How “Social” is “Social”, Really?

An uninformed university student reflects on his personal experiences using trendy online social applications, and wonders as to what extent we can truly be social without conventional human contact and interaction. Hilarity ensues.

“Humans are inherently social: they live together, work together, learn together, play together, interact and talk with each other, and socialize. It seems only natural, therefore to develop interactive systems that support and extend these different kinds of sociality.” - Preece, Rogers & Sharp, Interaction Design, 2002.

Indeed, social web applications are all the rage now. So much so that the University of Queensland created a course with a catchy name, produced an entire syllabus and even went as far as recruiting a knowledgeable and distinguished lecturer all the way from England to teach it :-). And thus my journey began.

The mission sounded simple enough: sign up to a few social websites and applications, observe and report. I chose to focus on the “social” aspect of the tools and applications I’d be exposed to, and attempted to immerse myself in 7 of the most popular social networking applications on the Internet today. Despite the fact that I’d been using a few of these applications for some time now, being forced to actually think about them in a particular context was a whole new experience altogether. It soon began to dawn on me that my old-fashioned notions of what it meant to be social simply didn’t apply on the Internet. I discovered that the word “social” has taken on a meaning almost as broad as the Web itself, now redefined to mean “anything with the potential for user input”. In today’s age of social bookmarking, social marketing, social commerce and social shopping, you can live under a rock and still be the most sociable person in the world.

THE TOOLS

Aiding me on my journey were the following:
http://jayderagon.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2008/04/socialmedia_2png.jpg

Last.fm
Last.fm touts itself as “the social music revolution”, and is a unique combination of online social music portal and ingenious software. By tracking your musical preferences and listening habits, Last.fm attempts to provide personalised recommendations, connect users who share similar tastes, provide custom radio streams and more.

Twitter
Twitter is perhaps one of the fastest growing social applications out there at the moment. It is a microblogging tool, facilitating the exchange of short textual messages between its users, all answering one simple question: “what are you doing?”

Google Calendar
Calendar is Google’s free online calendar service, allowing users to store, manage and share their schedules and contacts with other users.

Facebook
“Facebook is a social utility that connects you with the people around you”. Wildly popular, Facebook aims to connect its users with their existing social networks, allowing them to keep up with friends and family, share photos and videos, reconnect with old classmates, discuss interests and hobbies and plan parties and other events.

del.icio.us
del.icio.us is a social bookmarking tool which allows users to store a collection of their favourite websites and URLs online. Users can also use del.icio.us to browse and search for links that other users have posted, all made easy with the website’s easy-to-use tagging system.

Blogger
Blogger is another of Google’s free tools, and one of the most popular and flexible blog creation and publishing services around. For those clueless individuals that have no idea what a blog is, it is essentially an online journal, composed of text, images and links to other web content. You are reading a blog now.

Flickr
Flickr is the web’s premium online photo management and sharing services. Flickr allows users to upload, organise and tag their digital photos, share them either privately or with the entire Flickr “community” and search for and comment on other users’ photos.

THE JOURNEY BEGINS

You’ll notice right away that although all of these tools are classified as social applications, they all differ greatly in purpose, function and utilisation. As my use of these applications grew, I realised that they also varied greatly in their effectiveness to me as facilitators of “traditional” social interaction. There were those that brought me closer to my friends and companions, and those that I had trouble seeing as anything but useful tools with little real value in a social context.

I’ll begin with what the cream of the crop - Facebook. If you ignore the plethora of useless applications for a moment (a virtual zombie vampire drink, anyone?) and look at Facebook at its most fundamental level, you might find that it’s actually quite brilliant. In all my experience using online social applications, Facebook emerged as the lone purveyor of the sanctity of traditional social relationships – a welcoming shelter in an infinite landscape where ‘social’ contact is largely shrouded in anonymity, hidden behind usernames and multiple identities. A place where your ‘profile’ and online social network is a reflection of, rather than an escape from or carefully selected slice of your real-world personal and social connections. With Facebook there are, at least for the meantime, no signs of the lack of accountability that seems to have plagued many other online social networking tools in the past, which essentially allow you to take on an online persona that may or may not represent who you really are. Unlike older social networking sites such as MySpace and Bebo, where the objective for many of its users seems to be to amass large, shallow “friend” networks with little or no value, with Facebook there is a strong emphasis on maintaining and rekindling current and past friendships and sharing the life events that connect us, facilitating real world interaction. This is what (I believe) makes it instantly appealing and accessible, especially to those that have shied away from online social networking tools in that past.

It is also evident that Facebook’s founders and developers have gone to some lengths to preserve this sanctity, both with subtle inklings such as the signup form that prompts you to enter your “Full Name” and instantly rejects usernames, bogus names and aliases, and the less-subtle policy of actively cancelling and removing the profiles of users that mange to weasel their way through the automatic filters (it is in fact a violation of Facebook’s Terms of Service to provide false personal details). My personal favourite though is the “How Do You Know this Person?” box that formerly appeared with each new friend request, and would not allow you to confirm a person as a friend if you selected “I don’t know this person”.

THE JOURNEY CONTINUES

Next up on the socialness ladder is what I like to call the ‘Tools that Have the Potential to Complement and Improve an Individual’s Day-to-day Social Interactions’ category. Google Calendar is an excellent example – an online tool that allows friends, relatives and co-workers to synchronise and organise their lives... together. As with most Google products, the concept has been executed quite well, and although the layout and navigation took me a little getting used to, its value as a social accompaniment is unquestionable.

This is in contrast to the other social application I’ve placed in this category – Twitter. Put simply, Twitter confuses me. When I first signed up for and began using the “revolutionary” microblogging app, I saw it as something cool and innovative, but with no real purpose as anything other than a timewaster. Its sheer simplicity and openness threw me off slightly (you can pretty much “follow” anyone you want), and I was genuinely freaked out when after less than a week of sporadic use, I was informed that I was now being followed by a fat white dude with a spine-chillingly intense profile picture. Was this the purpose of Twitter? To find and follow people you’ve never met just for the heck of it? I can’t for the life of me imagine why the aforementioned Twitterer decided to follow me, but from what I’ve seen so far it’s quite a common occurrence. Scott Karp, in his ‘Why I Stopped Using Twitter’ blog post, wonders “whether it will ever catch on beyond geeks who thrive on spending massive quantities of their lives on the web,” and in its current incarnation, I’d have to agree wholeheartedly with that sentiment.

During my painful research phase I stumbled upon twitterholic.com, a website that tracks Twitter usage and lists the top 100 Twitterers based on followers. Of the 6 none- news, tech or political Twitter feeds on the top 10, I found a total of 6 (that’s 100% if you can’t do the math) to be mind-numbingly banal – filled with updates ranging from the mundane (“just got off plane. Flight was OK” /“going to dinner with family at Italian restaurant”) to the scattered and disjointed white noise of incoherent half-conversations. Sorry leolaporte and JasonCalacanis; you may be huge internet celebrities with thousands of “Followers” and your own Wikipedia pages, but your dull 140-character ramblings mean nothing to me.

Call me old fashioned, but I find it extremely difficult to “socialize” with someone unless I’ve met them IN PERSON and subsequently built some kind of rapport. In fact, of all the Twitter feeds and blogs I encountered on my path of enlightenment , the only ones that captured my attention and brought about a feeling of ‘connectedness’ were those that weren’t personal in nature – the breaking news, tech and political campaign Twitter feeds and blogs. I believe that technologies like Twitter (and Blogger) derive the most value and are truly in their element when they are utilised as publicity networking rather than a social networking tools – that is, in group and team-based situations, as a means of quickly broadcasting updates to all relevant parties. Allen Stern's CentreNetworks article sums up the difference between the two rather nicely: "A social networking tool becomes a publicity tool when 'I speak, you speak, I reply, you reply' becomes 'I speak, you listen'."

THE JOURNEY NEARS ITS END

Had it not been for these dynamics, Twitter could have easily found a place in my final category – the category I’ve dubbed the ‘Sharing Does Not Automatically Make You Social’ category. Here I’ve placed sites and services like Last.fm, del.icio.us and (to a lesser extent) Flickr. Now don’t get me wrong, I found each one of these applications to be brilliant pieces of technology, useful in their own special ways, but it irks me that they all follow the philosophy that by simply sharing something you are automatically being “social”. Bloggers like Stephan Spencer see it differently, describing Flickr as “a visual conversation… countless stories intertwined… a community”. I disagree. Sure, there are certainly hundreds of thousands of people around the world that share common musical tastes, browsing habits and/or visual ideas, but without the personal bonds and individual accountability that are implicit in social applications like Facebook, it’s hard for me to imagine “meeting new people” or strengthening my current social ties through them. To me, the more time you spend in these online “communities”, the further you drift from your real-world social ties.

And so the journey ends. A journey of reflection and enlightenment. To what extent we can truly be social without conventional human contact and interaction? My personal experiences using online social applications gave me mixed results. I found that there were those that bring (or have the potential to bring) us closer to the people we meet, and those that move us further away. The bottom line: on the World Wide Web, “social” isn’t always social.

Sources

Deragon, J; Which Community Do You Live In? – Social Media Today (http://www.socialmediatoday.com/SMC/29702)

Facebook; Statistics (http://www.facebook.com/press/info.php?statistics)

Goodin, Dan; MySpace users snowed in by new blizzard of spam (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/05/14/myspace_spam_blizzard/)

Karp, Scott; Why I Stopped Using Twitter – Publishing 2.0 (http://publishing2.com/2007/12/11/why-i-stopped-using-twitter/)

Odden, Lee; Twitter Marketing Guide – Tips on using Twitter (http://www.toprankblog.com/2007/11/twitter-guide/)

Preece, Rogers & Sharp 2002; Interaction Design: Beyond Human-Computer Interaction; John Wiley & Sons; ISBN 0 471 49278 7

Scoble, Robert; Scobleizer – The you-don’t-need-more-friends lobby (http://scobleizer.com/2007/10/14/the-you-dont-need-more-friends-lobby/)

Spencer, Stephan – What is Flickr and why should I care? (http://www.stephanspencer.com/content/flickr)

Stern, Allen; CentreNetworks – When Does a Social Network Become a "Publicity Network"? (http://www.centernetworks.com/social-network-to-publicity-network)

Twitterholics (http://www.twitterholics.com)