Beyond Social Media

Doc, well articulated…thank you. Several years ago as Social Media was initially formulating, we discussed whether or not we should even put weight behind “social media” as a category. You offered an alternative, which I still refer to today, “The Live Web.” Considering the convergence of personal + mobile + communication + social + geo + real-time, it seems that your idea of the Live Web is beginning to materialize.

Excellent post, Doc! I’ve resisted the “social media” hype and thought I might be the only one. Still, when people move their conversation from blogs to facebook, well… I gotta follow. Even so, facebook and its ilk remind me of AOL. Irony is that when Mosaic was released, AOL hung on to their walled garden approach even when their members pleaded for access to the world wide web. Wish I could be at defrag to hear the cluetrain at 10 keynote.

Doc, spot on and insightful, as always.

We actually raised this very question on the ebizQ Forum, with some very interesting answers here: http://www.ebizq.net/blogs/ebizq_forum/2009/11/will-enterprise-20-transform-the-enterprise-or-is-it-a-crock.php

Also, would love for you to share your e-wisdom as well…if interested, please email me.

Great blog post!

Pete

Wonderful analysis, by a pioneer blogger, on Personal Media vs. Social Media.

I also think that Social Media, if there really is a deep socializing element in it, should make all participants more friendly, compassionate, and extroverted in the real world.

If all “social” interaction is happening on the social media sites, but we’re surly, sour, and asocial in our daily offline affairs, then Social Media is a Grand Illusion.

In blogocombat, my primary technique is to respond with text to text. I don’t make it personal. I fight bad ideas with good ideas, hopefully. But in blogocaring, I try to connect my heart with the hearts of the people who seem to reside behind or beyond the text.

I’ve noticed that I indeed have become more sociable in the offline world, as a result of intense social media interaction, as typified by RTs, @s, :^) and sincere kindness to those who ask questions or provide me with comfort and support.

But to many, social media may be just another video game where points accumulated are Followers numbers and now Listings.

And, back to your point, if social media platforms are controlled by companies, then we are only slightly empowered personally.

Excellant article Doc!

I second the above comments.

The issues you highlight will be with us for a long time, and are at the heart of our societies’ access to and use of the Net for the whole range of human activities … not only monetization and commerce.

The provenance of the NEA “personal” technologies you list is in silos, such is the way of these things as described by Clayton Christensen in the Innovator’s Solution.

Proprietary, closed, integrated solutions that fulfill the customers’ needs. Then comes open, standard, modular solutions.

Yes, the services you mention are the new AOLs, and have learned their lessons, they are the *new* AOLs. Just as AOL simplified and democratised the tangle of computers and dial-up back in the day, so have Facebook and Twitter, while Friendfeed has not and consequently isn’t performing as well on the mass adoption metric. Since the new gardens have lower walls and costs of participation, the incentive to displace them may be weakened.

And along with the hot, easy, integrated solutions (Twitter, iPhone) we are seeing the growth of the open, modular (Identi.ca, Android).

Thus while I agree with your view about the development cycling back to a less NEA model, the new AOLs are just a typical and necessary step toward the next NEA.

Yes! I was meandering towards this point in http://www.circleid.com/posts/20001026_deluge_is_underway_is_email_waterproof/ a few weeks ago; thank you for identifying the core of it.

It’s a nice idea, but the problem is that non-tech-nerds are really, really bad at owning their own software.

I mean, yeah okay, it’s easy to buy hosting and set up a WordPress site and do anything you like, but it’s a *lot* easier to set up a Facebook account and share stuff with your friends that way. I’ve even heard people complain that I don’t check my Facebook Inbox enough. These people are using it instead of email, because “email’s too hard” or “email is for work stuff”. Seriously.

Look, my mom can use Facebook effectively, she can read Twitter. She can’t setup her own sharing platform, no matter how easy you make it to do.

The vast majority of personal sharing methods will always be through private companies hosting your stuff for you. The real goal here should be to make them all intercompatible by developing open protocols that anybody can use.

Facebook is anti-web in that it’s a closed system: you have to have a Facebook account to even read a Facebook blog. Such insularity only destroys the open communications platform of the web revolution.

The internet continues to be an amazing platform for connecting people and ideas. I say that’s always been its primary function. it’s just that when something new comes along, we naturally look at it in the context of what we had before. So we modify “media” with “social” and think that’s a meaningful placeholder for what’s happening… but the frame misleads us.

Thanks Doc for mashing Reset.

Thought-provoking, Doc, but you didn’t mention NNTP. I assume that’s because Usenet is so Web 1.0. But maybe it’s time to adapt NNTP to microblogging? Then no single service – twitter.com, identi.ca, status.net, etc.) would be the bottleneck. We don’t need real-time updates the way an IM system requires real-time. Usenet was optimized for propagation delays across UUCP. Ancient.

All the big online social networks are developing useful software and administration knowledge that will come in handy when the next generation of social networks comes along.

Someone who learned sysadmin and moderation skills atthe WELL, AOL, TheGlobe.com, Friendster, MySpace, Facebook, or whatever, will be able to move on and do it again somewhere else. Just like the person who learned to tend bar at last year’s cool bar is able to tend bar at this year’s cool bar. No online gathering place lasts too long, as Cory Doctorow explains.

The software and the net are infrastructure, and the sites are places where people choose to gather for a while.

Doc, Excellent post! I wrote something similar a few months back ( http://bit.ly/BlaNi ) about how services like Twitter and Facebook both violate “The Internet Way” of being “distributed and decentralized” systems and networks. As you note, anyone can set up a mail server, an email server, an XMPP IM server, etc. – *without* asking anyone’s permission. You just go ahead and do it. I like your “NEA” terminology – spot on.

As Don and others have stated in the comments, we may right now be in the transition phase from private/proprietary/silo social media/messaging/networks to more open networks that build upon what was learning in the private silos. Let’s hope so – for the sake of all of us.

Thanks for writing this piece – will your “Cluetrain at 10″ joint keynote be livestreamed or recorded for later viewing?

Doc — TNL pointed me to your post. Sorry I haven’t been a regular reader in a while.

I’ve been in Facebook. With my RL friends.

Grant that my Real Life friends aren’t as deeply philosophical as TNL or you. But give them credit! Maybe a tenth of had been — please allow this phrase — “social sharing” before, and most of them via email blasts.

There’s a tension in communications between messy and neat. We all start with messy. But when someone offers us a new “neat” technology, in order to broaden our horizons (radio with 2 bands. Television with 3 channels. Cable with 75 channels. etc.) we take it.

Now let’s get to the Internet. Open protocols are more flexible — and more messy. And thus take more cognition on the part of the average user. So adoption is limited.

I know that you want to move people towards the open/messy. But that may not happen.

Your “NEA” terminology is a bit confusing to me, since it suggests that No Ownership + Everybody Uses +Anybody Improves are bound together. Let me try a different tack — which comes to me straight from Open Source philosophy.

You want to unbind material ownership from affective ownership — these are the people who can affect any improvements. You seek an organization (or technology) where the affective owners have 100% of the control, vs. 0% to private interests. That could be described as the “perfect” organization. The affective owners are the *effective* owners — they have the ability to make the change. Ok, what if there are material owners, but the work of the affective owners (community) is so the material owners voluntarily step to the background (the steward model)? Or what if the ratio is 99:1? And furthermore, it’s not as if organizations/technologies with zero material ownership are bound to continuously improve (ie., NTTP).

I hate to pull unrank here, but if I were a researcher with your cachet  Harvard.edu), I would focus on the metrics first. Figure out how to measure material vs. affective ownership amongst different orgs/technologies. Figure out where affective ownership works best.

And here’s where we ultimately differ: in your pursuit of the goal of “no ownership” you stoke ownership angst. This is the same angst that worries about a federal “takeover” of healthcare. But there doesn’t have to be angst if material ownership is rendered moot — through effective Affective ownership.

Jon

My cousin and I had a similiar conversation tonight.

He’s involved with the church and we discussed how social media is affecting the way people interact.

While Facebook is not as anonymous as most websites, take a look at the events. When you’re invited to an event on Facebook, your more likely to say yes, just to support them, even if you know you can’t go. Would you do the same in person? Probably not.

Remember when blogging was something we did as individuals (who, oh p.s., happened to work somewhere or do some specific thing for a living) and then some of us started working together (not by some pre-ordained SOW, but because of the RELATIONSHIP SINEW that strung us together)? Of course you do, and I know that because I’ve hugged you.

SO: we are still a bunch of people who happen to work somewhere, shop somewhere, move about somewheres, dream about some things. That is who we are first. AND we also happen to be the same people who are using social media while engaging in all of the aforementioned activities. Which is why It. All. Begins. With. Us.

I watch many companies approach their social media strategies with a broadcast mentality. It’s another channel for disseminating information, for pushing news and information outward. They’re looking at it completely backwards, missing the opportunity to LISTEN to what’s coming IN.

And this gets complicated when you’re talking about a B2B company. There is no “consumer” in their direct line of fire, but in spirit and in process, there should be. Every strategy of a B2B company should start with their customers’ customers and work its way inward.

I’m rambling.

I wish I could be there.

Have fun tomorrow w/ Chris, JP, and Rick!

(p.s. It’s RageBoy’s birthday tomorrow–and I think JP’s too! If I had money, there’s no telling what surprise I’d conjure up. But since I don’t and I’m not there, it’s on you, Doc!)

Incredible Post. I was looking for your email and couldn’t find it, so I hope this does not come of as spammy – Hope you enjoy these short docs we made using pocket tools.

The Spark Series is a collection of short documentaries that show the application of emerging tech tools empowering the creative process of communication.

CURRENT EPISODES:

The new dial tone: http://www.eguiders.com/exclusive/the-spark-series-part-1-the-new-dial-tone

Not another twitter conference: http://eguiders.com/exclusive/the-spark-series-part-2

Doc,

Your points are well taken, and I don’t get the gist you are ‘resisting social media’ but rather taken a standardized approach to what everyone is labeling social media. I can certainly appreciate the instant messenger perspective, however, also feel that what is the alternative? Can microblogging be standardized.

I feel that what sites like Facebook, LinkedIn are doing with ‘federating’ status updates is the right direction. Granted Twitter has a monopoly on status updates, but its still in the air, so to speak.

Best regards,
Mark

Individually-empowered customers are the ultimate greenfield for business and culture. Starting with the social keeps us from working on empowering individuals natively. That most of the social action is in silos and pipes of hot and/or giant companies slows things down even more. They may look impressive now, but they are a drag on the future.

Would you say that language is “owned” by individuals or that it’s “owned” (managed, defined, etc.) by society? (Wittgenstein noted that the meanings of words are give by the contexts in which they are used)

See also “Get out of the Box” ( http://past.blog.com/2009/08/04/get-out-of-the-box ) and other writings (such as http://past.blog.com/2009/06/10/what-is-web-30-part-2-context-is-queen )

You make some really good points, Doc. I think if I was a developer/programmer type in my early twenties, I wouldn’t be learning all about the Twitter/Facebook etc API’s, I’d be helping Dave out with RSS Cloud, jumping all over open VRM, and taking a look at the tools Google have just open-sourced. That is where the exciting stuff is going to be in a few years, I reckon.

Doc — very well. I agree with the vector: openness and interoperability are good goals to push towards.

I’m just unconvinced that the social media industry are inherently against it. I think one can reasonable argue that social media is inherently about sharing with minimal restrictions — and that’s a good thing.

Calling for a new “personal” epoch sounds rather retro — PC’s and PDA’s are not cutting edge anymore.

Let me know if I’ve struck any chord with “affective ownership” — surely some economist or legal scholar has trod down this path? I’ll check my Benkler. One other koan I can offer: the material owner exercises power through past actions (creating the company, getting elected to office) while the affective owner exercises power through potential actions (buying more software, re-electing officers). In the “age of ClueTrain”, material owners should be better able to measure the needs, wants and power of the affective owners better, leading them down the path of stewardship.

Meanwhile, http://ow.ly/ is down right now. Oy…