Chiming in on an ever expanding meme (which Stowe Boyd nicely wraps up here), I’d like to pose some theoretical rebuttals to Ryan Carson’s “Why I don’t use Social Software“. Carson’s point is essentially twofold – he doesn’t have the time to invest in social software, and he doesn’t really have the inclination because social software doesn’t have much outcome on his day-to-day. Stowe boils it down to the classic argument he takes issue with (and I agree) – many hold a near positivist bias towards the need for utility in social software. Indeed – social software has utility (and deep utility at that), but the notion of social transcends utility.
However, I’m not really going to take on the issue of utility today. I’ve explored the value of utility in social software in my work on the “network effect multiplier” if you’d like to know where I stand. I’m also not going to take on situational relevance, because Carson essentially cedes that argument early in his post. As someone married and settled, the value of exploring connections is less so for Carson than say, the college freshman. Instead, I’m going to explore an alternative hypothesis – that Carson isn’t complimented enough by social software to find motives for use.
Recently, I’ve been re-exploring the work of Cliff Nass and Byron Reeves, particularly The Media Equation. I read the book a few years back and thought it was cool, but on this second reading (for a fascinating class I’m taking), I’m getting a whole new perspective. Nass and Reeves essentially explore how we treat computers like humans, and how human-like attributes affect our perception of computers. Indeed – a big part of this perception equation is manners – how well a computer compliments you directly affects your opinion of a computer. Nass and Reeves conclusively show that we like to be complimented by our computers, so I thought I might expand on this.
When we use social software, we often employ the software to share. I employ this blog to share my knowledge and try to sound smart. You may share your last.fm playlist to show people that you are a connoisseur of good music. Someone else may share a particular set of bookmarked links in del.icio.us so that their fans can be kept informed of information. Yet another person might join a pool in flickr to share photos that they think are of interest to that particular community. The common thread in all of these examples, and almost all examples in social software, is that what we share reflects back upon our identity.
As social software is situated in a community, we are hard-wired to be aware of the community’s perception of ourselves. For the most part, we are also hard-wired to want to win the affection and praise of the community. Good social software compliments us by enabling us to win the affection of the community.
On a computer, almost all behavior can be productive through ancillary means. For example, listening to music – a consumption behavior – becomes productive when your playlist is recorded. Your bookmarking – another consumption-oriented task – becomes productive when we start sharing them publicly. Lets make a little leap and tie this together.
As humans, we naturally want to win affection with the least amount of energy expended. We are economic beings. Given the opportunity to win the same amount of affection for 1 hour of work that we’d get for 4 hours of work, we’d choose the lesser work 99 times out of 100. Services like del.icio.us, last.fm and many other types of social software take low-work activities and introduce an affection loop, an affection loop that essentially compliments us. We like this.
Take the examples of playlist sharing. Previously, our playlists weren’t shared, and we were OK with that. The playlists just disappeared into the ether. With Last.fm, our playlists can be shared automatically with a website. We don’t really have to do any work. However, once we share these playlists, we can show people how great our music taste is. We can have friends and fans. We can get recommendations. We enter a community feedback loop, and we are ultimately complimented.
Blogging is another great example. Blogging enables us to easily share our thoughts with a public. Before blogging, we shared our thoughts with our friends, or maybe we just kept the ideas to ourselves. Posting them online was too much work, limited to people who were truly web savvy. With blogging, we can all post our ideas online. They are the same ideas we had prior, but we get complimented by sharing the ideas. I enter a community feedback look of comments, getting page hits to my blog, and looking at how many feedburner subscribers I have. I get all this for simply sharing thoughts I would have had anyway.
I hope these examples are cogent for you, because they are deeply illustrative for me. We want the praise and affection of communities. Social software is situated in the community. Social software easily enables us to share facets of our lives, and get feedback on what we share. Social software is turning the facets of our day-to-day lives into means to collect the social capital of feedback and affection, and we love it. It only stands that in the future, software will continually make it easier and easier to share, and we’ll be incentivized to take part because we simply like the feedback.
Indeed, I can’t speak for Carson’s motives, but I do see a fundamental flaw in the fact he draws a distinction between social software and blogging. By blogging, he has entered the feedback and affection loop that is endemic to social software. He’s getting the same value from his blog that many people get from their social software. As it happens, the value we get from social software is context-oriented – there are probably music geeks who get a tremendous amount of value from their Last.fm interactions, and they couldn’t care less about blogging.
I believe that it is natural that we don’t get the same value out of all types of social software. I get a lot of value from my blog, whereas I get less value from my Flickr. A hardcore Flickr user who doesn’t blog that much might express the exact opposite opinion. However, in the end, we both get the same thing out of our sharing in social software. We are enabled to share by social software, and we share for the communtiy. In doing so, we enter a feedback loop and are complimented by our sharing. Ultimately, it is all about the affection of the community – we just have to find the communities appropriate to our interests.
Tags: social capital, social software
nice post. my complements ;-)
Well thank you!