Facebook and Twitter are challenging the very foundation of our internet experience. From the days of dial-up, the Internet has been the most prolific catalog of human experience in recorded history. Services like Google and Yahoo have made millions of dollars organizing all of that data for us to search, but social networks like Facebook and MySpace, coupled with the emergence of real-time information provided by Twitter have irreversibly altered the landscape of the Internet.
Many consider email the advent of the social web and modern email clients like Gmail and Yahoo! Mail are more easily compared to social networks, but at its heart, email is just a messaging service. It might deliver messages in the blink of an eye instead of taking days or weeks, but in the end it’s just a digital form of mail. Chat rooms are another form of early social communication, but real identities were very rarely ever linked to this communication and nascent chat rooms more or less resembled the wild west of creepsters and registered sex offenders.
The true advent of widely accepted social interaction on the web are instant messenger services where you communicated with people you knew and who knew you in real-time chat windows. It was the beginning of real conversations on the web. Instant messaging served as proof of concept that people desired to use the internet as a social medium.
Direct instant messaging services like AIM were essentially the real-time expression of an email correspondence. You can think of Twitter in the same frame of real-time expression of an already established form of social media communication, but I’m getting ahead of myself.
MySpace and eventually Facebook upped the anty when they allowed users to create profiles that they could customize to reflect their individuality and connect to other profiles that reflected their real life group of friends and family. If instant messaging gave us a voice to communicate digitally, then social networks gave us a presence on the Internet that reflected our personality in the real world.
I’d also argue that MySpace’s fall from grace could be partly blamed to the nature of user-expression in their profiles. Many people immediately reference the customizable profile elements as a primary draw for creating a MySpace profile, but after a while the aesthetic of the MySpace community became very confused and to be frank, ugly. Not to discount the importance of individuality, but connections are usually formed because of commonalities and feelings of familiarity/trust. The aesthetic of MySpace, I believe, created a subliminal trust barrier because it emphasized our differences instead of what naturally draws us together. Facebook on the other hand has standard profiles that allow users to just control the information that they share. Even MySpace’s name emphasizes individuality over community. MySpace. Not YourSpace or OurSpace. MySpace.
Facebook’s introduction to the market and it’s origin as an elite-college social network gave it an incubation period that was healthy for the development of it’s culture. While most see students as crazy, reckless and impulsive (which they usually are), I’d argue they are the most aware of and in-tune with social influences that permeate their circles. Being a college student is tough. A completely new set of people in your life forces you to connect with a new set of friends and communities for you to express yourself. As young adults gain more independence to explore and own their self-expression, they also become very aware of how they are perceived and this gives them an incentive to actively control that perception. This isn’t just true of college students. Teens and even kids in grade school are highly aware of social status, what’s cool and what isn’t. This aspect of student culture transfered to the early iterations of Facebook as students on the network were highly aware that their profile could easily be the first impression they make on a number of people. When you don’t know whether your crush or your arch-enemy is reading up on your activities, interests and groups, you tend to self-censor a little more carefully. This leads to profiles that are a little tamer, but ultimately more inviting to connection with a wider net of people because there are fewer outlier/alienating elements included in profiles. The profiles also more closely reflect the real-life expression of our identity because most of us are very proficient at controlling our perceptions through self-censorship.
Fast forward to 2010 and social networks have begun to dominate discussion in the advertising world and among thought-leaders developing tomorrow’s business models. The founder of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, is one of those thought-leaders. He sees Facebook and the social web overtaking search engines as the primary portal through which people interface with the web. I won’t argue with this point. I do believe as the social web will continue to develop and deepen digital relationships, that social networks will become our homepage and primary reason for going online, but I also believe that search engines and the information-web have a unique role independent of the social-web.
Those who argue that the internet experience is converging into one portal that people will use both socially and to seek information seem to ignore the fact that digital technology, in almost every instance, begins to mimic our real life experience. If our real life were 100% social and all of the information we learned was through our friends and family, then I’d jump right on the bandwagon for a one-portal interface solution to the internet. This is not the case though. We seek information from sources outside our social sphere and interact with the world in many ways that have nothing to do with our friends. Sure, we seek the opinion of our peers on subjects, but many people prefer to develop their own perspective before letting others influence their opinion. How is that possible if social networks and the influence of our peers is interwoven with all of our internet experience?
In the end, I don’t see the information-web and social-web experiences converging into a single solution for all your internet needs. Facebook and other social networking services like Twitter and Foursquare have a long way to go before they have maximized their online potential because they’re only starting to integrate themselves tangibly into our real life experiences. The power of digital word-of-mouth is only starting to be felt because consumers are still acclimating to the idea of expressing opinions online. The rise of blogging, Twitter, status updates and viral content online is helping drive this expression to the mainstream. As opinion expression spreads through the culture of the internet and more people become comfortable with sharing their thoughts online, businesses will be forced to listen and encourage this feedback because it will provide them invaluable data on their customers that they’ve never really had access to before. From a research perspective, think of social media as the largest representative sample in the history of research.
Personal expression is extremely important to the growth and integration of the Internet as a ubiquitous aspect of our everyday lives, but the web as a source of independent information and cataloging will always be a part of our user-experience. A converged Internet would be like living in a world without libraries or bookstores where you could only borrow buy books based on your friend’s interests and literary purchase history. There is no winner in this war between social and independent portal experiences because the “battle” is just a narrative that has been developed based on too narrow of a perspective. The user-experience will eventually converge in it’s ubiquity, but diverge in the expression of that ubiquity, ultimately reflecting the very complexity of those who created the experience.
Jackson Pollock's Convergence
No comments:
Post a Comment