I read an article in last month’s WIRED that I meant to talk about here but kept forgetting to. It’s about how people’s idea of social networks is to grow them to epic proportions as a sign of their digital worth. Yet bigger isn’t always better online. Maybe you have more “followers” than your peers — real or virtual — but what is the quality of the interaction?
There may even be a reduction in conversation due to the sheer enormity of your network. WIRED scribe Clive Thomson explains it thusly:
Once a group reaches a certain size, each participant starts to feel anonymous again, and the person they’re following — who once seemed proximal, like a friend — now seems larger than life and remote. . . Social media stops being social. It’s no longer a bantering process of thinking and living out loud. It becomes old-fashioned broadcasting.
I operate multiple social networks, a few of them professionally, most for the fun of it. (Actually, I find the professional ones pretty fun, too.) The official Twitter account of my job has 15,000 followers. I made that happen, and it feels pretty good. I do my best to keep the information I send out through that channel engaging and relevant (I work at a music policy think tank), and, judging from the number of re-tweets, people seem to like what I’m putting out there. On the other hand, there isn’t a lot of what I’d call “conversation.” I also operate a Twitter account for a certain dead writer from the turn of the last century, and he gets tons of interpersonal action. There’s a Contrarian Media account and one that’s just “me.” My personal Twitter has about 1,400 followers, most of whom I don’t engage with at all. I’d estimate the number of folks that I actually communicate and share information with to be about 50.
I also have Facebook accounts for many of the aforementioned.
Now, I don’t really sweat the social nets — I basically use them as a snark dissemination platform/news ticker. Conversation is just the icing. The Contrarian Media site concerns me, however. We get a solid amount of traffic, and I know what people are looking at and where they come from. But even though our hits keep going up and up, there isn’t as much back-and-forth as there was back when we launched nearly four years ago. (Although technically, we’ve been around for a bit longer than that, as we grew out of this blog that I started back in 2005.)
Now, I understand that microblogging has somewhat eaten away at the mystique of long-form posting — people want their information in briefer and faster bursts — but blogging doesn’t seem to be going away anytime soon. Still, I can’t help but wonder if the intentional community we’ve created hasn’t lost a bit of luster due to the perceived size of the enterprise. I can’t claim TMZ-level hits here, but we do pretty damn good. According to Clive, however, it’s us mid-size sites (re: not Daily Kos or TechCrunch) that have the most to worry about:
Blogs and Twitter and Facebook are, as Internet guru John Battelle puts it, “conversational media.” But when the conversation gets big enough, it shuts down. Not only do audiences feel estranged, the participants also start self-censoring. People who suddenly find themselves with really huge audiences often start writing more cautiously, like politicians.
When it comes to microfame, the worst place to be is in the middle of the pack. If someone’s got 1.5 million followers on Twitter, they’re one of the rare and straightforwardly famous folks online. Like a digital Oprah, they enjoy a massive audience that might even generate revenue. There’s no pretense of intimacy with their audience, so there’s no conversation to spoil. Meanwhile, if you have a hundred followers, you’re clearly just chatting with pals. It’s the middle ground — when someone amasses, say, tens of thousands of followers — where the social contract of social media becomes murky.
There’s no doubt that sometimes I feel like I’m talking at people, rather than to them. But as a charming megalomaniac, that doesn’t bother me all that much. (Although I’m sure those who try to argue with me feel differently.) What gets me feeling awkward is that what we do here is informed by the interactions we have with our regular visitors. Without the inspiration that comes from conversation, it starts to feel somewhat pointless.
If you’re a regular reader (or even a lurker), I’d love to know what you think.
It only makes sense that the FCC unregulated interwebs would someday be hatched down from the storm of public control. I am shocked that, to this day, some 20 years since Al Gore first made the first internet with an erector set and some play-doh, that it is still open to the public like Lindsey Lohan’s crotch.
I always thought that it was only a matter of time before the internet became exclusive to the elite. It would make sense that the mid-level blog sites get eclipsed by the larger ones in time. Mid-level blogs were the masturbatory stimuli (and still are) for the internet subculture hounds – but when the vast majority of internet users go to CNN.com and never heard of Huffington, or when Mom and Pop America “turn on the AOL” (as one of my parents suggested one day), the independence of the internet will fade, leaving only corporate voices.
“Free Speech” looks great on a protest board, but in reality, free speech in public forums gives you one or two Public Access Television stations in the largest of markets and 500 corporate stations. It is only a matter of time before the internet looks the same.
Chris, you’re right about ALL of this with the exception of FCC regulation. In traditional broadcasting, even the commercial stations are REQUIRED as a condition of their license to make $$ on the public airwaves, to uphold some basic standards of localism, competition and diversity. Which they don’t.
When the FCC was chartered back in the day, it was in response to European fascism. The US government was rightfully concerned about protecting our spectrum from control by a handful of voices. Back then the enemy was the State. Now it’s Rupert Murdoch and Comcast. Historically, the FCC leadership has been all too eager to bend over for these companies. Thankfully, we’re beginning to see a shift.
Still, money talks (or as Stech would have it) “Free Speeches” loudly, and there has been, in the last 20 years, a push for deregulation at nearly every level of government, including broadcasting. With the 1996 Telecommunications Act, the long existent caps on how many broadcast outlets a single entity could own were lifted, resulting in the RIse of Clear Channel. Blame the lack of regulation and laissez-faire. (Say, didn’t that bring down the global economy, too?)
Now, then. On to the internet. I fight this battle daily at my job. The internet was born and developed on open platforms, which offered a level technological playing field for all comers. Google could start in a garage and become the biggest company in the world because of a little something called “net neutrality.” Unfortunately the powerful cable and telecommunications duopoly want to extract extra $$ out of the networks (while not allowing anyone else to use their infrastructure, providing crappy service and raping customers along the way).
They aim to charge content providers — anyone who innovates and puts stuff on the web — a higher fee for the faster delivery of their sites and services. This is the OPPOSITE of market competition, and would carve up the web into fast and slow lanes where the best-funded enterprises would receive preferential treatment. Another system of gatekeepers in another pay-to-play system. You can imagine what that would do to speech, to say noting about innovation.
Which is why myself and others are pushing hard for the FCC to codify net neutrality principles that would keep Al Gore’s internet open for everyone. But Cable and the Bells (love that band) are pushing back HARD. If you want to go on the FCC record telling them that you support an open internet where innovation, creativity and commerce can flourish (aka the internet we’ve always had), go here:
http://futureofmusic.org/file-comments-fcc-open-internet
And there’s some excellent info (and boner fide rock starz) at Rock the Net: Musicians for Net Neutrality:
http://futureofmusic.org/issues/campaigns/rock-net
So yeah, the internet at this point in history requires regulation to keep it OPEN, not closed. Weird, huh?
Creativity and communication are the means by which we demonstrate and thereby distribute representations of intimacy. The duty of a creator is to let others onto the Big Secret that they themselves are capable of creation and intimacy. That’s the Job. It’s not really about how close one can feel to their audience, but by the work itself cartooning methods to communicate deeply with those in our lives for which we seek to remove mediation. Everyone who creates and puts themselves out there has to deal with the fact that they may never see how many people and works that they have inspired, but it’s likely that it’s many more than they’ll ever know. In the meantime, the 50 people that you remain in open-ended conversation with are the real reward for “practicing” communication with an audience, and creating forums for others to stretch out in is no needless task. To paraphrase Tolstoy, “the most important person is the one you are with.” http://www.livinglifefully.com/flo/flothreeanswers.htm So however you do it, in whatever format, is working.
So thank you for this wonderful forum, to which I owe the great opportunity to both gather and distribute inspiring information. Keep it up! xo
There are many keen observations in this thread, many of which I recognise from my time on Xbox Live.
I’m sorry but gaming is the only way I know how to relate to this modern world of the internet, as I never used it for anything other than gaming until 12-18 month ago. I never saw the point in sharing my opinion, that didn’t matter, with other folks opinions that didn’t matter.
Having played a while on the net I really relate to this post. Again though because of XBL I say the audience has a great deal to do with this problem.
For the last few years XBL has been opened up to every gamer, especially the younger Twitter generation, they have demanded from day one that the friends list on XBL is too small (you can have 100 friends).
It took me nearly 3 yrs to fill that list up, with people I TALKED to, and had common ground with… but I only found that out after a few sessions of play/chat.
These teenagers are obsessed with having thousands of friends… but they offer such shallow friendships to these kids, it keeps them in a controllable state for ad men/marketeers to manipulate.
A teenager once made fun of me online for ONLY having 100 friends on my list, where his had over 500 (merged with his Messenger).
I despaired… this is what the gaming world will become…
These kids aren’t there for the gaming they want to collect people to say to there true friends, how many people like them.
The expansion of the friends list just indicates that these shallow little feckers care not for my gaming world, and I hate how the gaming industry panders to them.
I maybe at my peak only communicate with 30-40 people on my list, and that’s TALKING to them not writing… INSTANT communication… THAT’S why the current net MUST DIE.
There is no real need to expand the friends list… a modification of the type I proposed would of been nice but then you see…
MY VOICE doesn’t matter on the Xbox.com FORUMS (see how I tied that in lol)
…they only care for the masses. Fuck the elite that built XBL, who played everyday for 4 yrs, to build a wonderful INCLUSIVE community (by talking to people), ONLY to be excluded by the very people we were trying to invite…
BASTARDS.
I haven’t ever done the live web gaming thing (I do have a PS3, but I don’t play often), but I understand how everything ends up being a giant marketing ploy.
That said, people like to come together in big groups (festival concerts, Nazi rallies, etc.) — and it’s pretty much a guarantee that a solid percentage of them will be young and irritating.
[...] I should mention that I own all of the aforementioned games, even if I play them very rarely. It’s not because they aren’t incredible. I just have other hobbies, like recording music, watching movies with my wife and feeding my social media addictions. [...]
I think your “twitter” example proves Clive wrong. With mid-sized cites, the conversation will be with minority of visitors who are outspoken individuals, probably under a hundred in most cases, and the conversation is likely to be robust among those individuals. The elusive element is why certain cites have robust conversations while others just have readers. Topic matters certainly (post a best of list in music and you will be responses from the listers), but there are certainly other elements.