How a Community of Strangers Can Enrich Your Life: A Personal Reflection on Online Social Networking

Georgia Mountford
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Introduction

“People are accustomed to thinking of the on-line world as a social space.” (Boyd 2004, p71)

My first memories of the Internet are from around 1998, the first is of sending an email to my relatives overseas, and the second of downloading cheat sheets for Curse of Monkey Island III.

These both show how, even ten years ago, the Internet was shaping up to be a enormously accessible social sphere. People were already making use of the Internet’s capacity to facilitate fast and affordable communication, and to share seemingly limitless information. I think effortless communication and sharing of knowledge are two of the greatest strengths of social networks. Today, there are a huge number of social and mobile computing applications aimed towards supporting these kinds of social interactions between not just friends and colleagues but between people who have never and will never meet.

In this blog I will be reflecting on my experiences with a selection of these applications, namely LastFM, twitter, delicious and friendfeed ,but I will also draw on my experience of related tools I am already familiar with including flickr, StumbleUpon and facebook. I will be focussing on the extent to which a community comprised both of friends and unknowns can enrich the life of a social network user, and how well the above mentioned applications facilitate this.


My Experiences


Flickr

I have had a flickr account for several years, but have not made very much use of it. On the occasion that I am directed to someone’s flickr portfolio, I log in to leave comments, but that’s about it. Flickr is a social networking site for those with a shared interest in photography (which, just like blogging, is something I enjoy, and would like to pursue if I had more time and inspiration). It is not hard to see how valuable a photo hosting service that facilitates commenting, sharing, notifications, subscriptions, and collaboration between users would be to those passionate about photography. However, it is still useful to those who are not in it for the sake of art – instead using it to share photos with an existing social network such as family and friends.

I think it is important to note the power of photographs to invoke emotion and opinion in the viewer, and even reveal personality aspects of the photographer. In my opinion, this affords flickr a strength that other social networking sites may not have – the capacity for users to feel more connected to an individual that they may never have met, because of the way they relate to the photographs the user has taken. There is also a significant amount of camaraderie between people with a shared interest or goal, something flickr users would benefit from, but twitter or facebook users might not.

Delicious and StumbleUpon

I think I would have gained more from Delicious if I had made greater use of it, as I really enjoy accidentally finding, or being sent, interesting websites or videos that I’d never have otherwise found. I have been using a browser plugin called StumbleUpon for about 6 months now to do just that. In my experience, StumbleUpon’s social network is much more noticeable than Delicious’s. The StumbleUpon website explains that, “StumbleUpon integrates peer-to-peer and social networking principles with one-click blogging to create an emergent content referral system.” (StumbleUpon 2009) This means that the more you use StumbleUpon, and the more the rest of the world does, the more likely you are to ‘stumble’ across a site you like. This is similar to the indirect connections between LastFM users; where a LastFM user plays (and scrobbles) a song, a StumbleUpon user clicks the ‘I like it!’ button in their toolbar – and from this the application learns your interests and provides recommendations.

StumbleUpon also has a ratings and review system that allows users to connect and collaborate with people who have similar interests, something that Delicious doesn’t cater for. Delicious founder Joshua Schacter says “Delicious is about extending memory and saving things for yourselves and others. Stumbleupon is much more about surfing, like TV.” (MacManus 2006) While I have been using StumbleUpon to save things for myself (like adding a Favourite), having trialled Delicious for a few weeks I can see that it would be much more effective due to the ‘tags’ system of categorising.


LastFM

I found LastFM the most enjoyable out of the new tools. By ‘scrobbling’ the songs each user plays and by inviting users to add information (much like a wiki), LastFM creates a vast information bank about music, artists and gigs. LastFM learns your taste in music and recommends upcoming events or bands that you might like - a feature I found very useful. At first glance it seems that all LastFM has in the way of social networking is the ability to add ‘friends’ and view/listen to their playlists. While I find this feature fun, being able to observe my friends’ listening habits did not make me feel any more connected to them.

LastFM provides a few other social functions, for example listing people with similar musical taste to you, as your neighbours in a metaphorical “musical neighbourhood”. Personally, I found this feature interesting to start with, but overall not very useful. I think the true power of LastFM comes from the invisible network of music lovers who not only allow their listening habits to be tracked but also take the time to provide and correct information for the rest of the community. This is an excellent example of how an online community can enrich the lives of its users. Without the co-operation of millions of other users, I might not have discovered two new artists I like, nor learnt that a band I like was playing in the Valley in March.

Twitter

As mentioned in one of our lectures, technology is often adapted and appropriated by its users into doing something it wasn’t originally designed for. Twitter is a brilliant example of this; it is amazing how many uses Twitterers have found for one tiny message box. However, while Twitter is certainly useful for open-ended expressions of intent, and is powerful tool in increasing awareness and connectivity between peers, it does not appeal to me personally. I do not like to broadcast what I am doing all the time, and am not interested in being constantly notified of what everyone is doing.

I acknowledge that the SMS notification system makes it incredibly portable and accessible, but I prefer to ‘pull’ information, not have it ‘push’ed to me, so this advantage was inconsequential. I also found that Twitter was not as customisable as I would like, especially in that you cannot create groups, or subsets, of friends so as to broadcast a message only to a particular set of people. My aversion to twitter is shared by a lot of people, many of whom complain about the “unremitting triviality of most people’s updates” (McFedries 2007, p84) and of ‘Twitterrhea’ (an inundation of messages from a user addicted to posting). However, this blog is not merely about my personal preferences. In terms of enriching the lives of a user by making use of a social network, I do think Twitter is a valuable application.


FriendFeed

With so many social networking sites around these days it can be hard to keep track of what all your friends are doing – on flickr, facebook, LastFM, digg etc. If the main strength of social and mobile applications is increasing your sense of connectivity and awareness with friends, then being unable to easily and quickly obtain the information you want would be a weakness. FriendFeed is a management tool that attempts to solve this, by allowing you to track your friends’ activities in other networks. This concept sounds very useful to me, but during my trial I did not actually find it be so. Although not a fault of FriendFeed itself, when I attempted to add some friend’s facebook feeds all I found was the option to add my own feed, which is not what I wanted.

Without a network of friends, I could not properly analyse Friendfeed, however I played with it enough to realise that with a number of friends active on a number of different networks, it could very quickly become cluttered and cease to be effective without powerful sorting and customisation tools. FriendFeed is also at the mercy of the other social networking sites, in that it relies on external RSS feeds, and sometimes a user cannot get the feed they want. For example I may want to track my friend’s photo uploads on facebook, but the only feed offered by facebook is their Status post feed.

Discussion and Conclusion

I feel that the social networks evaluated in this blog each satisfy slightly different objectives, although many are tied together by the common theme of a shared interest, passion or goal. For example, LastFM provides the opportunity for users to expand their musical knowledge and pleasure thanks to the indirect connection with millions of others with similar musical taste. Delicious and StumbleUpon improve a person’s experience browsing the internet by allowing them to track what they like and receive recommendations from users who share a similar sense of humour, view on life etc. Flickr is more of a niche social networking site geared towards nourishing the creative talent of artists and their audiences, by sharing their life through picture, but is also used by others to share photos with relatives.

While these websites did not significantly improve my connectivity with, or awareness of, my friends, I did benefit from the seemingly invisible virtual communities behind the sites. This is in line with Ellison’s statement that social networks lower the barriers and transaction costs of social interaction, meaning that a user may easily connect with those who “who may share one interest or concern but differ on other dimensions.” This is a positive thing, because it encourages “disparate individuals to connect, communicate, and take action.” (Ellison 2009, p6)

The websites that do not fit into this model are Friendfeed and Twitter. As stated before, Friendfeed’s strong point is not as social networking site itself, but a management tool for other networks and feeds. Twitter relies on already existing ties between people, and works to fortify connectivity and awareness through frequent, simple updates – as opposed to establishing a bond through common interests.

In conclusion, I believe that social networking tools such as those discussed in this blog have the potential to enrich the lives of those who chose to use them. Many of them rely on a large network of like-minded users, and the size of this network could easily be a source for trouble if the systems were not designed effectively (to minimise confusion, guide the user through their desired tasks etc). However, I am also aware of the potential for these sites to breed a society so dependant on their array of social and mobile devices that actual face-to-face socialisation suffers. There is also the situation where the sites are over used, or abused, and start to lose their appeal (for example, Twitterhea as mentioned earlier).

I find myself somewhere in the middle when it comes to how much I like these technologies and social network sites. I enjoy many of the things they can offer me, but I also have no desire to become deeply entrenched in them – telling everyone what I’m doing every hour, having my mobile phone on and with me all the time, updating my facebook status on my lunch break etc. As with all things in life – balance is key.


References
Boyd D & Donath J (2004) ‘Public Displays of Connection’. BT Technology Journal. Vol 22 No 4. p71

Delicious (2009) Available from: http://www.delicious.com Accessed 28/03/09

Ellison N, Lampe C & Steinfield C () ‘Social Network Sites and Society: Current Trends and Future Possibilities ‘. The Potential for Technology Enabled Connections. Issue Jan + Feb. pp 6 - 9

Flickr (2009) Available from: http://www.flickr.com Accessed: 19/03/09

FriendFeed (2009) Available from: http://www.friendfeed.com Accessed: 19/03/09

LastFM (2009) Available from: http://www.LastFM.com Accessed: 20/03/09

MacManus R (2006) ReadWriteWeb: del.icio.us Plans To Become A Social Network. Available from http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/delicious_social_network.php. Accessed: 29/03/09

McFedries P (2007) ‘All-a-Twitter’. IEEE Xplore. Oct issue p84

StumbleUpon (2009) Available from: http://www.stumbleupon.com Accessed: 19/03/09
Twitter (2009) Available from: http:// www.twitter.com Accessed: 20/03/09