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:
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.
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