Chris Butler's Work in Progress

Social Media Tools and Synthetic? Communities

November 6, 2007 at 8:30 pm by Chris

My title for this post clearly betrays my underlying ambivalence toward social web communities. However, before being too critical, I think it's important to distinguish between two different types of social web interaction that seem to make up the social web movement in general.

One type utilizes existing communities and social momentum for the purpose of gathering and organizing information (think wikis and such), while the other attmepts to create communities using online technology and connectivity (think MySpace or Facebook). One could perhaps argue that some widely used applications bridge the gap between these two types in various ways, like Flickr , YouTube or LinkedIn, but that's a discussion for another post.

It seems to me that the applications which attempt to utilize our innate desire for community and group participation for the purpose of achieving difficult goals, like organizing information on Wikipedia or providing up-to-date reviews of businesses in the context of mapping software, are doing something positive. They harness our existing interests, knowledge and skills and connect and inform people in a way that was previously geographically impossible. I do realize that many critiques have been brought against Wikipedia, as to whether allowing just anyone to contribute leads to its overall unreliability, but the concept of using technology to allow many otherwise unconnected people to build an information resource is a good one.

One general aspect of these tools that I appreciate is that they don't have to get personal in the way that MySpace or Facebook inherently do. In other words, tools like Wikipedia or Google Maps are not ultimately about you or me, but the particular content that we are involved in gathering and organizing, where as my Facebook profile is ultimately about me. I'm not saying that personal is bad, but it's the personal context that can lead to overexposure, lurking (voyeurism, as Eric explored in the first portion of his newsletter, Social Media- Madness?) or false expectations for friendship. This notion is important to a tool like Diigo, which allows anyone to post public or private comments on any website on the internet, but also allows you to control when you see those comments. Imagine how frustrating it would be if you couldn't turn Diigo off- all of the sudden your entire web experience would be overrun by the noise and distraction of other Diigo users' comments! That would definitely be too "social" for me.

Another consideration is that for most social media tools to be successful, web users need to be comfortable with a certain level of transparency in their online behavior. For people just a bit younger than my generation, this does not seem to be a problem. However, for many it is. For instance, I was a bit shocked when a 'Web History' link appeared at the top of my Google account, and I realized that Google was now interested in collecting and saving my search and browsing history for its ever-growing cache of data (Ryan Naraine explores his suspicions of online privacy policies in his first point in The 10 Biggest Web Annoyances in this month's PC World magazine.)

I've spent the majority of this post focusing more on the first of the two types of social media that I differentiated, mostly because I still don't know what to make of the second type- social networks like Facebook. It's obvious that they are not going anywhere. In fact, despite my long standing reluctance to join, my younger sister finally convinced me to create a Facebook profile because I was at that point "like the only person in the family" not listed. So here I am, actively maintaining my profile and, I have to admit, liking it. I've "reconnected" with several people I haven't heard from in years- some even a decade, and it's really neat to see how these people have changed and grown and all the interesting things they're doing. Yet, I'm still wondering to what extent we've reconnected.

Mark and I recently did a "tour" of New England for a couple of days of client meetings and we both remarked to one another that engaging with our clients in person makes an incredible difference in terms of the quality of our relationships. Because our clients are all over the place geographically, the majority of our contact is over the phone, web meetings or email. But, on the rare occasion that we can meet face to face, something unique occurs that is difficult to articulate. However, I know that the effect is a greater sense of intimacy, trust, and care, and this makes me reflect upon the kinds of connections made through online social networks. Sure, my Facebook friends and I can check up on each other through our profile pages, send messages, play games and even make new "friends," but are we really a community in the way most people want to be? Is there intimacy in the way there is when you are physically present with a person? Don't worry Facebook friends, I'm not necessarily trying to build an argument against Facebook- I'm really just throwing these questions out there because I'm not entirely sure of the answers myself.

Perhaps this is the direction in which social activity is moving and I need to get with the program. I just can't help but feel that there is a qualitative difference between the sound of someone's voice and the words on a screen, or the physical presence of a person and an image of him or her, or a smile from a mouth and an emoticon. Or maybe I should learn to stop worrying and love the social web- after all, thanks to Facebook I am in touch with some of my high school marching band friends...

The mages used in this post were created by my wife, Carolyn.

Update (11/7/07): I recently saw Into the Wild, and there is a great scene in which the protagonist is describing his desire to move to the wilderness of Alaska, and his friend replies, "Ok, we're in the wild... what are we doing?" This is exactly the kind of question I ask about social media. I have my Facebook profile, I've gathered friends, posted images, now what?

Here's the Into the Wild trailer, where you can see the scene I described above:

Tags: web-development social-media software

Chris Butler's Work in Progress

Social Media Tools and Synthetic? Communities

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