Social Networking Blues

Here's another article in the current wave of not particularly insightful but interesting nonetheless articles on social networking: Facebook, MySpace Reveal Hidden Messages.

The thing that bothers me about this kind of journalism is that it's once again stating the obvious,  i.e. if you constantly change your Facebook/MySpace status then you're probably doing some attention-seeking.  Do we really need a journalist to point this out to us?

People do all sorts of things to get attention:  they dress and style themselves, they surround themselves with 'defining' possessions like cell phones and cars, and if you watch truly gifted networkers at a mixer, then they don't hesitate to approach someone new out of the blue with some sort of an "opener."  Chatty people chat.  Twitterers tweet.  Status updaters update their status.  So what.

I think it's fairly obvious that we're exposing ourselves emotionally over social networks - this isn't necessarily a bad thing.  The only thing I'm really worried about is whether more advanced data analysis is going to scour my online emotional trail one day to create some sort of semantic-emotional graph.  A potential employer might not need to analyze my biological DNA if they have access to the emotional 'strands' that I've left online as behavioral fingerprints.

Psychological Mining: The Genius of Facebook ‘Games’ and Quizzes

There’s an eerie brilliance behind some of some of Facebook’s seemingly innocuous applications. The most insidious genius that I have encountered thus far is the “Likeness” application, as it preys upon so many levels of hope and fear, and then supposedly ranks users against each other, then ranks/matches them with people who achieve similar scores to them.

I need to dig deeper into their privacy policy before I can make any sort of overarching judgement about whether or not this kind of application is data mining for targeted advertising, but I see absolutely no reason why this kind of data collection isn’t a form of targeted advertising tool – if I input all of my preferences and fears, with the idea that I’ll then be ranked against my ‘peers’ (and all of the other characters that start to randomly pop up within the system), then why shouldn’t I suspect that this is not a new kind of collective litmus for psychometrics?

If I’m given a choice of the kinds of attributes that I most desire myself, with the promise of discovering those in my contact list who have similar desires, then why on earth would the developers not be feeding this information back to subscribing marketing divisions? How on earth do they make their money without ad support?

An example: “Choose the things you’d want more of first: intelligence, creativity, friends, money, beauty, money, beauty, confidence, athleticism, fame, respect, time to yourself.” Surely if I rank order these fields then advertisers and marketers will be able to sequence both my priorities, and those of everyone who completes the sequence, so that they can direct products at me that will supposedly fulfil my needs and desires?

My suggestion is that the new wave of social ‘games’ that we’re being presented with are not only highly amusing, personal, and engaging, but they may also be leading to targeted product development and advertising that will supposedly fill our needs. Is it all harmless social fun, or is there a quiet wave of extremely careful targeted advertising that’s about to start arriving in our Facebook accounts?

Sleep-talking to 15 Minutes of Shame

Clive Thomspon's recent article in Wired aligns with what Always On Culture is endeavoring to explore.
Clive Thompson on the Age of Microcelebrity.

The idea that we are being transformed into our own PR managers is a concise way to sum up what's been described to me by some people in much simpler terms, "Facebook can get messy." Cnet's Tim Leberecht also wrote an extension article on Thompson's piece: Pew study says Internet users are becoming their own reputation managers, however, both of these articles focus primarily on management of reputation in the real world, as opposed to errors that people are likely to make online.

It's easy enough to predict how your associates may respond to you if a drunken photograph of you appears on someone's blog, or even within the slightly more 'walled' environment of a Facebook account, but what are the implications of the actions we actually take online? I am not referring to explicit/obvious examples of posting offensive material in a public forum, but the ripples and side-effects of more subtle actions, eg. accidentally sending a stupid application to all of your contacts, sending messages to friends' walls before proofreading, and all of the those 'silly, forgivable, harmless' actions online that may lead to social or professional consequences.

This is the where the "Always On" culture's rubber really hits the road. Visiting hours are never really over, as the impressions we leave in cyberspace are there even when we're sleeping. The only problem is that when we wake we may not necessarily be aware of the reaction of the person/people we've communicated with. I've learned the hard way that occasionally a sarcastic review left on a seemingly obscure forum might be one of the first things that people see if they search for me. Everything you post online represents you, and it will come back to haunt you - oh yes, it will - even if it's just in the form of weird targetted SPAM, but that's a topic for an entirely different post!