Sunday, March 21, 2010

Twitter and Testosterone

Thoughtful post by Jonah Lehrer on the hierarchical nature of social networking at scienceblogs.com.
 "Now that the social web is maturing - the platforms have been winnowed down to a select few (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc.) - some interesting commonalities are emerging. The one shared feature that I'm most interested in is also a little disturbing: the tendency of the social software to quantify our social life. Facebook doesn't just let us connect with our friends: it counts our friends. Twitter doesn't just allow us to aggregate a stream of chatter: it measures our social reach. LinkedIn has too many damn hierarchies to count. Even the staid blog is all about the metrics, from page views to unique visitors.
"My worry is that our online social platforms both magnify our hierarchies (by measuring our friends, followers, links, etc.) and erase social distance, so that we suddenly find ourselves in the same monkey cage with a far larger number of monkeys. And that's why I wish there was a popular social platform that didn't measure anything."

1 comment:

Beck said...

Mmm. Still thinking about this one. Of course all marketers want to measure but he's right that we're in a different personal world now.