Antisocial networks like Snubster began as parody; a backlash against large social networks and our fatigue in managing virtual “friends” we barely know. But there are far more powerful and systemic trends leading towards true antisocial networks. The question of where social networking is heading and where it ends is important for anyone investing or venturing online. Paradoxically, the biggest and most valuable networks will be the ones that can deal effectively with the smallest things.
My previous venture builds and manages large-scale communities. There we witnessed a constant churn of community members into smaller cliques. Even though the communities are focused on very specific interests, namely individual recording artists, cliques form around every topic imaginable, most having nothing to do with music at all.
Large networks like Facebook or LinkedIn face this fragmentation on a massive scale. But even the narrowest social network is not immune. Any service that’s organized around a static activity or interest will become fragmented as its membership grows. The reason is that the very organizing bases for social networks, the foundations for their existence, are constantly changing from within.
Sociologists have a good understanding of these forces. People want to form temporary social networks for specific purposes. We don’t keep friends and loved ones as a pool of network labour. Instead, we look to weak ties – acquaintances, friends-of-a-friend, and co-workers – to help us get things done. Underlying our “antisocial” resentment towards social networks is the conflict between strong, persistent connections and the true nature of our social relationships.
Today’s social networking systems were not built to support informal, ad hoc relationships. Large lists of “friends” or “connections” are much more a scorecard for one’s networking ability than any purposeful network of weakly associated people. The role of a social networking service is in mediating connections and providing a supportive structure. But if the organizing foundations for the network are constantly shifting, how do you provide the organization to support it?
The solution adopted by the large players is to become social networking infrastructure: focus not on the individual needs of each clique, but rather allow them to define their own organization and tools. But in so doing, they are necessarily ceding their role as a social networking service for the weakly tied, task-oriented networks that represent the bulk of our needs. This gap offers considerable market opportunities for any service that can reconcile the needs of dynamic networks with the benefits of structure and organization.
I’ve argued that thought networks, as a class of semantic networks, don’t need social networks to operate effectively. The corollary to this argument is that semantic networking illustrates one possible manifestation of extremely weakly tied and dynamic social networks. But whatever services and networks emerge from antisocial networking, the winners won’t be managing lists of “friends” or specific topics. Instead, they’ll learn to organize large numbers of highly specialized, task-oriented and fluid networks that don’t hang around long enough to become awkward.
What do you mean, how “small” and “valuable” can social networks get? Clearly, a social networking site is more valuable when its larger. (Just see the land-grab going on around the world between the big social networks; they become natural monopolies, like Orkut in India.)
I think what you are asking is the degree to which social networks can be large, but accommodate ever smaller niches effectively. (Chris Anderson’s Longtail!) For different approaches, see Wikia, Affinity Labs, Ning, and my project LearnHub (which we call a social learning network, and is organized into hundreds of separate communities).
I’m curious to hear more about the transient/transactional networking you are suggesting. Do you consider it social or antisocial networking, or something different?
Peter, thanks a lot for dwelling on your perspective and clarifying it: that is really valuable in terms of communication.
Here is ONE train of thought (broken down into several steps) with which I want to address your message:
1) Please, correct me if I got you wrong: you actually are saying that so far current social networks (on the web) have all the defects of our casual communication at leisure: the major of them being: wasting our time discussing weather rather than business;
2) I support your concern and mean sheer business; and that business is a specific real life problem that is related to IT, and can be described in a number of frameworks;
3) my business perspective is based on a framework rooted in Arts (linguistics, semantics, cognitive sciences, sociology); my message through a number of previous posts has been that we might get lots of benefits in solving that very COMMONLY SHARED problem; that mutual effort can happen if we find (create) means to combine specifics of TWO major frameworks to discuss one real life issue;
4) why would we need both approaches?
– IT framework has got the language (notions, background knowledge, logical patterns, scientific object in focus) designed to deal with most technical details of the problem;
– Arts have got worldviews, notions, and experience with viewing the fields adjacent to the IT framework area, yet it (arts) fails to go into specifics;
5) the winning language has to inherit the best of the two so as to have both:
– scientifically describe the problem at the macro level as a Human related one, and
– sustain means to handle it scientifically when it comes to deeper levels.
Anyway, here is a possible solution to the problem you described (as written down in terms of social sciences):
– create examples of interacting on-line on the topics of your choice without the defects that you described; this is probably already happening somewhere inside some organizations;
– extract the needed part of that desirable communication pattern;
– transplant that new pattern into broader social networks.
This societal surgical operation can be described scientifically and implemented in terms of some social sciences. Yet the objective and details have to be described in IT language.
I own the technology of combining any two languages (frameworks) and doing the planned social change.
I hope my message got clearer this time: thanks to your effort to clarify your standpoint, Peter.
I think of social networks as just one faucet of the “collective intelligence” that might put hard data in a humanized context, though the social networks would need to generate conversation on topics of interest. Do you agree?
A larger network is a more valuable network, but the potential size is a function of the granularity of the nodes in the network. When your network is dealing with “large” nodes such as people, it is more limited in terms of its potential connections than when it deals with “small” nodes such as the individual interests of each person. If you aspire to build a really large network, focus on really small things.
As the subject matter gets increasingly fine-grained, the strength of those relationships weakens. I might have an interest today in “weak ties in social networks”, but I wouldn’t hang my entire identity on it. Ideally, these networks are transient, emerging as needed, but as critically, disappearing when I’m done with them. The antisocial quality is just a narrowing of our interests to a specific interest in a point of time.
My interest here is largely in the technical problems this type of dynamic and fine-grained network introduces. If you grant me that a social networking service provides value by helping people form the connections and manage the organization of the network as it grows (as opposed to self-service infrastructure), then these types of networks introduce some interesting challenges: not only making connections, but severing them as well; managing the potential for connections and their emergence; providing an organizing structure that can support a much larger number of nodes without incurring the costs of that great scale.
I agree that social networks express a collective intelligence. If the service is drawing connections between extremely fine-grained subject matter, “generating conversation” may be a good metaphor for it.
Thanks for your comments.
Yes, very well put.
Perhaps this isn’t the correct place to change the subject but I see a Thought Network as a distributed system. I recall an article in which the author talks about a system and how it could have become very pofitable and powerful.
“If learning mechanisms, using A.I. principals had been built into the software capabilities of the grid set-up, then the envisioned database network would have become a self-organising system. This should eventually have allowed the franchised databases to form a kind of Macroscopic Neural Network (MNN). In other words a self-funding artificial intelligence project, working on many levels.
The A.I. mechanisms to have been employed were to be used to study many if not all of the interactions of the online users, as well as how the networked databases share information, so allowing the organising or the dynamics of that matrix to become automatic and immediate. The employment of A.I. principals within such a large and powerful network set-up, would have allowed the operators, access to some very useful and valuable data.”
Are there differences between a Thought Network and Semantic Network?