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March 8, 2009

Networking Social Behaviors

With the help of the McKinsey gang, important thinkers such as Soumitra Dutta and Matthew Fraser of INSEAD are hosting discussions about how the internet and the recession might collide. Their angle: "When Job Seekers Invade Facebook". In their conversation starter, Facebook is offered as a venue that has its own culture, now threatened with an alien influence that could change the nature of social networking.

This is a somewhat romantic notion, best held by facebook's marketing and legal teams but not a plausible or fact-based reality. The concern wouldn't be how social networks behave; rather, it would be how social behaviors are networked.

Interestingly, it brings up the question of how much a given tool can control its users, versus how much design can flex to assure that the tool is fit to its purpose. What's not clear is that there is any cultural "end state" of facebook that represents its purpose. Instead, both on the surface and in theory, facebook is one of multiple grand collaborative experiments to discover what social "connectivity" really includes, with social propriety being a necessary but secondary concern. This experimentation seems likely to show ongoing morphing in what we see being social networking, but it hardly seems likely that a horde of unemployed invaders at one site will change social networking into something it is not already.

The dominant feature of the most popular social networking tools is that they are gateways to fundamentally public environments where privacy policy controls get applied. But the trick is that the policy applications are done based on personal preferences, and the personal preferences reflect many different cultures. It is unlikely that any one culture actually governs a social network unless the network's environment is administered according to some dominant policy model that proxies a culture. The default condition is that public spaces (like facebook) are polycultural, and that the less polycultural the space is made, the more constitutionally private it becomes -- just like a club. Punchline: unless internet economics eliminate the chance for more new "price"-free gateways, it is not social networking that will change, but instead the variety of social network venues.

There is some counter-thought to this that insists on some "critical mass" of members for a social network to be seen as useful -- and therefore in some Darwinian way likely to survive. This presupposes that the "natural" limit on the number of networks is a small number, since most networks won't offer enough richness to be worth the troulble. But I think this oversimplifies things by assuming (arbitrarily) that the "richness" (value) of a member of the network must be measured by the interconnections within that network. Real life shows that assumption to be silly; incredibly valuable people join and use networks on a very limited basis all the time; and, some small networks can be incredibly powerful, like the smoke filled back rooms of old. We'll remember that these smaller ones tend to be more private.

Rather, some members who are not "rich" when they join public networks have the ambition that they can achieve some richness within the network. That is precisely the current sex appeal of the term "networking", as used for painting in broad strokes; well, fine, as long as we don't pretend that social networking is actually hostage to any network.

Posted by Malcolm Ryder at March 8, 2009 9:07 AM