Social Networking for Humans
I am thinking about social networking and how the balance of our attention shifts back and forth between people and tools. I have tried many visualization tools that produce pretty graphs of my network. The images offer evidence of connections between myself and others and provide a way to understand how we all connect to each other using social networking tools. To me, these don’t seem to represent the true nature of social networking. I think they give us a false sense of community and distract viewers from recognizing the importance of individual connections.
Connections between virtual friends and followers are only as powerful as the individual, human interactions. When we follow someone or add them as a friend, we get a false sense of our relationship to them and to their friends and followers. We must make mutual contact in order to build and sustain a relationship. This is something I’ve not seen represented in network visualization tools. These visualizers show connections created through mouse clicks, not sustained communication.
I have seen presentations on the power of social networking. They discuss how great it is to connect with someone and have access to all their friends or contacts. The entire world is now open to you, and all you have to do is create a profile and start clicking. Business will boom, work will distribute and friends will multiply. Rarely do they discuss the work that goes into building true relationships through individual connections. When we send a Twitter shoutout to the wind, we are not demonstrating the power of a network. We are demonstrating the strength of individual connections in a one-to-many relationship. You may have thousands of virtual friends, readers and followers, but if you don’t have two-way communication with them, the connections are truly virtual and will not withstand the potential failure of the social networking tool.
The technology can help us find people with similar interests. Similarity is not the foundation of a solid relationship. In fact, differences often make connections more beneficial, interesting and productive. Finding people by common interest disregards natural patterns of socialization where randomness can serve as glue. If we are to promote and model social networking for education, I feel we must responsibly include narratives of the paths we follow before finding great connections.
We must tell the stories of how we met, connected, and discovered through individual relationships. We must share our secrets for filtering through the negative connections. We must examine the foundation of our networking and determine whether or not we are building something that will last. We are human beings, not users or profiles. Humans built the tools, and humans, like tools, can fail. Our rich histories are shared through narrative, not hyperlink.
July 6th, 2008 at 2:28 pm
Amen. The stories - which are really shared experiences - are the key.
That said, I have made many online people discoveries who later turned into true friends, or more. Let me tell you the story of how my husband and I met online in 1990…(-:
July 6th, 2008 at 2:58 pm
I wish I could go bold for everyone else who may read this: “You may have thousands of virtual friends, readers and followers, but if you don’t have two-way communication with them, the connections are truly virtual and will not withstand the potential failure of the social networking tool.” A tangible value to me of a social network is to help me solve problems. What people have to offer (myself included) is the value of social networks… face-to-face or through some technology.
I found the Facebook thing of indicating how people know each other was a good move in the right direction. However, it was checkbox-based and few of my connections easily fit into any of the boxes. Of course, I don’t like fitting into boxes.
July 6th, 2008 at 4:08 pm
The nature of relationships and connections through technology is the topic of a lot of study and research that is more nuanced than we see in the tech arena– it is just happening in other areas…. hopefully it will bleed over some.
I have seen a few representations of social networks that visually represent persistence, repetition and volume between connections. Which gets closer to a better quantification, but it still isn’t truly qualitative.
July 6th, 2008 at 4:21 pm
One other small note. “Social relationships” are built in all kinds of ways on all kinds of foundations. I agree that there is a kind of serious social relationship– let’s call it friendship– that doesn’t rely on shared interests (and, as you point out, is sometimes enhanced by diversity of interest)… but let’s not overlook that most shared interests, because they are limited in scope, often provide an important entree to more significant relationships. In real and virtual life, the majority of my friendships have come after initially meeting someone through a shared interest of some kind.
There’s also the curious phenomenon (to me, at least) that there is an important and continually more significant difference between the network (the social fabric) being robust and the friendships/connections themselves being of a lasting nature. The former can be true even when the latter is not. So, it’s important to consider whether the individual connections we make are “lasting” or not, but it’s equally important to consider (or reconsider) how important that element of lasting continuity is… just as we can, with a lot of information, go to the information when we need it, perhaps the weak connections (in the social theory sense) and intermittent connections retain more value than they used to… without necessarily leaving those people *feeling* used…
July 6th, 2008 at 7:14 pm
Excellent piece, smart, perceptive & well-written.
July 7th, 2008 at 4:21 am
Nice piece Jen. A long time ago, I was very into the concept of narrative and how human’s learn through narrative structures. I was interested in it for early online education (see this article around 2000 - http://jime.open.ac.uk/00/1/) - your piece makes me think it would be worth revisiting in the light of social networks.
I’m not sure we need to _tell_ the stories - we need to construct them for ourselves though.
While I’m pimping my own stuff in your comments - I think your point about building relationships is relevant to a talk I did on ‘the sweet spot’ which I think good online apps hit - they are both for work and socialising, professional and private, etc. When you hit this you get the pull-in factor that pure social or pure work alone does not generate. Reading your post makes me think that maybe the sweet spot is where we begin to construct narratives.
July 7th, 2008 at 1:26 pm
Debbie, I believe some of my best friendships have started off as online connections!
ez, I agree that problem solving is one of the best ways to use my network connections. In fact, I get great personal satisfaction from helping other people find solutions!
Chris, thanks again for adding depth and perspective to my post. It’s good to know others are taking a more serious look at these connections. I don’t believe connections need to be lasting. Many of the connections I make are disbursed after our mutual purposes are served. I do think that in order to be part of the visualization, there should be a distinction between relationships with sustained communication and those with only virtual linkage through accounts.
Thomas, thanks for reading and chiming in from the iPhone!
Martin, thanks for the resources! I actually have some narratives recorded with audio from this presentation I did a few months ago. http://wecplanning.wikispaces.com/J+Detailed There’s a link to the intro audio and the links for each of the people go to pages with recorded narratives.