The problem with social networking

Anthony Townsend talks a lot of sense with his blog posts, The Future of Social Networks is Storytelling, Part I and Part II.

I think this makes a lot of sense, and jives perfectly with my complaints about social networking, which are generally that a) the signal-to-noise ratio stinks out loud, and b) that it's all disjointed: in other words, that it doesn't organise itself...and the way to finish that sentence may be, 'that it doesn't organise itself into stories'.  When I log in to facebook, I get a massive page of random information - and even if it were all of interest to me (ha!), it would still be a bunch of random, disconnected tidbits.

And what he points to with the evolution of Foursquare etc., I have done with my diary for years - recording the 'header information' of where I was and with whom, so I can reconstruct the story later on, combining it with my memories of the 'content', i.e. what actually happened/was important about that day/night.

Now, bear with me.

We've recently been going through a host of documents which belonged to my grandparents.  It's amazing what we're finding, photos of relatives from the early 1900s in farflung places, sometimes with notes on the back explaining who's who, sometimes without; letters, postcards, relics, you name it.  There are a few boxes of this stuff.  And it's all turning into some very interesting, meaningful stories, filling out the history of my family.

Let's fast forward a few generations to some people who are curious about us.  Of course, they won't have any photos or letters, not the kind they can put in a box; it's all digital (and it's owned, effectively, by facebook/flickr/name-your-provider-here; because what happens to your social-networking data when you die?  Better make sure you put your passwords with your will so someone can download it all before it disappears!)  Will future generations be curious about the minutiae of your daily life?  I'm guessing, not so much - who will ever have time to go through it?! - and again, the signal-to-noise ratio is terrible.  I don't go through my e-mails every week, getting rid of the 'what do you want for dinner?', 'see you at the pub at 8' etc. and leaving only what I consider the meaningful stuff.  No-one does, because storage is cheap and everyone else is making lots of money by mining the minutiae.  So in 100 years, even if my children can get a hold of the archive of all my online dealings and missives, they're gonna have a heckuva time putting it together into something that tells them what was important to me, at least without resorting to data-mining techniques to make sense of it all.

In other words, we're each creating more data than ever before, and the only meaningful way to get knowledge is through aggregate data and statistical inference.  That's great for the data aggregators, who are making stacks of money out of it, as well as making new things possible - everything from targeted advertising, to optimising production, to the wonders of the modern financial system, ahem.  But it does very little indeed, I would argue, for the individuals whose data is aggregated.  It means we're drowning in data, but we're not suited to statistical data-processing.  We're suited for story-telling.

This brings me to a fascinating little book by Paul Connerton called 'How Societies Remember', which argues that cultural memory is primarily performative, not textual or inscribed.  What, then, now that we record every little thing and mediate many of our interactions (the medium through which we remember) through the online world?

Update on Tuesday, March 9, 2010 at 16:51 by Eli

So what does [the commons concept] + [overwhelming control of personal data by Google, Facebook, Microsoft etc.] * [legal issues and obscurity around control and disclosure of that data] + [the shortcomings of social networking media] + [Google and Mozilla's separate projects, however unbelievable on Google's part!, to make our data portable] = ?

Of course, most people don't seem to care, mostly because the big providers provide those services for (ostensibly) $Free.  But if they did, could we move towards independent cloud data hosting for the masses, and open-source protocols for social networking:  what if, instead of using proprietary social networking sites, people instead effectively all ran their own social networking servers?  My cloud data would interact, somewhat like RSS feeds, with the cloud data of all the other people I care about/am 'connected to, and so on.

It's still a half-a-thought.  And, for all I know, there's a project working right now on such a thing.  But when I googled 'open source social networking' just now, I found nothing of the sort - just ways for you to make your own conventionally-hosted social network.  Anyone want to give it a shot?

Update on Thursday, May 13, 2010 at 10:00 by Eli

Tech website Gizmodo has posted a report about Diaspora, a new, distributed Facebook alternative.  Looks like some other people have been talking about what I'm talking about.  Or did they read it here first?

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