5 ms·
The Unbearable Triviality Of Social Networking
- ubercore 16y agoCalling out social networking for being trivial is a bad analysis of what social networking is all about. Your social networking experience is defined by your friends and what you choose to socialize about. Scoble is socializing about mobile apps, and technology. I'm sure he has a whole raft of very insightful posts, balanced by more mundane ones like the example in the article. In my experience, some friends post consistently interesting and thought provoking links and paragraphs. Others post about their coffee habits. That mirrors my "real life" experience of interacting with them. Why is there this expectation that online socializing should be inherently more profound than real life socializing?
- raganwald 16y agoI agree with your basic sentiment that social networking is driven by the tenor and tone of your real life friendships and interests. However, it differs from real-world socializing in that it is a broadcast model rather than a conversation model. When you and I meet for coffee, the cost of telling you about my new 19t Surly steel cog is, shall we say, two minutes. We only have so much time for coffee, and I ought to spend half of it listening to you, so am I going to decide that the cog is worth two minutes of our limited time to tell only one person about it? But online, I appear to have unlimited time to broadcast what I want to say. If I spend two minutes on the cog, it takes away from two minutes of the Real World, but it doesn't appear to take away from our limited time together, and I blast it out to all my friends, some of whom may care. I believe this gives me an incentive to talk about fairly trivial stuff that doesn't exist in the face-to-face world.
- wyclif 16y agoI had to google "Surly steel cog."
- bhousel 16y agoThat's actually another advantage of online interaction. In real life, you wouldn't be able to google something mid-conversation, so you'd basically need to sidetrack the conversation to be brought up to speed.
- mbreese 16y agoOr disadvantage. It's far easier to ask what a Surley steel cog is than to force a cognitive break to go look something up. You'll probably get a better answer too. And you can also avoid the inevitable 30 minute trek through Wikipedia as you get distracted and end up looking at what other types of cogs you've been missing out on. And don't even start looking at sprokets.
- ubercore 16y agoThanks, that's a good distinction I was overlooking. It does seem to be somewhat dependent on the network we're talking about though. Twitter swings far to the broadcast side, but Facebook seems to push the needle back towards a conversation model. Maybe not a super in-depth conversation, but I do often have discussions with people around posts that were seemingly pretty trivial, meaning there was at least some level of interest and discourse.
- michaelrlitt 16y agoTwitter allows me to interact with my friends more regularly. I still spend time at the pub, and those conversations can be more endearing because I'm up-to-date with the social hubub. That said, we are in a special demographic. It's hard to validate our experiences against the "fragile youth".
- paganel 16y agoA Milan Kundera reference in Forbes magazine... The world must be approaching its end, then :)
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- ihumanable 16y agoI think ultimately the kind of "interaction" we have on Social Networks is unfulfilling. It's like an odd form of social masturbation, it simulates interaction without being interaction. The problem I see is that it's so much easier than actual human interaction and when the average person is given a choice between instant albeit less meaningful gratification and delayed more meaningful gratification, we tend to choose the former. Social networking has gone from a tool to facilitate real world social interaction into its own form of social interaction, I think it will take some time for culture to adjust. We may find that this works fine, and that our current fears are the same as those people who relish the bygone days when people used to write letters to each other. We may look back on this time and view it as the beginning of a trend of cheapening the human experience. I think it's too soon to tell though. Sidenote: The thing that surprised me most was that his CMS software allowed him to set a publish time in the future but still required him to push a button to publish. "Since I wanted this column to hit around the time the Elite Men were coming through, I set it up the night before and hit the publish button from an Apple iPhone..." Of course that has nothing to do with the content of the article. I just thought it a very odd thing to do since most CMS systems allow for delayed publishing, and that this in and of itself was in the article and had nothing to do with social networking.
- timwiseman 16y agoYes, what you find on social networks is frequently trivial. For that matter, what most people talk about at family reunions is mostly trivial and what most people talk about at the local bar is even more trivial. Also, yes, you can overuse social networks just as it is easy to overuse the local bar. Used in moderation though, social networks, facebook in particular, have helped me keep in touch with many of my more distant relations that I otherwise would likely see and talk to only at weddings and funerals. It has helped me reconnect with friends from high school and college that I probably would have forgotten about. Overall, I have found that, used in moderation, social networks and Facebook in particular have helped to enrish my social life and help me keep in touch with people that matter to me, and if the price of that is dealing with some triviality, I will pay it gladly.
- chadgeidel 16y agoI agree completely. Social networks are just that, social. Who thinks that catching up on "what is happening" with friends and relatives is worthless? Additionally - why does everything have to be a binary choice between "completely worthless" and "world changing"? Social networks lie on a continuum between those two extremes.
- jerf 16y agoAnother perspective on the same basic point: The average neural message transmitted in your brain is trivial. What arises from the sum total of those messages is not. But there is probably no way to get to human-scale cognition without a lot of triviality at lower layers. There's probably no way to have a civil human society without these "trivialities", and if that is true, are they really trivial interactions? Declarations of triviality encode an embedded value scheme that may or may not have actual utility for any purpose. I hesitate to label things "trivial"; it may be missing the forest for the trivial leaves. I don't do Facebook for various reasons, but I don't look down on those who do use it.
- RogerKay 16y agoGuys, thank you for your comments. I appreciate your understanding. Please note, however, that there is some irony in the piece, aside from the seriousness rightly accorded to the incident of the inattentive mother.
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- adriand 16y agoNot sure that I see the point of responding this negatively and sarcastically to what seems like a harmless clarification.
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- izendejas 16y agoYour post will definitely get a lot of attention. I'm sure you know that. It's a good discussion we need to have. However, I think you could have used a little less irony and a lot more balance if you really wanted to get something across besides a rant. Ultimately, one person's "triviality" is another's passion. The problem with social networking isn't it's triviality. It's that to consume what's important to us, we have to find it through all the "noise"--whatever that may mean to each individual. It used to be that we didn't have this problem because when two people meet, or a group for that matter, they immediately find a middle ground and talk about what's important to all. Such context breaks down when we broadcast information online. This problem I feel will be solved in the years to come. Disclaimer: I'm working on it.
- trustfundbaby 16y agosummary ... social networking is nice but society can abuse it. I'm doing it the right way, everybody should do it how I do it. What a waste of my 5 minutes.
- technomancy 16y agoDid it bother anyone else that their anchor tags included the space following the words?
- jdietrich 16y agoExistential crisis alert: as more and more of our lives are conducted in the "unreal" world of social networking, we will increasingly start to question the nature of our "real" lives. I think that a lot of the backlash against social networking is the product of cognitive dissonance; Specifically that Facebook so efficiently reveals our significance (or otherwise) in the wider world. Facebook is perhaps the first technology that reveals to us that the major events in our own lives are, on the macro scale, merely background noise. Learning of an old friend giving birth seems very much less significant when we learn of it not through direct communication but through a wall post that is read by 600 other "friends". Space travel gave us the ability to see our own world from afar, revealing to us the fragility of our world and the insignificance of human existence when seen from a cosmic scale. Many astronauts describe being profoundly changed by seeing the "blue marble" for themselves. Perhaps these vertiginous experiences, these sudden shifts in perspective will occur more frequently with the advance of technology. Perhaps the opposite will occur and with the decline in mass media we will become increasingly insular and narcissistic. Perhaps our reaction to being able to see the sum of all human life will be to shield our eyes from it. We live in interesting times.
- jterce 16y agoThis is an interesting insight. Facebook/Twitter allow us to communicate the little things that are big in our own lives and see how much (little) those things really mean to others. Should eventually have a bit of a reality check effect.
- biggitybones 16y agoI've never considered the parallel between what you describe - I think it's valid and eloquent. I find the application of technology to the social context fascinating and at the same time worrisome, given the impact it has on our psyche. Part of me wants to chalk it up to "resisting change", but I feel like altering the social fabric by increasing efficiencies in our social lives isn't going to help psychological illnesses like depression.
- adriand 16y agoPerhaps the shift in perspective threatens to demonstrate to people that they are not really individuals after all, or that if they are, being so isn't really all that meaningful. The scale of digitized social interaction shows conclusively that are "just another brick in the wall", or just droplets in the vast river of human life. The threat this has to the ego is countered by posting thoughts to social networks in an increasingly obsessive manner. "I post therefore I am."
- BornInTheUSSR 16y agoThis article is worth a retweet
- pmikesell 16y agoOverheard at the bar: Person: "Greg, if you're not on facebook you're missing like 50% of world". Greg: "Is there some way that I could miss 75%?"
- stevenj 16y agoHe (and I) likes to be active, others like to watch YouTube videos. To each their own.
- guinaps 16y agoOne of the biggest dilemmas in this industry I keep thinking about is: if I'm the creator of a platform for an unprecedented, and potentially addictive, online social experience, should I care if people overuse my product and try to educate them somehow, or should I keep coming up with incentives to make them use it more and more? In other words, does the user own the entire responsibility for the amount of time he spends on social networks? Or it would be a good idea (on the moral side of the issue, anyway) if the makers provided a way for the consumers to limit their usage?
- rgbrgb 16y agoWell I can tell you that this is my top reason for not selling weed. I don't really care if it's the fault of the addict or the dealer. If there's a problem and I can easily help fix it, I probably should.
- DavidBishop 16y agoAgreed. Nothing more be said.