In How Your Creepy Ex-Co-Workers Will Kill Facebook, Cory Doctorow says, “In the real world, we don’t articulate our social networks.” That’s what I was getting at in this GigaOM article I wrote about how the GGG (the giant global graph a.k.a. the semantic web) would be best used for plane trips, not people. Okay, people on plane trips. But not people relating to people, because there’s no good way to intelligently and completely and in a unified way represent social relationships and social interaction online, whether you use RDF or something else. Besides, the semantic web is mainly about making information machine-processable, but socializing requires people.
Doctorow describes what a bad match social networking software is for our actual social conduct:
You’d think that Facebook would be the perfect tool for handling all this [keeping track of our social relationships]. It’s not. For every long-lost chum who reaches out to me on Facebook, there’s a guy who beat me up on a weekly basis through the whole seventh grade but now wants to be my buddy; or the crazy person who was fun in college but is now kind of sad; or the creepy ex-co-worker who I’d cross the street to avoid but who now wants to know, “Am I your friend?” yes or no, this instant, please.
It’s not just Facebook and it’s not just me. Every “social networking service” has had this problem and every user I’ve spoken to has been frustrated by it. I think that’s why these services are so volatile: why we’re so willing to flee from Friendster and into MySpace’s loving arms; from MySpace to Facebook. It’s socially awkward to refuse to add someone to your friends list — but removing someone from your friend-list is practically a declaration of war. The least-awkward way to get back to a friends list with nothing but friends on it is to reboot: create a new identity on a new system and send out some invites (of course, chances are at least one of those invites will go to someone who’ll groan and wonder why we’re dumb enough to think that we’re pals).
I suspect that fragmenting friends lists and interactions across multiple sites is a decent way of reproducing the complexities and layers of meaning of social relationships. No, I don’t want a unified social graph.
But I don’t manage that many contacts. I can see why people with huge social networks would want one even though I don’t think that our social selves are necessarily well served by one.
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Good food for thought, Anne…
I read Cory’s piece as well…but I’m still hung up on the “in the real world we don’t articulate our social networks” part.
I would say it’s not that simple. From choosing what we wear to who we hang around with, we do articulate quite a bit…even if it is not explicit. The wealth of information we process in the “real world” is astounding, and though we might not vocalize it, it still has meaning. Entire societies are structured around…something…and it’s not just policy.
And to your point about there being “no good way” to represent social interaction online…I think I agree…but I also think it depends on if you grew up with a cellphone stuck to your hand (I did not).
I’ve seen younger folks who make no distinction at all between online and off: what happens online *is* social interaction, not merely a representation.
I agree that online interactions are real social interactions, and what I’m trying to capture is that you can’t reduce it into some unified representation. Relationships are made up of all our interactions — you can’t reduce them down into “Anne and Joshua are friends.” Even by making many categories of friendship, you miss something if you don’t take into account all the ways we’ve interacted in the past, on and offline. Our brains do that, but computers can’t.
I had a similar conversation with a friend who is 26. I asked why he didn’t use MSN and instead SKYPE and he said, too many ex-girlfriends.
“Well, just block them” i said.
“oh leigh. You can tell who blocks you with services and everyone i know checks. I don’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings, I just don’t want to talk to them”
Shit, you can tell who has deleted and blocked you? Who knew? (i’m so old)
He gave me the url with the warning,
“just careful, it can hurt your feelings or piss you off in the “THEY blocked ME” sort of way.”
All I have to say is lucky they didn’t have this stuff when I was a teenager or I would have been traumatized by all of it.
I think part of this problem is just what you mentioned…that because a human brain is evaluating everything…it gets really hard to know what is a good representation and what isn’t.
And people have differing skills, too. Great writers, for example, are excellent at representing (or communicating) emotion while poor writers aren’t.
This emoticon, for example, works better in some situations than others.
Yes, you’re right, online interactions are real social interactions.
Most of the problems regarding representation of human socio-behavioural interaction (online or otherwise) is in the methods we use to classify them. Relationships and associations arn’t as clear-cut as Facebook would have us believe. Nor does Facebook reflect the way that these behave in the real world.
There are, however, a few mechanisms for describing ‘things’ in terms of the actual web of relationships and associations and NOT the categories that they do or don’t fall into. Much of this comes from cognitive and behavioural modelling in the psychology-space.
Now we just need commentators and developers to understand these issues and incorporate them into applications.
M
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[…] Anne Zelenka suggests that this is because that even while they are tools designed to facilitate social interaction online, “they’re actually unable to intelligently and completely, and in a unified way, represent [actual] social relationships and social interaction”. […]