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As I move through the process of helping my day job develop a community strategy, I’m trying to tease out the kernels of unique truth about “social media”. There are many facets that people are grappling with, some technological, some sociological and a few economical. Interestingly enough, the politico’s haven’t entered the arena yet, and quite the opposite, social media is giving rise to methods of circumvention within oppressed cultures like mainland China.
This is all good, but what’s unique about it? What will “stick”, because evolution demands endurance. Most everything people voluntarily spend their time on is justifiable as relevant. When those people are, on the average, intelligent, they their justifications sound more relevant.
Since computers fit so well into the business sphere, the benefit of a new phenomena (like CD-ROMs, or Shopping Carts, or distributed ID, or Social Behavior) is most frequently cost justified in it’s benefit to business - this fits well with the Enthusiast/Professional/Lay-person adoption trajectory which most technology products go through. What’s really the case, is for business to benifit, they have to create innovative ways to bridge the early adopters sense and the mass market demand.
So, to have endurance, a capability (I’m calling Social Media a capability, as it’s everything from software to behavior) has to eventually be generalizable to the broad, non-technical population, because for the vast majority of humans, computers are vastly unsatisfying places to spend time.
So, towards identifying some of the bridges between traditional methods of social behavior, and this new stuff, I’m just capturing some notes for my analysis stage:
- People have always created media: Photos, home movies, poems, invitations, thanks you cards.
- People have always exchanged small messages: “small talk”, sound bites, cocktail party chatter, all the way back to notes passed via foot messenger.
- Most of what is created by individuals is not worth consuming: this goes for music, the written word, food, paintings, etc. People do much of these creative efforts for self expression, therapy and numerous other personal reasons.
- As with Spam, as the cost of production goes down, quality will drop in direct proportion and expectations will be met less often.
Case Study: in the days of hand written Christmas cards distribution was limited and responses were understandably infrequent. Follow-up was in the form of reciprocity and might have a cycle of a year or so. I believe this is what used to be called personalization
- As input channels multiply, peoples ability to manage the information inflow will be more and more challenged and they will be forced to triage in relation to their need to juggle their other day-to-day obligations.
This is nothing but notes… observations. it should just be up on a wall somewhere, but for now, this is my wall, and you are welcome to help me analyze it.
November 15th, 2007 at 6:36 pm
I think Hugh McLeod put it best when he said, “human beings don’t scale.” I’ve also heard it put this way: “human attention does not obey Moore’s Law.” There’s clearly an issue around the economics of attention, the competition for attention is fierce, and the tools for organizing what gets attention are very weak. Social networks can provide those services within their domain. Some aim to be more primary, like Facebook. Others are more ambient like Twitter (it’s ok to miss some Tweets, there’ll always be more). Communication within social network websites also seems to provide some freedom from spam. They function like a gated community.
Growing a social network is a difficult task in a commerical setting, because the motivation isn’t social, it’s to increase business. Social network = marketing. That spin brands the network from birth. A corporation’s demand for control is contrary to the normal growth patterns of a community.
Interest in the artifacts of one’s life (photos, notes, drawings) do have a natural audience — it’s just not a mass audience. But with the cost of production approaching zero, isn’t it ok to have 15 people who care about a photo of your cat? Amortize production costs of zero over 15, and the numbers look pretty good.
Dick Hardt uses a concept that might be useful in this conversation. He talks about the difference in behavior between “Digital Immigrants” and “Digital Natives.” Young people born into the digital world have a different relationship with it than those of us who moved from the non-digital world into the digital world. (Or perhaps we were forced to move into the digital world.) When looking at uptake of social media in whatever context, it’s interesting to use the conceptual framework of “native vs. immigrant.”
Just some musings on your musings.