But weren’t social media designed for the people who want to share their words with billions of people? Andy Warhol said long ago that everybody wants to be famous, at least for 15 minutes, wasn’t Facebook designed just for that purpose?
No. Early social media like FOAF and the first commercial iteration of FB was designed so that people could connect and share with and meet a limited number of people – two, maybe three degrees of separation at most. An individual’s social network was not seen as billions or even thousands of people, but something closer to Dunbar’s Number (I don’t think it’s co-incidence that one of FB’s choices is exactly double that number).
Fame whores and corporations and trollies and advertisers used the base tool to try to extend their reach to six degrees, giving us the mess we see today. Meanwhile, the social media services never bothered to put in place easy-to-use tools to segment those an individual might want to reach (e.g. immediate family, friends, co-workers, etc.), but instead put all their efforts into creating advertising segmentation tools.
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I don’t think it’s about real names. You could be “Caped Crusader” on FB and not much would change in terms of context collapse if you still had your boss, your mom and those guys from the ikebana club in your friends list. You can group your contacts and set custom visibility rules to your posts, but that’s cumbersome. Facebook and the others like them are your public face, the one you show and are comfortable showing in a job interview, to your granma and so on. For everything else, social networks are just not the right tool. There are forums, remember them? And for actual friends, we have Whatsapp groups and a lot of similar alternatives.
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I don’t think the useful number is the one between 300 and 1 billion, but numbers between zero and 300.
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And now G+ is officially going away in April, at least for non-corporate users.
Not sure it ever was there outside of some niche users.
In science fields at least, it was somewhat popular. Facebook was seen as unprofessional, and LinkedIn seemed too corporate.
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This is essentially a rephrasing of what I was going to say, which is that the real dishonesty is that Option 1 (300 friends) almost always turns out to be exactly the same as Option 2 (the world at large), due to totally unforeseeable technical issues that the social media platform promises to get right on and fix … again, and again, and again. Trusting a social media company to keep your information private (or restricted, or whatever) is like trusting a teenage girl to keep a secret from her friends. It’s just not gonna happen.
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Hi, I’m not real right now! Check out my radical imaginary components. You might know my trigger-feel from the Turkish Air ad directed by Ridley Scott or its bump which aired. I too, do dystopian eyeballs. I’m thinking she gets her visor on right away and un-loses her smaller flamethrower quickly if it’s…well, sorry!
My popular wrong notions and I were taking a break from 3D printing Volvo coral tiles for Sydney Harbor and taking pictures using LiNbO3 crystal media the other day (G+ said,) wondering whether you have different knives for use in Orkut, MeWe, minds, PlusPora (a Diaspora node…is a nod to orthodoxy backed by real sexy skunk eyeballs I suppose,) Vkontakte, (.com;) and Mastodon.social? Because it has seemed like lots of plastic wine service, and that the diversity of write-once flash memory products has suffered even in its blush [see here the last 2 wings to First we Feast with Gordon Ramsey, via Stefan Esser’s sense of humor.]
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I want to make a Howard something parallel here, but am out of my cooking heat class. (But send no more than an Alexa skill to interview on Bill Maher’s SHO thing and violent political agent?)
another> LinkedIn seemed too corporate.
If you mean it follows you as LinkedIn to your hair appointment and liqueurist and when asked says it’s accounting or governance or event hotels or StrategiesInLight (featuring humorist Ken Jennings, and the back-up hotel, and architectural lighting sometimes) and puts on the same moustache-glasses every time, then breaks out some security theater buggery, then yes. The Portable Mrs. Carmody Bible?
all the real humans have left.
See though, it seems like a useful tool to workshop and avoid off echoes, and surely it will nonetheless exist as a wandering guitarist, whistling with musical care of past endeavor and suppressing the echoes of shitlordry past. [foley: Wind whistles]
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I like the idea of Google+ living on as a social network where various brands desparately post memes, attempting to seem like humans, but there’s nobody to hear them as all the real humans have left.
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I think they have corporate customers who use it for internal company things. So G+ for all your work mates at megacorp.
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Social media doesn’t have to be a commercial service. It doesn’t have to be the centrally controlled and designed abomination that it is in the present era.
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I know… After puzzling over it for a bit I figured it had to mean something like the internal version of Gmail they sell. But I like my version better.
The only thing sadder than a social network full of corporate entities pretending to be human is a “social network” that a corporation forces humans to use to get their jobs done. I’ve encountered those and they are dreadful.
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That is the Facebook official narrative, that their system was built for “friends”. Except that Facebook is not the only social network and even if you consider Facebook the official narrative is not history.
The largest social networks of today are, in no particular order, Facebook, Youtube, Twitter and Instagram. The latter three are built under the premise that users want to share with the whole world.
Facebook gained traction around 2006. At the time, the cool thing to do was to run a blog. Remember blogs? The idea was to share with the whole world. Facebook and all the other social networks are actually little more than a massive collection of cross-linked blogs. I don’t think this is by chance but by design. Certainly they could not have ignored that blogs were the thing when they started to refine their system, back then around 2006.
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You may be thinking about diaspora or mastodon, etc… Except that you may be addressing a much bigger problem than you may believe.
The most attractive point of social media is the number of users, simply because they are a communication system. That, in turn, drives them to be huge to the point of being quasi monopolies.
With size comes two effects:
- the business becomes attractive to investors
- the business becomes too expensive for amateurs, especially when you consider the cost of moderation.
The two effects combine makes them evolve towards commercialisation, unless regulation quicks in.
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But by ignoring the reality and presenting the tech companies perspective he is implying it (in my view). Also Google+ and I believe FB followed suit where you can literally share things with defined subsets of your friends (though it is not straight forward).
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It made the rounds in training/workforce development and other educational circles (K-12). It was easy to make it look nice, good for collaboration, and free. I just got my “get your sh** before we delete it all” message this afternoon. 
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Yes, I am familiar with those (indirectly) but they don’t achieve what I’m referring to. The problem is addressed directly in the structure of the internet.
Perhaps that is the most attractive point for business, spy agencies or fame whores (thanks for that one @gracchus) , but I wouldn’t agree that it’s fundamentally true that most or even many people wish to use the net as a means to reach as many people as possible. Many of us simply would like to be in contact with our personal sphere(s), and have a normal measure of control of how those presentations are managed.
We have pre-existing communication systems that aren’t fundamentally vulnerable to malicious algorithmic manipulation. The telephone network, amateur radio, bulletin board systems etc.
But to pretend that these are the only two options for the future would be surrendering to a false Neo-liberal/Market Fundamentalist dichotomy, (not to mention a terribly limited imagining of the possible).
Several current technologies in combination could conceptually achieve this, RSS + Bit-Torrent + ubiquitous network connectivity. (Samsung recently announced a 1TB flash memory chip for phones…)
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What I meant is simply that the network with more reach is statistically more likely to have more of the 300 people new users want to communicate with, not that people want to communicate with all the people in the larger network.
I don’t agree. It seems to me that the telephone system is plagued by automated advertising calls, which I see as malicious manipulation. BBS, at least the large ones, are also plagued by shill users, just look for firms advertising covert advertisement on BBS to find out. Amateur radio is heavily regulated to be non commercial and only open to users with a license, so is actually an example on how regulation can be used against abuse.
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