Social Notworking - Digital Refugees

The recent troubles over at Twitter have created a mass of confusion in what previously looked like a self-organizing social networking system.  As in the real world, it takes time to settle into a new neighborhood and to discover how you fit into a community.  However, Twitter's lack of ability to scale to its ever-expanding user base has resulted in an explosion of digital refugees who are now wandering through cyberspace in search of new homes.  

Recent networks d' jour have included Plurk, which offers a new graphic spin on microblogging; identi.ca, which is gaining popularity due to its open source origins, and Ping has also entered the arena as a solution to centralize users' updates from a single location.  On the flipside, FriendFeed is there to collect everything that you've been doing on multiple blogs, and to tie it all up in a neat little... mess.  Of course, aggregating feeds is nothing new, and aside from standard RSS readers, other sites like Suprglu and Multiply  have been doing this for quite a while, but adoption rates seem to be sluggish.

Therefore, we have tools to take a single message and to amplify it and reproduce it so that it colonize a series of locations across the web, and we also have tools to distill our scattered thoughts into a single point of convergence.  We have the ability to broadcast a virtual presence to many sites, however, we are still lacking tools to maintain our connections and conversations within these communities.  

We can discover past contacts within emergent social networking communities, but then we can just as easily lose them as they migrate due to the push-pull factors that exist within physical cities.  We've taken a physically global community that is already transient, and we've created a hyper-global layer on top of it, where people exist in and shift between virtual spaces. 

As we move towards increased choice (and let's face it, we've been ramping up to this for centuries - this is not a new phenomenon), how are we going to identify and select the best options as individuals?  There is always the potential for engineers to write new scripts so that we can simplify complex networking choices, but is it more logical to just simplify and take calculated risks to begin with?  

Choice Control: The New Connectivity of Opinion Networks

It would seem that a number of bloggers & Twitterers/Tweets are converging on the Pew Internet & American Life Project at present, and its manifesting itself in various articles and reports that are appearing on Cnet's news blog.  It's also interesting that technologies such as Twitter allow people like me to discover fascinating components of reports that I'd previously sidestepped. 

As an example, several days ago I read fragments of blogs that referred to statistics that claim that girls are driving the blogosphere, and I'd also followed links to the Pew project site. However, today a Twitter reference from someone I've never met who 'attached' themselves to me as a follower posted a link to a Cnet report, Girls blog, boys post video, which is recursively prompting me to go back to the read more deeply and to investigate the claim that "Girls continue to dominate most elements of content creation" (according to the study).

As fascinating as the topic of gender domination on the web is - and I'll definitely be looking at it more in the near future - the means are sometimes just as important as the end, and I'm referring to how I actually got to this information.  In my 'old world' interactions I might choose to read a certain subject or specific piece of literature because of a conversation at a party, or because I attend a seminar and a speaker sparks some interest, or because I read a positive review.  This is, however, changing, and at least from the sources and influences that I have, it seems like the culture of recommendation and approval is becoming increasingly active.  We have 'opinion centralization' sites such as Digg, but we still have the chaotic, unbridled means to distribute opinion and approval in our social circles.

This week I've been led to a video on the psychology of nightmares via a group email from a friend in Shanghai; the report I just referred to was via some I've never met but am 'socially' linked to via Twitter; a book was recommended to me from a friend in Hong Kong via Facebook.  I keep lists of my recommended books and music on Facebook; recommended websites via del.icio.us, and leave impressions of my recommendations and choices in all of these places and via these means.  The ability to mine this kind of data for social/market prediction and commercial gain has created new forms of business.  

There are a few questions I have about the power and potential of these new forms of recommendation and opinion transmission:

• What happens to those who aren't enmeshed in these networks?  There are those who are concerned about the 3rd world and their lack of access to information, but how different are we becoming from those in our own neighborhood who don't live within the Metaverse?
• How good are we at managing the deluge of increased connectivity?  Does it lead to attention deficit, lack of focus, lack of specialization, or are there other possibly detrimental consequences that may need to be addressed?
• Where does education and media literacy fit into all of this?  Critical analysis and deconstruction is a component of most modern education programs, but how many K-12 school programs focus on information management and time management.  I don't think it's good enough to just recommend a 'healthy maximum number of hours spent on a computer per day.' 

Ultimately, we have new 'power' to choose and to transmit our choices to others.  However, as the number of choices we have increases, decision making/time management will also become more complex and more demanding.  The potential benefits of increased connectivity are staggering, and the social discovery of knowledge is already 'enhanced.'  However, as we move forward let's remember that there is a "burden of choice," and that an upgrade in one domain (ie. access to and transmission of information and opinion) may demand an upgrade in another (ie. critical literacy, decision making, and time management).  

Choices, choices.

Image by Greefus Groinks.  Some Rights Reserved.

Internal Disconnection

Previously I've focused upon the idea that the type of blogging tools you use can effect the way that a blog might be constructed or maintained, and that now instead of keeping physical 'shoeboxes' of ideas and memories, we're moving towards hyperlinked memory:

Scraplogs and the Worldwide Shoebox.

However, I'd like to zoom out from individual blogging tools to consider a more important question: is blogging not only changing the way that we communicate with others, but also the way that we communicate with ourselves?

The art of keeping a private diary or journal has been a tradition that's lasted for centuries, although I'd suggest that it may be a dying (or at least faltering) art. A private diary is not only a powerful tool for recording personal histories, but the nature of its privacy also led to explorations of hopes, dreams, fears, and secrets. In a diary, angst can be expressed, demons can be exorcised, and the freedom exists to build elaborate dreams that could seem ridiculous to even close friends.

However, as our modes of schooling and working shift to the digital domain, both children and adults have been endowed with new tools and new methods of expression. Although we as adults write about ourselves and how our lives have been impacted, it may be worth considering that technological shift is never immediate, and that just as previous generations had no idea how we'd turn out, that we really don't know how new generations will react to growing up in a predominantly digital environment.

So does anyone out there still keep a diary? I know that one of my friends does, but it's a pure pen-and-paper affair, and it's a habit she developed a long time ago. However, she's also from a particular demographic - she's competent at business computing, but she doesn't post her photos online, she doesn't have a blog, and she doesn't have a Facebook account. Both my wife and I have private blogs that require passwords, but we don't really use them very much. I would guess that most people who start a blog aren't starting to make something private - they're doing exactly the opposite: claiming their own place in the global village fair where they can wax prolific.

Hence, there is a shift from private diaries to public journals. When I record my history it's now written for the possibility of a public audience, as opposed to be solely for my own amusement. This may improve the 'quality' of my writing, or my attention to technical accuracy, but what now happens to the emotional asides, the flights of fancy, the crazy poetry, or the strange sketches that might have accompanied these records if they were written in a closed diary? As technology advances we're seeing the return of sketching/doodling, and other expressive elements are being added to our journals, like video, animation, and mashups where there previously might have been a collage or collection of magazine clippings or concert and movie tickets. The ability to express creatively hasn't been diminished, but the desireability to express openly and to explore yourself internally has been, I would suggest, altered by the new media.

Cutting edge educators are very excited and proud to be among those who are providing their students with the tools and skills to go forward into the digital age. I've been excited about being able to give those kinds of utilitarian skills to my students, and I've certainly been caught in 'connectivity fervor' more than once. And why not? It really is something to be celebrated - there are now so many possibilities for communication, for connecting like minded people, and for sharing our expression and creativity with the world. However, with a focus on increased connectivity with the external world, there's a possibility that there's decreased connectivity with our internal worlds.

Solution: I believe that it begins with education and the early formation of habits and patterns. Instead of suggesting that everything is in the public domain and up for peer review, it would be advisable for teachers to maintain the privacy of some student work. Instead of just celebrating blogging as a public tool, it could be introduced in classrooms as a more flexible concept - one which has the ability to record private ideas.

Image by Paul Watson. Some Rights Reserved.

Always On

This blog begins just before dawn. I've been lying in bed wondering about how technologies are changing us as human beings, and how the recent jolt of 'always on' culture has altered us as a species forever.

We now have an exhilarating level of connectivity, but we've also lost our privacy in so many ways. I'd like to explore this space further - from the impact that it has on us socially and emotionally, and to also investigate methods and techniques that can be employed so that we can control our technologies (not vice versa).

As a child I knew that there was a limited window of access to the information and entertainment I could get from my TV. Television stations would start broadcasting in the morning, and then they'd stop broadcasting around midnight. The remainder of the time I could look at my TV, but all I'd see was a test pattern. A letter could take weeks to deliver. I had to wait for the latest albums to arrive at the record store. People went from door to door selling encyclopedias. Telephones were attached to cords, which were attached to walls. It all sounds positively archaic now.

But now I can wake in the middle of the night and access vast libraries while streaming video and chatting to someone I've never met. I can explore a virtual world surrounded by characters which are the manifestations of real people. I could participate in an online war with a mass of other live participants. There are so many benefits, but there are also side-effects.

Blackberrys and phones that interupt dinner or steal attention away from physical interactions. Status messages in our email clients or social networking sites that reveal our presence to others. Personalized ring tones that transform public spaces into impersonal cacophonies. Private phone calls that are blurted out into the 'publicsphere' without an regard for the verbal and psychological assault on others. An Internet that's always on, so that I can wake up in the middle of the night and start a recursive blog about it as I am right now, with the possibility of you stumbling across it and reading it, even though you and I have probably never met, and probably never will.

Our new 'always on' culture is as much about evolution as it is about revolution. These new superpowers we've been endowed with are both incredible and complex. Previously we were told, "The pen is mightier than the sword," but now the pen is online and it's on steroids.

Image by Egvvnd. Some Rights Reserved.