Social Networking, or more appropriately software networking, is a term given to describe a virtual environment with a purpose of bringing together real people.
Sound vague enough? You bet it is. From the old-school modem-accessible Bulletin Board Services, to the new-school MySpace and Facebook, people who may or may not know each other in the real world can now do stuff together, even though they’re far apart. Stuff?
Don’t get me wrong – we all know a handful of people who are using these services intimately and loving it, and others who just don’t understand it. Personally, I understand both sides and don’t see the need to convert anyone to a certain direction – to each their own.
My real gripe is the lack of purpose behind most of these networks. Many promise more friends, better contacts, access to whatever anyone is doing at any time. So what? Do I care what MySpace’s Tom had for dinner last night? Does having more contacts than the next guy mean I’m a nicer guy, or that I value shallow relationships and quantity over quality. And I guess it’s nice to read my college buddy’s blog to see what’s going on in his life, but does that help him remember me when someone has a programming job available?
What about the Social Network Applications (SNAs) that are supposed to bring new people together? Here’s a snippet from a 2 year old article presenting a problem that still hasn’t fully been addressed by the public:
Civilization makes finding people mush harder than it was for gatherer-hunter cultures, where the number of people you could expect to meet and know in a lifetime were few, and the diversity of human activities was limited. So we have no intuitive way of finding the right people among the millions who we may have some limited contact with in our lifetimes. So we have to resort to trial and error.
We won’t solve this with top-down standardized centralized databases and web apps either — the process of finding people to love, work with or pursue mutual passions is a complex, highly personal process that does not lend itself to such processes.
How then could we develop SNAs that could accommodate these difficult, iterative, personal processes? Might these SNAs need to be only partly computerized and online, and rely on more ‘essential’ meetups and face-to-face interactions? And how might the filtering mechanisms of such applications be improved to increase the likelihood of finding the right people?
These are complex problems, and they will require the development of processes that are suited to dealing with complexity (most software is designed to address merely complicated problems). We’re not very articulate, after all, at expressing who we’re looking for, or even knowing what and who it is we’re looking for (though, of course, we believe we’ll know it when we see it). Chemistry is often more important than logic in making lasting and meaningful and effective relationships, and in finding the ‘right’ people.
The same way that books will never be replaced by computers and eBook devices IMHO, genuine live interaction will never die out. But technology has made the printing and distribution of printed materials easier and cheaper, so who knows where it will take us in terms of human interaction. As we continue to push the limits of online communication, we’ll strike a perfect balance with the offline world and hopefully grow stronger because of it.
What do you think?
Hi,
Bottom line is that online communications is a cult based culture where birds of feather fly together. i.e software people and people who are only interested in this field will group together. At the end there will be specialized and focused groups of virtual communities.
Social networking is a tool, and like every other tool is only as good as the way you use it. simply signing up for a social network like MySpace or Facebook won’t make you a better networker; however, if you are interested in networking it gives you access to a broader range of people AND a way to find the people who are most likely to be worth networking with.
But it’s easy to get lost in the possibilities – yes, you CAN know what Tom from MySpace had for dinner last night but that’s only useful for people interested in keeping up with friends.
Someone who is looking for potential work partners can ignore that but can focus instead on what Tom was doing at work yesterday. Or what project he is working on, on the side – perhaps you can partner with him and turn it into a business?
Know what you want to get from networking, and how you can find what you need – but don’t drown in the information overload that’s out there.