A Social Network for Talkers

Author: David Gelernter (Yale computer science) · Published: The Wall Street Journal, Life | Ideas | Essay, June 19, 2015 (weekend print edition June 20–21) · URL: wsj.com (paywalled; full text from the Wayback capture)

One-line: A spec for “Talknet,” a voice-first social app of drop-in group conversations of up to ten people, organized by plain-English topics rather than phone numbers or addresses. It’s pitched first at the elderly, who “don’t want to type; they want to talk.”

Saved to Kyle’s Apple Note “Things To Internet” (c. mid-2015; the note cites the WSJ June 20–21 edition) as “A social network for talkers wsj June 20-21,” with a note to look up the author.

Summary

The problem. “No group needs social network software more than the elderly.” Society is full of “shriek TV, shriek music, shriek movies, shriek ads,” and today’s social networks are “virtually useless” to older people. “The elderly don’t want to type; they want to talk. And if they can’t make sense of new software in 10 seconds, they move on.” Losing dexterity and arthritis make “conversational typing” slow, and in any case “writing is an impoverished version of speaking.”

The design, “Talknet”:

• Open the app and you hear “a jumble of voices.” Five colored rectangles on screen are featured conversations, “like a diner’s daily specials.” They refresh every five minutes and are chosen with your tastes in mind. His sample topics: “Rubio v. Bush, schnauzers, wisteria in zone 6, grandchildren’s weddings, school board election in Woodbridge, Conn.”
• Ten people at most per conversation, anywhere in the world or as local as one floor of a building. Conversations are public by default and can go private if everyone agrees. A full conversation puts you in line with an estimated wait, and you can listen in meanwhile or join several at once.
• Only three buttons. An always-open mic plus a “speak” queue for when things get noisy. “New conversation” takes a typed or spoken topic. A “topic has become…” button handles drift.
• Scheduling through topic text. “Schnauzers : next Tues, 9-10 PM EST” becomes a prearranged conversation that the system advertises to the right people, relying on AI. Friends could talk after every episode of a show or during every Mets game.
• Replacing the phone call. A topic like “Hey, Jack Schwartz!” becomes a standing channel with a friend. There’s no ringtone: “Jack, you there?” “Coming—one sec.” “In a decade or two, phones will be dead anyway.”

The claim. Talknet’s “big advance is the power to create group conversations at a moment’s notice—and to replace phone numbers, Web addresses and many other antiquated brainstorms with plain English descriptions, plus ordinary machine intelligence.” Gelernter calls it “inevitable,” pointing to his record: he predicted the Web (his “mirror world”) in 1991 and Twitter-style streams (“lifestreams”) in 1996. “But its first task is to help the elderly. They need it, and we owe them.”

Full text

Archived privately against link rot: ../attachments/a-social-network-for-talkers/a-social-network-for-talkers.md.

Connections

• Clubhouse and Clubhouse is a Unicorn, Clubhouse Versus Podcasts, Monetization, Moderation, and Monopoly: in 2015 Gelernter described an app built from drop-in audio rooms, a topic-based feed of live conversations, a speaker queue and scheduled talks. That’s much of the format Clubhouse took mainstream five years later.
• Loneliness: the essay’s stated purpose is human contact for older people “who were often lonely even before we turned up the volume on American society.”