responding to the social media bubble

24 Mar, 2010 • posts i've written • 19 comments

Yesterday, Umair Haque posted The Social Media Bubble over at The Harvard Business Review blog and it’s created quite a stir.

All in all, Umair’s post is a fairly damning treatise on the state of the social web. And though I’ve always valued Umair’s opinion, in this case I do take issue with many of his arguments.

Before my response to Umair’s post, I’ve transposed his central points for quick reading (edited and condensed):

… the Internet isn’t connecting us as much as we think it is. It’s largely home to weak, artificial connections, what I call thin relationships … Thin relationships are the illusion of real relationships. … At most, they’re marked by a tiny chunk of information or attention here or there. …

If we take social media at face value, the number of friends in the world has gone up a hundredfold. But have we seen an accompanying rise in trust? I’d argue no.

… If social tools were creating real economic gains, we’d expect to see a substitution effect. They’d replace — disintermediate — yesterday’s gatekeepers. Yet, increasingly, they are empowering gatekeepers. Your favorite social networks aren’t disintermediating PR agencies, recruiters, and other kinds of brokers. They’re creating legions of new ones.

… There’s this old trope: the Internet runs on love. Equally, though, it’s full of hate: irrational lashing-out at the nearest person, place, or thing that’s just a little bit different. … Far from fueling meaningful conversation, today’s “social” web is a world full of the linguistic equivalent of drive-by shootings.

… To be “friends” with 1000 people who are also obsessed with vintage 1960s glasses isn’t friendship — it’s just a single, solitary shared interest.

… I can swap bits with pseudo-strangers at any number of sites. “Friends” like that are a commodity — not a valuable, unique good.

… Farmville ain’t exactly Casablanca. Third, and most damaging, is the ongoing weakening of the Internet as a force for good. Not only is Farmville not Casablanca, it’s not Kiva either. One of the seminal examples of the promise of social media, Kiva allocates micro-credit more meaningfully. By contrast, Farmville is largely socially useless.

On to my response …

Relationships

Umair is clearly attacking a very specific type of behavior (the Pokemon-esque, friend them all philosophy) that I believe he is wrongly ascribing to a majority of people. I tend to find that people that include social media among the venn diagram of their job exhibit this behavior, but those outside of our sphere hardly ever reproduce this type of social activity. For most people, social networking sites are used predominantly to groom and support existing relationships, not to generate new relationships. Citing danah boyd on the topic, in her work on friendship, social networking sites, and teens, she concludes:

While social media have the potential to radically alter friendship-making processes, most teens use these tools to maintain preexisting connections, turn acquaintances into friendships, and develop connections through people they already know. Social media offer a platform for teens to take friendships to a new level. Those teens who seek new friends through networked media are a minority, often because developing online connections is stigmatized and set against a backdrop of adult fears of stranger danger and mainstream youth norms that center on school-centered sociability.

In contrast to Umair’s criticism, I do believe that most people are using social networking sites to strengthen existing relationships and not to generate thin relationships. In fact, the average active Twitter user has only 126 followers and the average Facebook user has 150-200 friends.

But while we’re on the topic, social technology often does one thing well – extract value from thin relationships. But let’s be clear, there isn’t much gold in those hills to begin with, they are indeed thin relationships, but the internet is an excellent extruder of say, the gold dust, that does exist. Google is a clear example of this: they were able to harness the value of thin relationships to improve search. And Amazon crunches thin relationships to offer better product recommendations. But both examples are applications of technology (algorithms, databases, etc) and not applications of a single person’s attention to extract value from thin relationships – which is what I think many of us are trying to reproduce with our behaviors, and we’re failing.

We, as in those of us with one foot or another in social media, can’t escape the inevitability of Dunbar’s number – after we pass around 150 relationships we need things like databases and algorithms to extract value from our social graph, and it won’t be the same kind of value we had before. And both Facebook and Twitter do an extremely poor job on their own of extracting value from thin relationships. In fact, things we typically call social networks are the worst at extracting value from thin relationships so far. We should fix that or fix our behaviors.

Substitution

Here, Umair’s argument seems to be that if the social web was actually empowering individuals, then brokers of all kinds (middle-men, intermediates) would be losing power of their own. Umair is arguing that the system should be tit for tat and that power is ultimately a fixed resource that can be exchanged between people or groups of people. Of course, this isn’t how a complex adaptive system works at all – and that’s exactly what the social web is.

Briefly, a complex adaptive system can be identified by the following attributes: 1) a multi-level system of agents constantly acting and interacting, 2) highly dispersed control, behavior is dictated by the cooperation and competition between agents, 3) an ability to adapt as experience is gained, 4) an anticipation of the future derived by agents predicting potential outcomes, and 5) many many niches that ultimately spawn further niches.

If that doesn’t sound exactly like the social web, I for sure can’t do any better. And it’s that last attribute, the many niches, that conflicts most with Umair’s argument. In his book, Complexity, Mitchell Waldrop describes best what I believe Umair is upset over:

… complex adaptive systems have many niches, each one of which can exploited by an agent adapted to fill that niche. Thus, the economic world has a place for computer programmers, plumbers, steel mills, and pet stores, just as the rain forest has a place for tree sloths and butterflies. Moreover, the very act of filling one niche opens up more niches – for new parasites, for new predators and prey, for new symbiotic partners. So new opportunities are always being created by the system. It is always unfolding, always in transition. In fact, if the system ever does reach equilibrium, it isn’t just stable. It’s dead.

The social web, as a complex adaptive system, will create new opportunities for niches and new opportunities for power struggles. But in contrast to Umair’s thesis, it will not actively destroy old opportunities in order to equalize power. The creation of a new niche can easily make the role of a broker, someone who can navigate a more complex landscape, even more valuable.

hate

The internet doesn’t run on love or hate – it runs on performance. Perhaps more than anything, the social web has generated new methods for identity construction and we’re actively performing in order to construct our identity among our peers. Certainly, anonymity online has contributed to people expressing distaste more freely, but I do believe that far before the internet was invented the world was already full of hateful speech. With that said, why is it that we expect the social web to purely be a place of love and good when inhabit a world and create a culture that is far from that utopian dream? I’m with Umair on this one, let’s make the internet a better place, but we may have to start by addressing reality.

farmville

As Henry Jenkins has said, “Humans do not engage in activities that are meaningless. If you think you see people doing things you find meaningless, look again and try to understand what the activities mean for them.” I find Umair’s dismissal of Farmville to sound more ignorant than I’m sure Umair, himself, actually is. And as Jane McGonigal cited in her recent TED talk, there is immense social and personal value found in gaming, enough so to easily justify why gamers would spend so much of their time inside gameplay. Farmville is so much more than Casablanca to so many more people – Casablanca has 23k fans on Facebook while Farmville has 82 million monthly users on Facebook (and ‘Not Playing Farmville’ has over 2 million fans).

but social media is a bubble

Of course social media is a bubble. But it’s the industry, not the technology, that’s the bubble. Those in the industry that are sick of social media are probably sick of their own reflection; we have to stop talking about social media as a thing wholly its own and instead talk of it as a reality of modern personal and professional life.

At this year’s SXSW, everyone seemed to be bored by most of the panels (and most were about social media) – because social media is boring. But that’s important, because now we can stop lecturing about social media and start innovating on social technologies and their applications.