Over the past few days I’ve been thinking a lot about social networks - perhaps triggered by the reaction to my recent post about community, and children. I hinted that social networking was in many waysa part of the problem with modern society, and the breaking down of community.
Take Facebook for example. While on the surface Facebook enables you to keep in touch with friends far and wide - and allows discovery of friends from the distant past, it does not mirror real world communities.Facebook only serves the discovery and interaction with existing friends. It is insular. In the vast majority of cases it relies on the real world as a feeder mechanism - therefore you are far less likely to befriend strangers. You have no neighbours, no postman, no milkman, no boy or girl delivering your paper.
If Facebook is insular, you might imagine Twitter is the opposite - with your posts being dropped directly into the firehose with millions of others. The story Twitter would like you to believe is that the community will embrace you based on the value of the content you share. The truth is that given a large enough network, any meaningful communication on Twitter dies. You might liken it to situations in the real world - a small group of people in a room can each have a voice, and be heard. A larger group of people - in a football stadium perhaps - can still communicate with their immediate neighbours - only on Twitter everybody is heard by everybody, and therefore everybody stops listening.
It seems rather strange in this “connected” world - especially when I work on the corporate coal face of the IT industry - that I should be pondering the failures of the technology I use, rely on, and am helping to drive the adoption of.
There is a famous term, repeated endlessly - that modern communication methods have made the world smaller. Who would have imagined we would also have become more distant ?