xeladosOP
#1
We're all familiar with social networking; it's been around in popular form since 2002 or so with Friendster. Myspace came along in 2003 and Facebook in 2004. Since then, hundreds of networks have cropped up, all trying to fulfill some sort of self-proclaimed social need. How social are these websites, and what do they add to the quality of communication over the Internet as a whole?"Social" networking has many issues with it. I'll try to cover the most important and/or grating issues.The first is competition. Many networks publicly display how many views your profile has received and how many "friends" you have. This publicly available information doesn't mean much to some people, but among the less mature and/or intelligent, it gives them a vector for competition. By assessing profile views and the number of "friends" you have, you can estimate how popular you are. At least, in their eyes...So what's relevant about this nitpick? Well, it affects the way people behave. Many users will add others to their friend list merely to pad their friend count. It increases people's desire to friend them (because most users assume a high number of friends is equal to popularity, and being friends with popular people is surely awesome... right?) This results in many people being added as friends but no real communication happening. Where's the "social" in this equation? The truth is that most people cannot maintain meaningful friendships with more than 10-20 people. From there lie about 10 more semi-friends, and the rest range from "complete stranger" to "acquaintance". Given this information, why should anyone have more than 50-60 friends? Even that number is semi-unrealistic.So, what can people do about this? Users generally act upon what information is available. If existing social networks got rid of the ability to publicly display friend counts and profile views, then the competition (in this field, anyway) would be diffused. The problem with this is that when you introduce a feature to millions of users and then take it away, you cause a LOT of anger and confusion. The networks shouldn't have had the feature in the first place because it's not relevant.Moving on, the next issue is privacy. There are many facets to privacy. Thankfully some users have expressed interest in keeping their privacy, and the networks have responded by adding privacy features. This is good since it allows the freaky college student to hide his drunken party pictures. But more importantly, these features could also be seen as a user's excuse to supply the networks with more information, since they believe they are protected by the features. The core problem here is the lack of discretion people use in publishing information on the networks. If they don't want the information to be seen or accessed, perhaps they shouldn't publish it! Another concern is the persistence of the data. Most, if not all networks keep concurrent backups of their data; this data sticks around for varying amounts of time, even after your account has been "deleted"! Some of the networks; Myspace and Facebook in particular, use this information to provide target advertising to users. Basically, they sell the information to marketers in order to make money.The networks justify this activity by pointing to their Terms of Service. In practice, however, no user actually reads the lengthy, legalese outline of terms. What needs to happen in that regard is full disclosure of a network's practices, in concise, human-readable language. This will make the relationship between user and network more clear, and users will be better educated on the nature of the network, so they can use proper discretion over their information. Once it hits the network, the user has little control over the information's access.Another concern regarding privacy is the way that professionals use this information. Law enforcement regularly sifts through profiles of people they may suspect to be doing things, and employers will judge applicants according to their social networking profiles. The former is acceptable with a warrant, but the latter has no place at all. What a person does outside of the workplace is not the employer's business; they have no right to know anything outside of the applicant's merit and abilities in the workplace. This falls back to user discretion and their knowledge of privacy tools; a smart user can alter their profile to make it so employers cannot judge them on irrelevant criteria.So the solution to the privacy problem is for networks to remove all user data when a user has their account closed. Permanently. They should also not maintain more than a week's worth of backups. This ensures that user data is not held onto for too long. Users can publish less information and restrict access to their profiles so employers cannot access them. The problem of selling personal information to advertisers is still there, though. I can't think of a practical way to fix it; they have to make money somehow; perhaps ads can be targeted to less personal information, such as an IP address. It would still give them somewhat relevant ads (since IPs are distributed according to location) and still put money in the network's pockets without sacrificing user privacy.Next up is the crux of this whole argument; between the frivolous adding of people and ease of finding out what your "friends" are doing without actually talking to them, the quality of interpersonal communication is not improving with these networks, but instead devolving. Twitter champions this de-evolution by limiting input to 140 characters. On one hand, it encourages users to say what they have to say quickly and get it over with. On the other, it encourages unwarranted self-importance and a lower signal-to-noise ratio. On Twitter, you cannot have a meaningful discussion, debate, or conversation. 140 characters isn't sufficient for everything. Thankfully, other networks have better means, such as private messaging and bulletins.Have you noticed anything fishy yet? Private messages and "bulletins" are nothing more than a centralized e-mail system and message board system, respectively! This technology has existed for decades and is still in use by millions of people across the globe. Why, then, do social networks get so much use when they're not introducing anything new or innovative? The only reason I can think of is convenience, which the mainstream will always be in favor of.So what can you do if you're sick of social networks but want to keep in touch with your friends? Forums, e-mail, IRC, and instant messaging networks have existed for many years and are still effective and commonly used methods of communication. They each have their quirks and limitations, but you're guaranteed to find at least one method to be good enough.But what if you actually used all the features of a social network in the intended way? Is there a modern replacement for the social network? Sort of... it comes in the form of Google Wave. In its current form, however, only Google has a "service provider" server, and given Google's not-so-great privacy practices, I don't recommend using it. However, they are working on an open-source server package that will allow people to setup their own servers and communicate with people on different servers. This is effectively the same way e-mail works. If Wave catches on, you will be able to choose your Wave provider (much like you choose your e-mail provider) and talk to people through that. Wave seeks to replace all existing communication mediums, by combining them. But it also has limitations.So.. in a nutshell, social networks are actually less social than the pre-existing communication mediums since they encourage stalking and the large amount of visible information turns people into nothing more than the labels they use to describe themselves. It also forms social competition, which is not beneficial in any capacity. In the end, it comes down to how you use a social medium, so social networks can be used to a good extent, but their features and limitations make them a poor choice compared to e-mail, IM, IRC, mailing lists, and message boards.So what are your thoughts after reading this wall of text?