difference is that ‘social capital’ calls attention to the fact that civic virtue is most powerful when embedded in a sense network of reciprocal social relations. A society of many virtuous but isolated individuals is not necessarily rich in social capital” [emphasis mine].

This means that putting a big group of dizzyingly diverse strangers together in a virtual room doesn’t mean we should expect them to come together and to become something wonderful together, no matter how wonderful they may be individually. True community is not maximized by the number of fantastic people who join, but by the quality of the relationships among those who do.

The key lies not in how much time people spend in a network, or in how many other people they spend it with, but in how they spend their time together.

Building a global community is possible, but given what the gap teaches about who we are, this requires encouraging, supporting and rewarding behaviors that differ from our default digital MO. Einstein famously said that "problems cannot be solved with the same mindset that created them." Engineers built the internet we are now in desperate need to make more human, and they built it based on very short and oversimple technical articulations of highly complex human interactions. Given the bigness and complexity of Mark’s vision, Facebook's solution will fail us all if it is to be limited by the attention spans of prototypical technicians. During a meeting at Facebook HQ right after the publication of the manifesto, executives within Facebook shared with us the anxiety their own employees' experience when digesting the manifesto. The company, they told us, is full of people who can build products and bring them to market, but not folks who understand how social infrastructure works or what it means to help users develop the types of relationships that are the bedrock of strong communities.

To quote Mark, quoting President Lincoln: “As our case is new, so must we think anew, act anew.”

Social technology is new, and how we choose to deploy it will determine whether it binds or divides us. We formed betwixt.us because we believe in the power of social technology to create community across all types of divides—and in a way that was inconceivable just 30 years ago. Our work is not theoretical: we’ve created a practical, scientific, data-driven framework for developing and promoting social capital within our social networks. Our current 4-D model uses principles of psychology, sociology, human behavior, and philosophy. In partnership with the UC Berkeley Institute of Cognitive and Brain Sciences, we are investigating the digital application of four pillars of meaningful human connection:

1. The imperative of incrementality and reciprocity to the development of interpersonal trust, as outlined in the Social Penetration Theory, aka the Onion Metaphor, which states that “relationship development follows a particular trajectory, moving from superficial layers of exchanges to more intimate ones.”
2. The role that credibility, relatability, and reasonability, the three building blocks of great communication identified by Aristotle, play in the success of the most compelling changemakers, entrepreneurs and executives consistently use (TED: The Secret Structure of Great Talks; HBR: Three Elements of Great Communication, According to Aristotle)
3. The value of nurturing a growth mindset in users instead of achieving the hallmarks of “success” (HBR: How Companies Can Profit from a ‘Growth Mindset’)
4. The importance of time to the development of strong relationships

Building a new social infrastructure is a massive undertaking, but we know it’s possible because we’re doing it on a small scale. Our MVP is a chatbot in pilot with some fantastic organizations and we are excited to see these small communities gain strength from its use. What we have learned can help inform the development and evolution of any social network, professional or personal. If you’re committed to building a strong sense of community, be it among your employees or among your customers, consider introducing one or more of the online mechanisms that drive our relationship building framework.

Below are a few suggestions for owners of social networks, corporate or otherwise, including Facebook, who want to boost trust, respect, and rapport between members.

1. Apply the principles of Social Penetration Theory to your digital network:

• Foster consistent interpersonal interaction and progressive intimacy: Consider providing the teams or groups within your organization or community with scheduled topics or conversation starters designed to help them get to know each other gradually.
• Encourage reciprocity by rewarding dialogue and 2-way conversation: Give your users insight into how they engage with different members and reveal the patterns of engagement between members or within groups so it’s clear to users just how much they are individually contributing to a conversation.

2. Facilitate meaningful digital communication:

• Make sharing whole personhood a priority in order to build trust and rapport: Give your employees or users of your social network the tools they need to communicate holistically, not just quickly and superficially. Ask yourselves: are your users being encouraged to share their thinking processes? Their values? Or just their credentials?
• Focus on the depth of user interactions instead of their breadth: Help members of your network prioritize and foster the relationships with individuals or groups that matter most. Could different types of relationships require different types of interaction?

3. Nurture a growth mindset within social networks:

• Decommoditize “liking”: Make “liking” a more thoughtful choice by allotting a certain number of “likes” per user per week or per month to encourage more thoughtful posting as well as more purposeful feedback.
• Enable more thoughtful “reactions”: Give users a way to say what they like or why they liked instead of just that they “like." You could add context that reflects the KPIs of your organization or any group within it, e.g., “I like this because I find it: ‘entertaining’ or ‘informative’ or ‘novel.’

4. Encourage a “long game” mentality among members of your digital networks:

• Convey evolution and progress: Help users of your social network see the evolution of their various relationships over and showcase how these different relationships stack up relative to each other.
• Reward perseverance: Consider applying the notion of “leveling up” to relationship building so that users have a long-term relationship goal in mind when engaging with each other.

One senior Facebook executive told me, Mark Zuckerberg is as “serious as a heart attack.” I believe him. Just last week Facebook doubled-down on its focus on community by updating its mission from giving people “the power to share and make the world more open and connected” to giving people “the power to build community and bring the world closer together." This might strike some as a minor change, but it reflects a significant and strategic shift: Facebook—and by extension the society that uses it—has been largely focused on the wonders of technology itself (the ability to share and to be digitally connected); the new mission statement speaks to the promise of this technology and to our hope for it, which is to promote community and human closeness. Mark Zuckerberg is no longer just a teen prodigy experimenting with new technology from his dorm room. He has had to come to terms with the fact that his decisions have serious and lasting impact on people all over the world, not to mention on his own growing family. But we shouldn’t wait for Facebook (or LinkedIn or Twitter or Google for that matter) to start building digital social infrastructure. History, along with the norms that have been the hallmark of strong community since the beginning of time, can guide us all.