Social networking is a race to the bottom

If George Orwell or Aldous Huxley or someother distopian thinker had heard of "social networking" they would realize that even their worst nightmares pale compared to the vision of the businesses in that space. The dream is a world where everyone is the same. They like the same music, have the same friends. The only exception are crafted "stars" cookie cutter beauties that act or sing in familiar and comfortable ways, calming, exciting, radical in turn, but alway familiar, always approved. We only see the news we want to see, only meet the people we want to meet, we can create a world where nothing is new, nothing is disturbing, where all information we see is perfectly controled.

The other night I saw a company that breathlessly bragged that they had developed software that allowed people to do the same thing as their friends, to surf the Web in the same way. Like lemmings marching together to the sea.

Here are some points:

• At 2/3 of your friends are overweight and half of those are obese.
• If you are in big city high-school to be like your friends you have to toss a coin, because 1/2 of them will drop out (in the US).
• People with the least diverse social networks have the worst immune response, so you will get up to 4 times as many colds.
• You will never hear bluegrass, new acoustic music, most jazz, modern orchestral music or the music of any other culture.
• You will think you like "all kinds of music" because what you have listened to or encountered is so limited.
• You will never learn another language, travel or even talk to anyone who has (if you are in the US).
• You can't locate Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran or Israel on a map (anywhere in the world)
• If your intelligence is higher than average, the majority of people in your social network and less intelligent that you.

The problems of the world have not all been solved. There are wars, there is poverty, threat of environmental problems and much more. It is up to each of us to do our part. I asked the authors of the software that allowed everyone to do what their friends were doing "who is this for?" If it sucks up the time of young people and creates a bubble for them so they do not learn about the world, it is not for them. The answer is: "it is for the authors of the social networking software to sell to marketing to get the kids to buy more stuff."

There is nothing wrong with this, but it seems it has a couple of interesting consequences.

It could negatively impact innovation. If everyone is doing the same things, then who will innovate? It is silly, of course, to think that everyone will march to the beat of the same drummer. There will always be people that are more motivated, less afraid and interested in doing something different. What is the benefit of having more of this?

Social networks and the network effect

In marketing, a thrilling fact is called "the network effect." This is the behavior of an item like a phone that is useless on its own becomes more valuable the more of them there are. Since Facebook and so on are considered to be "networks" then it reasons that the network effect should apply there. But that is a mistake.

The fact is that in technical terms Facebook is NOT a social network. It is a regular old networks that supports social networks. The infrastructures allows people to communicate with others and in one sense is not that different from the email or SMS. Think about this. What if, back in the 10's or so of the 20th century as phones were just getting put in people's houses a marketeer had thought "only businesses had phones, but now regular people do, let's call our phone networks 'social networks'!" Would the new name have changed anything about peoples patterns of use?

It is very likely that inexpensive phones and email have expanded our circles of contacts but what is the gating factor? It is our brains. We are not Cisco routers. We cannot add boards when we get too many messages, we just have to limit the throughput. Social networks, networks of people, do not exhibit the network effect. They degrade with new connections after a point. New technologies have allowed us to expand our contacts for many years, and some do, but most don't. Even those who do have small limits on the connections that are possible.
Social networking sites are infrastructure that lives on top of existing networks. They are not social networks because the social networks are the networks of people that use their software and they are networks that sit on top of other networks such as the Internet and the various networks that support it. They are a network layer. What is the value of a network layer?
They are very valuable to society, but they are a commodity business. The last few years has seen an increased in interoperability between the various platforms. Collaborative software, sharing objects across networks and so has been talked about and worked on since the 80's or longer, it is not a new idea.

Organizational Network Analysis

I want to comment that several companies and consultants offer "organizational network analysis." For any of you doing due dilligence, it is important to note that this is a marketing term and is social network analysis. I believe this has to do with the idea that business people do not care about abstract things and only want to know the bottom line, which is possibly true in most cases. However, for any business person that does want to learn more about what he or she is potentially paying for, calling social network analysis "organizational network analysis" effectively hides it from scrutinity and makes it seem like it is something new.

Views of Networks

Networks have complex topologies and can even exist in many dimensional space. Their boundaries are indistinct, and they change over time. Given this, how do we look at them?

Right now there buzz about "social graphs." In order to do this it is necessary to assume networks as distinct nodes, that ties are concrete and that the network is looked at from the individual's viewpoint. Technically this is called an "egocentric" viewpoint, not because the individual is egotistical, but "ego" means "self" in Latin and sociologists distinguish "ego" as "self" and "alter" as "other." (We could use "self" instead of "ego," but calling someone "self-centered" is not much of an improvement :).

To me, I wonder how important that is to know? We already have our own view of our networks, Perhaps we do not think of it that way, but we are limited in what we can see by where we are. Most of us won't ever really know what Warren Buffet and Bill Gates talk about with their friends at dinner parties; or what the leader of a village in Pakistan talks about with his friends. We are literally in different worlds.

It is important to know ones own network because people that have more diverse networks are healthier, happier, wealthier and many good things, that aspect of it is valuable. By seeing who our connections connect to we can broaden our search. Of course, all kinds of social media is allowing that. Heck, it is pretty cheap to put an ad on Google if we are want to be seen or to find something. So in my mind, the social graph as we are now thinking of it is more cool than useful. This is because it is an ego centric view of the networks

But there are places that can have a network centric view. LinkedIn has its view of the social networks, Microsoft has its view of IM traffic, phone companies have their networks. All of these provide "network centric" views of the network. That means they can see the whole network at the same time. We can see it from anyone's point of view, what could that mean?

We will see groups of people that are not connected, they could not have a view of each others. We can see groups forming and groups disbanding. We can see who in a group has higher status or is closer to what is going on. We can see the connectors and the hubs. Each community is like a geographic region with its own stories and when we see them, we can ask what is going on. From our own view point they are invisible, or blur together like the Milky Way.

Social Network Marketing Goldmine

As I go around Silicon Valley and talk to people, I don't meet that many that are aware of the goldmine that lives in the social network data that is being collected. Most of us see the interfaces to networks, we see cellphones, computers and other interfaces, but the network inside is out of sight and out of mind.



Several companies, including Microsoft, are making software that helps visualize the networks. They draw pretty pictures of the networks and we can get a sense of how connected we are or the world is in general. These are sometimes called "social graphs," but it is the latest generation of sociograms which were invented in the 1930's by a psychologist named James Morano. There has been wonderful software available for more than 10 years to visualize and analyze networks.



The key here is "analyze." What does that mean? There is a lot to it and over time I will add bits and pieces to this blog, but the point I want to make that is not obvious relates to what I previously wrote about 'roles." We are both who we are inside and who we are expected to be by ourselves and others. It can be difficult to see, but who we are, to some extent (and I think a very large extent) has to do with what others expect of us over the years.



We talk about things like "culture" and have a sense that people who grow up in different environments appreciate different things and have different ways of behaving. It is worth noting the "different environments" portion of this. What is an environment but a set of relationships located in one part of the social world? The key here is location. If we know where someone is located in social space, we can make some sophisticated guesses about who they are. Their culture is a consequence of their location so knowing their location can be a proxy for culture. In fact, perhaps "culture" is just a word we used because we could not see the networks. Now, with cell phone data, IM data, social networking data, email traffic data and so on, we can trace the patterns of connections between people. But, is that enough?



The links in "small world networks" like these can be very useful, but they are not the whole story. We are members of multiple networks. Some large organizations are creating "social networking" software that they can use internally. In some more progressive organizations they allow users to create their own social networks. In the US for all of this is owned by the companies. In principle, it is possible to see individuals as members of multiple social networks, which is the optimum situation for knowing who that person is. But even in flat, small-worlds networks, it is possible to find structural equivalence (or its variant regular equivalence) or people that, because of the patterns of network ties in which they enmeshed look at themselves and are looked at as similar.

Old marketing does segmentation of society by attributes, age, gender, education, race and so on. But, if you think about it, the relationship between age and music taste is a coincidence. Because people listen to music of their age group and they all grow older at the same time, there will be age graded bands of musical taste. But it is the relationships that "caused" the musical taste, not the person's age.

Innovation spreads through structural equivalent sets. People have a tendency to adopt ideas or do thing that people they think of themselves as similar do. Status, prestige and so on are all relative to who we think we are. The radical thing that I am saying is that we only get to make up part of who we think we are. We compare ourselves and are compared, just to know who we are. Networks can show us who is similar, who is different, who associates with each other, who is thought of as influential and much, much more.

Companies these days need to be taking some steps:

1. Collect data in a form that can be easily analyzed by SNA.
2. Create strategies to have people use multiple networks (this goes opposite of the idea of social networks as a broadcast medium)
3. Choose and implement analysis processes.
4. Work to mitigate privacy and other fears.

Some papers I have written

I have several papers, some peer reviewed, that are avaialble at:

http://www.steiny.com/writings/

Roles and networks

One of the most important aspects of networks is that of roles.





Roles have been widely discussed from a number of points of view over time. One that some people go to right aways is roles as attributes of an individual with a psychoanalytic basis. For instance, roles as archetypes, like "the warrior" and so on. In this theory, to understand ourselves we need to know the roles that are fundamental to our character. The notion of role that we take (network folks) is almost the opposite. We take the position that there are countless roles in society and that they exist whether we occupy them or not.





When you first meet someone, or anytime you are interacting with you, what are they interacting with? Are they interacting with you lips? Your immortal soul? Your mind? Specific neural patterns in your brain?





Depending on your beliefs and the level of analysis, possibly all of the above, but if you meet someone new and you ask yourself what type of a person you are meeting, a story about them will come to mine. As Gladwell points out in "Blink" the decisions we make about others are instant and unconscious. A more practical way of thinking about it is that somehow you create a story about that person and they about you.





So, what are the elements of that story? Where do the stories come from? Could you tell your story to someone else, in other words say it in language? Probably you could. That presupposes that they have a shared understanding of what is possible. The stories don't come from nowhere, they are given to us by the communities in which we are involved. Our mothers, your friends, the social world around us. We are born into stories and explanations.



One thing that "exists" in the world outside of us is "roles." It is easy to see that the authority of, say a police officer, is not because of the individual that has the role, but the social weight of the role. Anyone who is a police officer can arrest people, carry a gun and so on. There are more or less sensible ways of talking to a police officer and a police officer is trained in having the bearing of a police officer.



Suppose someone wants to be an accountant. He or she goes to school and learns to do what accountants do. Though there can be some creativity, the domain is small. And an account needs to have the kind of office an accountant has appointed with the appropriate equipment and furniture. The accountant needs to wear the appropriate clothes, drive the appropriate car and have the appropriate friends. Society has many ways of letting us know when we are not following the rules. If you ask the accountant "what are you?" He or she might answer "an accountant." But, what part of that did he or she have any choice in?



Of course, few of us have a single role. We surely are sons or daughters, we may be parents, golfers, leaders, social icebreakers, and countless other roles. These roles to some extent have to be agreed on by others. We fill the roles, we cannot make them on our own. We can move from role to role, but the roles will exist even if we do not fill them.



Later on I will talk about more subtle aspects of roles. The subtely has to do with multiple networks. The role of a father might be seen differently in different networks. But that will come in a later entry. What I want to emphasize here is that when we interact with each other, we are, to some degree interaction with a socially influenced expectations by both parties. You can think of highly formal diplomatic situation where both parties are the roles and every word spoken is scripted to be the words of a prime minister or president. We hope that a judge will act in his or her role, not from his or her feelings about a situation. It is not difficult to see that roles strongly influence the way we are seen and the way we act.



So the idea is: what if we could know people's roles we could know a lot about how they will act.