social media | Disparate

In response to Émilie Pelletier, who replied to my previous post on “intimacy.” That previous post of mine wasn’t well thought out and I hesitated before pushing the “Publish” button. But given Émilie’s thoughtful response, I’m glad I posted it. It makes for a somewhat more “interactive conversation” (!) than the typical blogging session.

What seems in what I describe is that “social media” are about managing the way “content” is transmitted (on Twitter, YouTube, del.icio.us, Facebook, BitTorrent, LinkedIn…). In this sense, “social media” are quite easy to understand, even though the diversity of “social media” systems available obscures this simplicity. Hence the cyclical discussions about what constitutes “Web 2.0” and what is coming next.

The “obvious concept” I was trying to describe in my previous is a simplified version of the concept of “intimacy” we all seem to have in mind. Émilie did a good job at describing important dimensions of intimacy in social life and I should address those later. Admittedly, my use of the term “intimacy” was quite confusing and not at all obvious. The concept I tried to describe seems to me rather obvious but it doesn’t make it easy to describe or name. I know, some people might jump at this and say that what is easy to understand must be easy to explain. Yet many concepts are rather easy to grasp and quite hard to explain, especially in a “one-way conversation” such as a blogpost.

Anyhoo.

“Intimacy” isn’t such a good word for what I meant. I didn’t want to use “privacy” because it’s being used for slightly different purposes, in those social media. I could have worked to define “privacy” more precisely but I thought the term itself would have prevented further discussion since “privacy” is so well-known, in “social media.” Again, I agree with Émilie that “intimacy” isn’t more accurate, but it seems to have worked in making people think. Nice!

Come to think of it, “confidentiality” would possibly work better. In these same social media (e.g, Facebook), «confidentialité» is the translation of “privacy” but there are differences between the two concepts. Putting “trust” and “confidant” in relation to “confidentiality” gets closer to the slightly more subtle transmission management I had in mind. Some items are shared “in private” based on a level of trust that nothing will leak out, neither the content nor the fact that content was transmitted. Other items can be shared through controlled (semi-private) channels with the intention of “spreading out” the item and making the transmission known. Quite frequently, such transmission is more effective at “becoming viral” because content is properly contextualized. The “contract” of any transmission of information has such rules embedded in them and “sharing content online” is simple enough a process to be formalized in these ways.
The other dimension we tend to embed in “online content transmission” is what’s often called “reputation” or “authority” in those same “social media.” Again, very simplified versions of what happens in communication broadly, but the simple social models work well in those simplified “social media.” The “receiver” of the content may trust the “sender” based on a series of simple criteria. Trained to think that we should never “trust information” based on the sender, I used to (and still) react negatively to notions of “trust,” “authority,” or “reputation.” Slashdot’s concept of “karma” seemed somewhat better at the time because it sets apart the social capital from a notion of “blind faith.” I now understand more clearly what role trust might play in receiving content, especially in preventing malware to spread or managing our concentration. Simplified, this concept of trust is only indirectly about the value of the content itself. It’s more about assessing the risks involved in the content transmission event. In other words, we should only open email attachments from people we trust and, even then, we know there are risks involved in opening attachments.

So, going back to the obvious concept I’m circling around. What Facebook just did in terms of privacy controls does seem to connect with what I have in mind. Not only can we group contacts but we can finally use these groups to manage how widely some content may be distributed. Neat and rather easy. But some dimensions could be added to make content transmission approximate a bit better the sophistication of social life. For instance, there could be ways to make intermediate receivers understand how widely the content can be “redistributed.” Is it “for your eyes only” or is it “please distribute to all like-minded people?” An easy step to take, here, would be to add a type of license-control reminiscent of Creative Commons, on user-generated content. There could be something about the original creator of the content (“I’m only posting this because I like, I don’t claim ownership”). Ratings, which are so common in “social media” could be added and fleshed out so that a creator could key her/his work in the right frame.

Ok, I’m rambling even more now than before. So I’ll leave this post as-is and see what happens.

No, I won’t even replace all those quotation marks or correct my mistakes. RERO.

Do with this post as you want. I’m just thinking out loud. And laughing on the inside.

Quite obvious a concept, but it could simplify some things in so-called “social media” and other online applications of social network analysis. In simple terms, why can’t we control (“slide up and down”) the “degree of friendship” implied in sharing an item? Because some people, North Americans especially, have an ideal of “equalization” in social relationships? Fair enough. “Friendship” in the U.S. often means “friendliness” or mere “reciprocity.” But, as most people realize, the content we share (microblog posts, funny pictures, academic references, music files…) is meant for a specific audience which can range from an audience of one (for archiving or “private communication”) to an audience of millions (everyone who can read English, for instance).
Most “social media” systems out there allow users to share items in private or to “the whole wide world.” Some systems have “privacy settings” so that one can distribute items selectively to a number of people without “leaking” the item to the public sphere. And the “social network” dimension often implies that people’s “inner circle” serves as the primary audience for items which are semi-public.
Contrary to what some people seem to assume (especially in educational contexts), these systems often mean that users think about privacy quite a lot. In fact, strategies to control how private or how public an item should become run at the center of those online systems.
Yet, most people have much more elaborate concepts of privacy and intimacy, much more “granular” ways to approach information sharing than what is involved in almost any online tool available. Put simply, users often know very precisely how widespread they want an item to become and how fast it can spread but they often don’t have ways to control these.
We all have strategies to cope with these issues in face-to-face relationships (what some like to call “meatspace”). For instance, breaching secrets is often considered a serious offence resulting in loss of face which, in turn, leads to avoidance strategies and other social control mechanism. Our social tools are more advanced than our online tools.
What’s funny is that some very simple solutions could be found to overcome discrepancies in sophistication between social and online relationships. An obvious example is the use of “groups,” “tags,” and “scopes.” These are already available and we can select a specific audience for a specific message (at least on Facebook, not on Twitter). But this “audience selection” process is rather cumbersome and most people end up posting things for much larger audiences to hear than what was originally intended. Some entrepreneurs are also thinking about the economic and ludic aspects of social capital, reifying “importance” with a form of currency in symbolic exchange.
All good and well. But adoption of these solutions depends on a number of factors, including the “transaction costs” and the “workflow integration.”
If these all fail, we’ll just have to bet on the ingenuity of teenagers to come up with new ways to use what was once known as “Web 2.0 technologies.”
Ah, well…

A bilingual blog on disparate subjects. / Un blogue disparate bilingue.