Here it is, this is the first post of my new blog. What a crazy thing to do when I think about it. First, I assume some people will read it. Secondly, that they will without prejudice. Finally, that what I write will never be used against me, quite the opposite… This brings me to question a little more social web, is it good for me?
Firstly, it would be interesting to understand the social expectations of online contributors. Are we replicating our offline social behaviours and expectations on the web? Or are we deceived by some offline social behaviours and hope that social web can work differently?
Our opinion might be biased by two actors having a direct interest in social web: businesses and web communities. A community will always take individualist arguments as threats. This is not new: governments, religion groups, sport clubs, office departments have always encouraged their members to gather and interact. Isolated individuals will be stigmatized. The same for the internet: Facebook, Myspace, Linkedin, Digg and others will always promote interaction. What is new in our contemporary society is how communication has become lucrative. More we communicate, more ads we see or more communication services we pay. This generates a huge social pressure to communicate, whatever is said. Is it always at our advantage?
One argument often repeated is that social web brings more freedom than other social structures. We can say what we want, we can join the groups we want. But is this really better? Thomas Hobbes says that man is naturally a wolf to men. Give people more freedom and they will use it to create a highly competitive, rough, unfair environment where everyone pursues its own interest.
One-in-Five Employers Use Social Networking Sites to Research Job Candidates, CareerBuilder.com Survey Finds. Of those hiring managers who have screened job candidates via social networking profiles, one-third (34 percent) reported they found content that caused them to dismiss the candidate from consideration (e.g. provocative or inappropriate photographs or information). The internet is a global village where everybody knows each other: parents, education, friends, success, and failures. We have maybe forgotten the advantages of the big cities anonyma, the freedom to experience other aspects of our personality without having to stand for them our entire life. Social groups will always simplify and denature individualities because it is not their interest to recognize the complexity of human behaviours.
I attended few weeks ago the dConstruct conference in Brighton and liked the presentation of Jeremy Keith. He said “The idea that social relationships follow the Pareto principle can strike us as unfair. Entire nations and philosophies have been founded on the principle that we are all equal. But when it comes to our social connections, some are far more equal than others.” I took part in the design of a web community few years ago. I know that the challenge is not to give freedom to its members, but to design the rules which will encourage desired behaviours + will discourage the impressive amount of unacceptable behaviours. Desired behaviours are those increasing valuable activities, not fairness or happiness, even though they are most of the time linked together. It requires a clear set of rules so that the community can easily grow and auto regulate + tactical decisions of which functionalities to expose or not. Thus, despite appearances, social web might follow more Hobbes than Rousseau after all. We are not good by nature, social web can only work if a Leviathan punishes people’s predatorily inclinations. The question is then if we agree with the Leviathan’s values.
We are just at the beginning of social web, many types of social networks, based on different values and rules, still have to be discovered or transposed from offline structures. Let’s not be passive, we should question any social organization, wherever they emerged spontaneously, organically or not. I would not assume social web is intrinsically good for me. Still, it lets me interact with people I would have never met otherwise.
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