Tuesday, August 25, 2009

SXSW: Please vote! Social Interaction Design Concepts


Vote for my PanelPicker idea!


I'm excited but still somewhat churlish about posting this, the obligatory Vote for Me at SXSW! post. But I think there could be some great insights to come out of this event. It seems that time for the industry. Time for a bit of critical thinking and deeper investigation.

As many of you know from talking to me, my take on social interaction design is as much sociological as it is design. I'll be presenting (given the chance) an overview of core concepts and insights, key questions and issues, and examples.

I'm hoping that by the time the panel comes around a number of us will have had a chance to blog and talk on this topic. My sense is that a number of us recognize that designs, features, architecture, and other tools in the designer's toolbox cannot explain or structure the social alone. That the interaction is not between user and screen but user and user. The timing feels right for a deeper look at what drives social media participation.

Core concepts:
  • A critique of cognitively-based ideas of the user and the user's behavior in favor of social action and communication
  • User centric and psychologically-oriented emphasis on accommodating and understanding multiple user types
  • A view of social dynamics and how some user types might work well together
  • A look at paired and triangulated interactions
  • The reflective and imaginary properties of the screen: how it is we see ourselves being seen by others, and project ourselves into those we see only an image of
  • Definitions of user acts and actions, social actions, interactions, and communication
  • A look at transactional and conversational forms, including gestural, symbolic, reciprocated, and other kinds of social and economic exchanges
  • The impact of conversational media and the use of talk itself as a medium of distribution and circulation


There will be more. I'm hoping to provide examples, and offer good stuff to practitioners along with the concepts.

And here are some other panels I'm hoping to see at SXSW. I know these folks but that's not why I've listed them ;-).

Thanks for the vote, and don't hesitate to retweet!

Sunday, August 16, 2009

Newspaper culture, authority, social media, and relevance

Stowe Boyd has an excellent post today on social news. While at first I was going to just leave a comment, my thoughts ascended from commentary to a post in their own right. Not wanting to blogjack Stowe's points, I'd like to continue the conversation by means of referencing the debate around newsprint's decline and the economic threat to journalism here instead.

As I see it the problem facing traditional news media is not just a problem of old media, new media. Indeed, as McLuhan argued, any new medium initially uses an old medium as its content. Old media methods and practices aren't about to disappear simply because attention is shifting increasingly to social media — a consequence of changing reading habits, advertising budgets, expenses and costs of maintaining and print publication in challenging credit markets, a shift from time spent by consumers in print and television to internet-based experiences, and so on.

All those forces are real and are exacting a punishing toll on traditional media, of course. But there's another paradigm shift in the works, and it has less to do with economic forces and more to do with the very social and cultural function of news.

News is not simply reported; it is produced. News media create the news. Their reporting not only documents facts, but through processes of editorial, publishing, and distribution, it also creates the news. The legitimacy of traditional media rested on the authority news media brought to this process. This authority in turn comprised of several "social functions," if you will. For there were different ways in which news media established their positions, defined their roles, and maintained their market leadership and service:

Authority can be had by means of reputation. This is a perception issue, and is maintained by consistent adherence by news organizations to internal (brand) principles, commitments, interests, style, judgment, taste, truth, personality, accuracy, speed, and so on. In this way news organizations might each command a different reputation, a brand identified with authority of a kind, or in a field, or within a genre. In other words authority can be had by a news media leader regardless of its actual credibility and service as a news gathering and reporting organization.

Left of center, right of center, news "lite," — the audience of readers either buys it, and thus legitimizes the organization's authority, or not. This point is important because we should separate authority from the "truth" of reporting events, and the "fact" of news itself. News is created: the process is owned by for profit institutions, and seeks market share and financial performance. News is never just an objective recording of events, but is always a selection and narration of events.

Authority can be had by means of position. This is a general perspective on authority. It claims simply that an authoritative social position bestows authority on the organization, entity, or individual who occupies the position. From a cultural and historical perspective, new media have long occupied a traditional position of delivering timely, relevant, significant, and objective reporting of events, topics, issues, and perspectives. This tradition is surely changing — not only because news media are no longer the best first source of news itself, but because other media (social) compete for the position of authority.

This argument does not claim that social media are better or more accurate, faster or more honest — these are some claims made by citizen journalists and I agree with many of them — it simply claims that authority is a social and cultural function, and that the function can be fulfilled by different entities. (Functionalism argues that the function remains relatively stable, but who fulfills the function is interchangeable.)

There are other ways of defining authority, but I'll leave those aside as they relate more to contexts in which power and force are in play. Now, there's an interesting change taking place in the migration of consumers from mainstream media to social media. It's not just in the content, the communication and "conversation," the social networking and personalization of media, but does involve all of these. We might characterize it more broadly as a change in modes of consumption and modes of production. And here it is where traditional media are at a distinct and overwhelming disadvantage, for their medium of choice is the wrong medium.

In the traditional medium, value is added to news by the production of news as a news medium for mass consumption. The work of producing news was the work that created value for the news organization, and which is consumed by readers and viewers. The mode of production of news was separate from the consumption of news. Social media, by contrast, involve consumers in the process of value creation. The mode of production is also the mode of consumption. There's no distance separating the two: distance that normally permits the transaction fees that cover distribution, circulation, and broadcast.

Furthermore, the value determined in traditional journalism by means of authority as described above, is now determined instead by means of social communication and interaction. This leads to a shift in the value itself: from the editorial voice and authority of journalism to the personal and social relevance of friends, colleagues, and other social relations. Value is no longer measured in degrees of authority but in degrees of relevance. Note the distinction, for there's no underestimating the significance of this shift. It's a change that, for better or worse, re-calibrates the consumer's interest in and consumption of news.

News is no longer "that which is important" and is now "that which is socially relevant." Social relevance rests not on value as determined by a scale or hierarchy of significance (what's worth telling, objectively assessed) but that which is distributed, shared, retold, cited, referenced, quoted, linked to, favorited, and otherwise socially ranked and delivered. Value of news in social media accrues by means of speed, distribution, reach and leveraged influence of individuals who get attention by means of paying attention. Value is a matter of "who chooses" not "what is worth choosing."

This shift from an editorial and journalistic version of objectivity — closely wed to the perception of an authoritative voice occupying an authoritative role &dash: to a unregulated, communicative production of value that is individually and subjectively chosen and socially proliferated constitutes an enormous rebalancing of media landscape. Not only are old media disadvantaged for their medium is non-social and non-communicative, but they are losing their authority and their traditional role occupying that authority. It is really only up to social media to better filter out noise, personalize news and content consumption, continually improve relational controls (friends, peers, colleagues — the whole personal/social/public thing), innovate interaction models to raise the medium's unique production value, and fine tune advertising business models for sustainability.

It seems to me unlikely that we will return, as a culture, to traditional modes of consuming news. There will always be a need for experts, a respect for their credibility and reputation, and interest in voices that can tell, narrate, and entertain. Those skills are platform agnostic. But the genie's out of the bottle. Regardless of how one feels about the quality of user-generated content, the noise of social media and irrelevance of much of its content, the most profound distinction between old and new media is in the relationship between production and consumption. New media content is sourced and distributed by means of social relations. It seems very unlikely that a culture would wish a return to the hierarchy of authority, when the proximity and immediacy of social media offer much of the same information, selected in a fundamentally different way.

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Wednesday, August 12, 2009

Dave Winer's little tweet reader: some thoughts

This morning I followed the suggestions of Marshall Kirkpatrick and tried out Dave Winer's new little twitter backup tool. I pulled the opml file into Google Reader as instructed and it wasn't long before i had one of those "Aha!" moments. The kind that happen when you re-encounter something you have been using for a while — a new perspective, a peripheral insight.

Marshall asks in his post if there are things we could imagine doing with the tool. Absolutely! Now, I'm not a coder so my understanding of api limitations is here restricted. But I'd want to build off the tool and create a conversation viewer. Twitter is an inefficient conversional tool, and third party apps have only limited effectiveness, because it simply delivers too many tweets. To make matters worse, each of us has different tweeting habits.

Personally, I'm constantly losing the people for the tweets. I use Seesmic desktop (love it) and have set up 7 panels each with 15 - 30 folks I follow in journalism, social media, marketing, user experience, philosophy and two groups of friends. Every few weeks I spend an entire morning reading the home stream and add people I've missed. This takes a lot of work!

The reader view of tweets surfaced people I've been missing for months — many now only tweet irregularly and infrequently. Now I spend a lot of time in the stream, so if I'm missing stuff, I can't imagine what it's like for others (well, I can, and it relaxes me to do so).

Being in twitter is being in the flow. And the river is now huge, it flows quickly, it's crowded, everybody's shouting (some are whispering), some are muttering to themselves, others just saying hello... it's a mess. It's no more a conversation than it is a high-school auditorium in a pre-game frenzy and everybody's got a sign to wave about and there's a constant stream of students coming and going and the signs keep changing and it never stops.

So I'd like to go meta, and Winer's tool reminded me why. I'd like a conversation viewer. Not just for the messages I'm missing, and more importantly, the people I'm missing them from, but for the cross-talk, depth, and threads, too. I'd like to see not just a feed for each of the people I'm following but I'd like to see the dots connected. I'd like to see and be able to navigate from person to person, on topic or off topics. During certain periods of time -- for the episodic interactions that often happen in twitter.

I'd like to surface experts, and not just the ones who think they're experts and tweet like they are, but those who are responsive experts: the ones who are quiet till asked. And the friendly experts: the ones who pipe up when they encounter a fellow soccer fan, make an introduction, and follow.

And the recommenders: those who may not be topical experts but who have some pretty good reasons to make a recommendation: they know the person, they know what they like, and whose recommendations are timely and helpful.

And the helpers: those who may not be experts but who recently had the same experience and can offer timely and targeted advice.

And the inviters: those who know what's going on and invite people they think may be interested (or invite everyone) because they themselves are interested. People who may not be hosting their own event but are socially and culturally active.

And the buddies: those who are there but you might not know it until you tweet something personal and it turns out they've been paying attention. The ones whose tweets you remember because they're kind and comforting in a me-too and we-all-have-those-kinds-of-days way. The ones whose tweeting is personal.

And many more. I'd like a meta-view of the space, by topic, person, group, clique, culture, profession, hobby, activity, location, and event. Over time, for periods of time, with flow velocities and rates of change. A navigation system so that I can hop around through conversations and save, favorite, and share. I'd like a viewer for myself and one for clients. I'd like different kinds for clients, depending on whether they do community management, brand management, PR, marketing, customer service, or sales.

And a whole lot more. I think I'm going to dig up some of my old conversation analysis stuff now. Did I mention social analytics? So, thanks Dave! And thanks Marshall!

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Tuesday, August 11, 2009

Transparency: truth in social media

I consider social media to be talk technologies, and I've been suspecting of late that the debate around "transparency" is a debate about communication. I say this only because transparency is sometimes used to describe branding, advertising, PR, marketing, corporate behavior, and of course, use of social media. All of these activities can possibly benefit, or suffer, from transparency.

Think of transparency and you see clarity. You see through the foil, the "grand gestures" (Deb Shultz), and the clever tactics of corporate marketing and PR. Transparency then describes how a brand relates to its cusomtomers.

Transparency certainly involves a company's interactions with its customers. This impacts the customer's experience, and thus idea, of the brand. From the customer's perspective, you get what you see, and what you ask for, you sometimes get also. We sometimes call this authenticity, meaning that a company is sincere in its customer relationships and communication.

Company walls, too, become transparent &emdash; if not on the inside, then on the outside. Company disclosure is an element of transparency: companies that no longer try to conceal their inner workings, or which are "open" to sharing their activities with the outside world, are transparent. This kind of transparency involves the visibility of company actviities.

Then there is customer service. This, too, is a key feature in the new transparency. Here it generally means treating customers with respect, fairly and responsively (in a timely manner). This involves a kind of equality in relations, in the sense that, as the saying goes, the customer is always right. It's transparency because it puts the company in its right place: not above, but in the service of, the customer. This is the rightness, the justice, or fairness of relations.


To return to the beginning, then, I find these different accounts of transparency interesting because they all involve "truth." I deliberately avoid Colbert's infamous claim to "truthiness," because that is just the image of truth.

There are, in pragmatics (a branch of linguistics), three claims to truth made in all our communication:


  • a claim to truth as fact (something is true about reality)

  • a claim to truthfulness (somebody is sincere, means what s/he says)

  • and a claim to authority (somebody is allowed to claim what s/he claims, e.g. has the social position or authority)



These aspects of truth in communication underlie the concept of transparency.

Transparency is:

  • truth in brand communication and behavior: factual accuracy, full disclosure, no manipulation, denial, misrepresentation of the truth

  • truthfulness in brand intent: authentic self-representation, genuine, sincere, and honest communication, behavior with integrity, respect, and understanding (including the listening part)

  • truth as the right to speak and act: respect for laws and norms, codes of conduct, etiquette, shown by associating with the brand's own community, audience, and marketplace as an equal participant committed to a shared and common future, sustainably and compassionately



I suspected that transparency had something to do with communication when it became virtually interchangeable with authenticity. These are terms we use in describing people, and trust, especially. They apply to people because they involve intentions, actions, speech, behavior: human stuff, deeply social stuff.

We might in fact say that transparency is really about humanizing for-profit companies. That as professionals, and as consumers, we ask for transparency in corporate behavior because it is what we expect from state and government behavior: accountability. In other words, transparency is in the zeitgeist.

One final thought. For transparency is not all that it's cracked up to be, for all and at all times equally. As tax payers, it is a citizen's right to expect accountability in government actions.

Companies that sell products, and which use their brand reputation to do so, are paid by consumers for their products. There is no social contract, but an exchange of money. In other words, the brand that embraces transparency does so in its own self interest. I'm not saying that this invalidates corporate transparency, but that it complicates it. Social media may want to be used authentically. But companies and brands are unlikely to embrace full transparency.

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Friday, August 07, 2009

Enterprise and Social Media: Ambient Knowledge, Hidden Knowledge

In the process of considering the differences between "regular" consumer social media, and social media in the enterprise, I've been turning over the idea of ambient intimacy vs ambient knowledge. I thought "knowledge" might not only capture the knowledge management trendline that continues to run through many internal enterprise software applications, but that it might also shift emphasis from social to organizational values. The idea of "ambient knowledge" came up around some webinars hosted by Ross Mayfield (@ross), Laura Fitton (@pistachio), and Marcia Conner (@marciamarcia). The term seemed to suit realtime social media in the enterprise well, namely twitter and, in this case, Socialtext and its Signals messaging platform.

But in the weeks since, the concept has been tumbling and turning over in my mind's eye. The "knowledge" part of it works for me still, but the "ambient," like an ill-fitting shirt drawn from the tumble drier too late, does not.

I went back to Leisa Reichelt's (@leisa) first use of the term ambient intimacy.

"Ambient intimacy is about being able to keep in touch with people with a level of regularity and intimacy that you wouldn’t usually have access to, because time and space conspire to make it impossible. Flickr lets me see what friends are eating for lunch, how they’ve redecorated their bedroom, their latest haircut. Twitter tells me when they’re hungry, what technology is currently frustrating them, who they’re having drinks with tonight." Leisa Reichelt

Leisa's description is about awareness, access, visibility. These are provided by means of messaging and communication. "Ambient" here means a kind of passive connectedness and awareness; the metaphor is visual, specular, spatial. "Ambiance" refers to one's surroundings and place. Here, ambient intimacy hints at Wim Wenders' "Far Away, So Close," a film that is about intimacy, video, vision.

But where "ambient" suggests connectedness where there would otherwise be none, people within the organization are often connected: if not in fact and by virtue of a shared building, company identity, purpose and so on, then also by means of in-house technologies. The issue, as often noted in the knowledge management literature, is less a connectedness problem and more a problem of silos. Awareness, not of what people are up to but of who may have an answer.

Relationships within the organization are structured. They serve functional organization. Communication, too, tends to serve tasks, jobs, projects: communication coordinates activities.

The "awareness" problem, in terms of knowing and having access to knowledge that others have, seems more one of transparency and disclosure. And in the organization, the relationships that could be helped by use of social technologies are the latent relationships: those that could be functionally productive, if the employees knew of one another.

So I have been going with "hidden knowledge" instead of "ambient knowledge" of late.

Lee Bryant, in his (old) post Ambient Knowledge describes a feed and flow-based view of organizational social media use. The fact that this dates to 2005 seems to me, in fact, prescient.

Lee describes three directions for KM (Knowledge Management) as suggested by David Snowden:

  • Techno-fetishism: where organisations focus on codification through technology solutions, which is little more than an advanced form of information management

  • HR solutions: where it becomes a servant of recruitment, retention and succession policy, owned by HR and run by IT

  • Sense making: where the focus is not on sharing knowledge but on enabling better decision making, creating the conditions for innovation and understanding the way we make sense of our world


Lee then reflects on the social interaction model, if you will, for a socialized KM:

"We need to let people organise their inputs by exposing all relevant information in granular feed form and then provide smart aggregation and tagging tools to create a personal eco-system of content, cues and links.

This is what we have been describing as a social interface to corporate information sources: create a layer of feeds and flows that reference content objects, and allow people to apply flexible personal meta-data within a social context to constantly reorganise the links into that content according to their day-to-day needs.

Second, we should help people develop the skills and confidence to move from linear processing mode, where they feel a need to respond to our acknowledge everything (e.g. memos and the email inbox) to peripheral vision mode, where people make better decisions and connections by assisted by ambient information feeds, and where information grabs our attention only when it needs to (e.g. "reading" in an RSS aggregator, sensing importance of links through number of references or recognised trust relationships)."

I think the passing emphasis on action, and on use of social tools to make what might be "ambient" (hidden) knowledge actionable (or connecting up latent relationships to make them actual) is important. Work is focused activity. Work done in part by talking uses talk to coordinate action and activity. Flow-based social media can supplement this kind of work: by routing, distributing, exposing and sharing communication differently. From email to a more transparent and visible kind of communication.

Transparency creates and opens possibilities: for reciprocity and recognition of shared goals and common purposes. It discloses bias and undermines (somewhat) structural tendencies (the schlerotic organizational body). It can work, using social media communication tools, in part because communication becomes more personal (in contrast to professional or employee role and position). And while this personalization may create risks for employees, it can produce coincidental and serendipitous openings. These are the benefits that accrue to activities not designed for their utility (productivity), but for their ability to weave and bind socially (social fabric).

This is where I'm at now with it. I'm still allowing the coincidence, serendipity, and social of social media to tumble about the cranium. I know that the "social" inside a company is not the social we normally mean by social media. But that'll be a separate post.

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Wednesday, August 05, 2009

Social media metaphors: what do we mean to say?

The topic of metaphor came up the other evening over dinner with some friends. Metaphor, and social media in particular. We had gathered at the behest of Andreas Weigend with the express purpose of having an "intelligent conversation" about the social web. Not that most conversations are unintelligent or stupid. But that most are held only falteringly during events and at parties. Besides myself, Mark Plakias Jerry Michalski and Eric Doyle were also at the table.

I raised the matter of metaphor simply to kick off the conversation. I commented that I'd been trying to understand how it is that we talk about social media, emphasizing that how we talk about it often translates into our work: what we design, what we advise, how we analyze trends, and so on.

I mentioned that I'd been interested, too, in how industry leaders talk about social media, and in the sometimes subtle but meaningful differences between their terminologies. Brian Solis has been talking about publics (instead of audiences). Jason Falls talks about relationships.

(Sidenote: Brian talks about putting the public back in PR; Jason about putting relationships back in PR. Both are right, if understood through their own lens).

Tara Hunt's concept of Whuffie is a form of social capital, and related to one's personal brand and influence. Chris Heuer (of Adhocnium and Social Media Club fame) emphasizes the conversation, and if you know Chris, it is clear why. Stowe Boyd hews more closely to the network, or more accurately, its edges, where culture, technology, and social practices co-mingle and conspire to create new kinds of interactions.

I suppose these distinctions are obvious when you get to know these people and their work. I'm not psychologizing friends and colleagues here, but simply making a point about metaphor: we describe things as we see them. How we describe them shapes and informs what we think about them, and thus how we talk about them.

"We assume more than we know." -- David Hume
"A man's reach exceeds his grasp, or what's a metaphor?" -- Marshall McLuhan


Metaphors are ideas that substitute for other ideas. A metaphor is usually a linguistic concept whose meaning is both greater, more ambiguous, and more general than the concept it substitutes for.

There is nothing wrong with metaphors. But we can easily take them for fact, for objectivity, for reality, which they are not. They are expressions (and necessary ones). But when we describe phenomena like "social media" in terms of "relationships" "audiences," "publics," "trust," "conversation," "communication," "markets," and so on, we are in effect making claims built on foundations of sand. Those of us in social media describe it as we see it, emphasizing the actions, uses, insights, benefits, profits, trends, or whatever, that work for us (given what we do and how we make a living):

Brian Solis: audiences > publics = PR people, change the way you think about who you are communicating to.
Jason Falls: promotion > sharing = PR people, change the way you act, treat people with respect for they are partners in a relationship
Tara Hunt: branding > whuffie = Do great things, be a part of your community, listen, and be more an inspiring and person of leadership

We are reflected in how we talk, in how we see things and in how we think they work. All of these people are right, from the perspective they have taken on social media. Yes to Brian, it is about a paradigm shift away from the old, traditional PR/audience relationship to a much different one. Yes to jason, it is about using what you know about relationships to achieve promotion but in a better way. Yes to Tara, it's about the personal and community, which when you see it is really so clearly what branding was always about (but lost sight of).

I find this stuff fascinating, and of course, we have only scratched the surface.

  • The design world has many metaphors around users, design, influence and control, and the big one --"use" itself;
  • Technologists have many metaphors, reflecting assumptions about problems, solutions, utility, efficiency, and their big one "better."
  • Economists and business people have theirs, focused on markets, exchange, demand/supply, production, and their big one: value.
  • And so on.


The point here is not to personalize common social metaphors or claims. It's to raise an issue with respect to the social media space in general. Metaphors easily become facts, truths, claims. Ideas taken for granted. They are embedded into arguments, which is to say, opinions. Soon enough we are all using terms like "relationship," "transparency," "community," "conversation," and we don't really know what we mean any longer. At which point it becomes difficult to speak with precision. And misunderstandings then proliferate.

I, for one, don't often know what is meant by "conversation" and I use the term "conversational media" regularly. I don't know what "transparency" means. I definitely do not know what "relationship" means, because I've heard that one used in brand terms that violate my sense of "relationship."

It helps to know who is talking, in order to better understand how the term is being used. But that's not a feasible expectation. And terms, and how we use them, change. When we use a term like "relationship" do we literally mean that Coca Cola has relationships with its customers? I've had thousands to drink and yet felt anything about the brand. I love the taste, love the experience, but the brand? Do we mean "like a relationship?" This will be a topic of another post, as I don't know what "relationship" means, and it bothers me to think that people can really only know relationships with living things, mostly people. So if "relationship" means personal relationships, then we may have a misused and inappropriate metaphor. Perhaps it's time to admit that what we really mean is "communication."

This was what has been on my mind of late. I'm really interested in knowing how social media work, well enough to formalize some of it in a description that works for industry professionals. In studying the field, and coming to know many of its pioneers, I've enjoyed the differences among people much more than the similarities. Each of these people is, wittingly or not, to some degree responsible for new understandings, and for observations, descriptions, and explanations that contribute to the "discipline" (if this is one!).

I probably hail from a place where terminological precision is a more valued facet of communication than communication, and clarity, itself. But I do think we gain substantial insight when we examine our own language, and when we think critically about the terms we use, and how we use them.

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Monday, August 03, 2009

Researching social media usage: right research, wrong conclusions?

Just a short post, friends, to rant a bit about a couple social media research posts I've just come across. As invaluable good research is on the uses and implications of social media, I'm sometimes bothered by the conclusions drawn from research. I speak not as a researcher myself, and must express my gratitude to those who get their hands dirty with data collection, organization, and processing. But we all know that research is frequently conducted in order to test a hypothesis — and that consequently, data lends itself to proving the hypothesis to be correct. And there is the fact that some of this research is reported with a flair for the headline, and so the blogs on which we discover internet research may often distort or even falsely report research findings for the sake of a good lead.

I have two complaints. The first deals with conclusions drawn, I think falsely, from research conducted around online communication practices and proximity. The research used Facebook and email habits of users, and concluded that the internet is not a "global village" after all, but that users in fact communicate with people they live close to. Well the research is interesting, but clearly Facebook is not the only way in which people communicate online. And Facebook is a social network for friends. Presumably, if one included the many ways which we communicate with people we don't know: twitter, blog commenting, groups and niche networks, then geographical proximity would not look like the cause of communication. it's not the research so much as the conclusion that bothers me. and not even that the conclusion — we communicate most with people close by — is a bad one (it seems to me an obvious one).

It's the theoretical misstep that bothers me. And it applies to other and similar research efforts. Aggregate user activity, captured in data, are a problematic foundation from which to make claims (such as observations) about user motives and intentions. Even more problematic, in my opinion, is the use of research like this to explain these motives. Either the researcher, or the reporter (bloggers included), will often draw conclusions that are neither supported by data nor expressed by the data. I'm not a scientist or statistician, but it seems clear to me that a finding such as "we use the internet to communicate with people close by" neither refutes the internet's ability to collapse distance; to link disparate and unrelated people, pages, and communication forums; to aggregate commentary around blog posts; to create followings around personalities (twitter) in ways that can subvert mass media's control over image and messaging; nor proves that the global village was a utopian idea, but an idea only.

To make those kinds of claims, one would have to study not just our personal communication habits, but our habits around tweeting, "publishing" and posting, participating in groups, playing social games, subscribing to news, and much more. One would have to know how internet-based discourse networks grow and function. One would have to make cultural claims about access and exposure, oh, and participation, in media events, stories, videos, and other kinds of socialized news.

The village, local or global, is made up of far more than personal conversations. Villages have news, gossip, rumors, and secrets. So it frustrates me when research is used to collapse a concept, when research is used to support conclusions it couldn't possibly contain (because they are outside the data), and when simple stories are created as a means to explain or tell research findings. I'm sure researchers themselves are troubled when this occurs.

The article that prompted this post:

E-mail Traffic Data Casts Doubt on Global-Village Theory
mentioned at Modern Metrix

If you think e-mail is making geographical distance less important, think again. A new analysis indicates that the opposite may be true.
....
Their conclusion is that far from reducing the importance of geographical location, electronic communication appears to have increased it, probably because people swap more messages with those they have personal interaction with.
....
A lot of thinking about economics and numerous business plans are based on the idea that society has become a "small world." There may need to be some hurried rethinking if that premise turns out to be wrong.




And the second part of this rant is sparked by an over-simplified categorization of social media users found at AndersonAnalytics. I am glad that there are others interested in social analytics, and from a behavioral and psychological angle. This has been my bailiwick for a while now. I don't have research to support my "insights" into user psychologies. Anderson floats user types based on a simple form on which users self-describe themselves in ways that unsurprisingly match the characteristics used to differentiate users.

Others have taken this kind of approach, and while I have my doubts about the reliability of self-described behaviors (we don't always know the whys and wherefores of our actions), it's again not the research approach that bothers me. It's the idea that user types may be identified that explain user behavior and experience. This is suggested by the labels: "fun-seeker" (a form question supporting this must be: "Express my creativity", which is an awfully strange way to self-describe "have fun," not to mention that being creative and expressing oneself are different things altogether, that being creative doesn't require an audience, and boring people express themselves, too).

It bothers me when generalizations are made on the basis of data inadequate to the generalizations concluded (our first case, above) or on the basis of data poorly collected (our second case, below). Granted, research in this field is often cited to tell stories that support the cases made by social media professionals. But for those who might take such conclusions as we see here to heart, I want to simply say that online user experiences, and real phenomena of communication, of relationships, of community, etc, are far more complicated than suggested here. If you are in the business of using social media, demand better research and reporting.


From: Anderson Analytics’ Seven Social Network Segments

"To understand the SNS market more broadly, Anderson Analytics has created and profiled seven segments of online Americans. Three SNS Non-User segments and four SNS User segments. The yellow circles mapped below represent the four SNS User segments. The blue circles represent the three SNS Non-User segments."

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