danah boyd’s post How to Kill Email was remarkably prescient, and it struck me as a great topic to riff on. To sum, danah refers to the fact that email is solidly losing ground a primary communication means amongst youth – and she’s absolutely right.
Instant messenger, text messaging, blogs, social network services and the cell phone all compete with email, and they all serve different communication purposes. Unlike adults (and mid-twentysomethings, whatever we are) who grew up with dominant communication modes, today’s youth entered into their social adolescence with a wide range of communication options. Instead of choosing one and sticking with it, they adapted each of these options for a certain set of situations, and used it accordingly.
There are a number of different ways to categorize the uses of a young adult’s communication tools: synchrony vs. asynchrony is one, one-to-many vs. one-to-one is another. In each toolset, there are dominant uses and enterprising uses; by enterprising I mean cultural uses whose functionality was never on an engineering spec sheet. The fact that young adults move effortlessly between these tools, and have a native understanding of their situationally proper uses is remarkable, and attests to the importance of communication and our inherent sociality (it also says alot about pack mentality and learned behavior of virtual communities).
I think there’s an important point here, especially with regards to learned behaviors. As social individuals, we are incentivized to adopt the behavior of our peers. Since communication is such a vital part of our social framework, we are doubly incentivized to adopt our peer group’s standards. For a long time, those standards changed very slowly and incrementally; the internet and various advances are now causing sea changes every few years.
I’ve been thinking about why we pick up certain social-technological behavior, and I keep coming back to the magic number of 65 from my Facebook study. That number was the average number of friends added over the course of a semester by a freshman on the Facebook. Its a staggering number, especially for most of us who don’t meet 65 new people we’d consider friends every 13 weeks. Inside that number, however, is the key to social technology. As long as we desire or are compelled to expand our social networks, we will make efforts to learn the communication behavior of the pack. If you need proof of this, think of the adults who turned to computer dating a few years ago; our desires for social contact will drive our adoption and uses of new mediums.
To bring it back to the topic at hand, I think about information needs. An individual who is actively expanding his or her social network will always have an information need. Lots of times we talk about perfect information in terms of financial markets; I believe we can apply economics very easily to our friend-making behavior. The more information we can have about our friends, the better decisions we can make regarding our investment into the friendship.
Why does email fail to serve the needs of socially-motivated individual? I can think of a number of reasons, but I think the biggest two are that it is not a very responsive medium, and its uses have been culturally established in ways that prevent it being used socially (I’ll explain more in a minute).
First, responsiveness. We can also think of this as synchrony, more or less. Just as eye contact and facial expressions inform our face-to-face conversation, the responsiveness of an information system provides us hints in communication. How long a person lags before responding to a instant message and how that behavior compares to previous conversations is a good example. In the absence of facial expression, we’ve learned to pick up on numerous other hints, and our inherent pattern recognition ultimately allows us to take a lot of value away from these hints.
At the same time, we’ve realized that broadcast (one-to-many) communication is not exactly suitable over email at all times. When we post to a blog or leave an away message, we are publicly signaling; the rate at which we do this would never make sense with email. Since signaling is just as important a part of our friend making behavior (e.g. posting a cool new band on your MySpace profile), we’ve moved to other services for this purpose.
Friend-making decisions are economical; we seek more perfect information (through responsiveness and feedback) and we work to make ourselves more attractive (through signaling). Email supports these behaviors, but it is nowhere near as good as most of the social services that young adults pick up. It isn’t that email doesn’t matter, it is just that email has specific uses, and it is quickly being relegated to just another tool in the ever-expanding portfolio of tools socially-motivated individuals use.
The sea changes that dramatically shift a young adult’s communication behavior aren’t going to cease any time soon. Blogs, text messages and social network services will seem to be crude tools in a few years, just as MUD’s and Bulletin Board Services seem crude nowadays. Social software designers who understand the concept of information needs will think of new ways for us to interact and take value from the tools, and those socially motivated will use these tools. It does make me wonder, though – as my peer group ages, and we settle on the communication tools we adopted at critical times in our lives, will we ever adjust to a life of communication systems in constant flux?
Tags: cognition, facebook, social software
