“Social networking through the ages” – The Guardian headline
There is some deep human instinct that compels us to take a wild and open territory and divide it into citadels, independent city states, MySpaces and Facebooks
Much ink, electronic and atomic, has been expended on the subject of social networking and web 2.0. First, let’s decide on how this last is pronounced. “Web two” won’t do. “Web two point oh” is common, but I heard it as “web two dot oh” from the lips of Sir Tim Berners-Lee OM himself and since he is the only begetter of the web, I shall take my lead from him, the most influential Briton since… well, he has no rivals. Brian Blessed, perhaps.
Web 2.0 was christened, so far as I am aware, by Tim O’Reilly. Oh really? No, sir, O’Reilly. He was one of the early advocates of open source programming, and greatly championed Perl, the language my father speaks fluently but which involves too much brain power and concentration for the likes of me.
These days web 2.0 refers both to user-generated content and to social networking sites. Rather than passively searching, browsing and eyeballing the billions of pages of the web, millions now contribute their videos, their journals, their music, their photos, their lives.
The Big New Thing
Social networking (Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, etc) has been identified as the Big New Thing. In other words, people who watch My Family have now heard of it and are at last aware of the difference between downloading and uploading. A sure sign, perhaps, that the phenomenon is on the way out. MySpace is already as seriously uncool (and as hideously girlie, pink and spangly) as My Little Pony; Facebook is taking its advantage (openness to having applications written for it) to such extremes that it’s in danger of losing the original virtues of elegance, intelligence and simplicity that established it as a classy, upmarket place in which to live a digital life in the first place.
I am old enough to remember Prestel and the original bulletin boards and “commercial online services” Prodigy, CompuServe and America Online. These were closed communities. You paid a subscription, dialled in and connected. You made new friends and you chatted in “rooms” designated for the purpose according to special interests, hobbies and propensities. CompuServe and AOL were shockingly late to add what was called an “internet ramp” in the 90s. This allowed those who dialled up to go beyond the confines of the provider’s area and explore the strange new world of the internet unsupervised. AOL offered its members a hopeless browser and various front ends that it hoped would keep people loyal to its squeaky-clean, closed world. This lasted through the 90s as it covered the planet in CDs in an attempt to recruit subscribers. A lost cause, naturally, and the company ended up as little more than an ordinary ISP. Made millions for Steve Case on the way as AOL merged with Time Warner, but that’s another story.
Opening and closing like a flower
My point is this: what an irony! For what is this much-trumpeted social networking but an escape back into that world of the closed online service of 15 or 20 years ago? Is it part of some deep human instinct that we take an organism as open and wild and free as the internet, and wish then to divide it into citadels, into closed-border republics and independent city states? The systole and diastole of history has us opening and closing like a flower: escaping our fortresses and enclosures into the open fields, and then building hedges, villages and cities in which to imprison ourselves again before repeating the process once more. The internet seems to be following this pattern.
How does this help us predict the Next Big Thing? That’s what everyone wants to know, if only because they want to make heaps of money from it. In 1999 Douglas Adams said: “Computer people are the last to guess what’s coming next. I mean, come on, they’re so astonished by the fact that the year 1999 is going to be followed by the year 2000 that it’s costing us billions to prepare for it.”
But let the rise of social networking alert you to the possibility that, even in the futuristic world of the net, the next big thing might just be a return to a made-over old thing.
© Stephen Fry 2008
Stephen has an interesting point regarding the cycle of freedom and openness being undermined by our human desire to draw borders and curtail our own such freedoms. This phenomenon will go on and on, and I think it is naturally a good thing because as part of the cycle new opportunities inevitably present themselves. The most important thing is that we ensure that no hindrances can to put an end this cycle, for then we enter the realm of totalitarianism – AT&T have recently proposed that they monitor and control our access to content and information.
Incidentally, the “Next Big Thing” will probably be some killer application built on top of Google’s OpenSocial API, which attempts to abstract all of the various social networking sites beneath one common interface, and from this we will probably see various niche applications spring up, once again removing the garden wall.
And in a similar vein to this, I believe OpenID authentication protocol will probably start to flourish this year – the social networking sites will probably be the ones who introduce this concept to the great unwashed masses.
I’ve always felt as though social networking sites were greatly overvalued because of the fact that their communities are pretty fickle – they are part of a trend led by teenagers, and as Stephen points out Myspace is now seen as yesterdays cool, Facebook is “hip”, and by the summertime we will have something new. As I said, it will probably be a much more advanced concept abstract concept to the “traditional” social networking sites.
I have learned two important things in life:
1. People don’t know what they want until we (the geeks) give it to them.
2. Everybody is different.
Finally, I shall leave you with a quote:
“People keep asking me to join the LinkedIn network, but I’m already part of a network, it’s called the Internet.” – Gary McGraw, via Jon Udell, via Gavin Bell, via Simon Willison, via Andy Chantrill.
- Andy.
Calm down AxmxZ, Zoidberg is just the name of a character from Futurama. Zuckerberg/Zoidberg both sound Jewish, does it really matter if you substitute one for the other for comic effect?
I’ll try to break Douglas Adams’ prediction, despite my massive addiction to his works, by saying that I’m a computer person and I know what’s coming next for social networks and their ilk – and it’s OpenID, as suggested by a couple of people above.
http://blog.wired.com/monkeybites/2008/01/yahoo-leverages.html
This stuff is actually mind-bending when you get into it; it’s no less than the ability to have trust relationships across the web – and of course the most important aspect of a social network is not the ability to share, but the ability to share selectively. Imagine that I can selectively share not only my facebook page with friends, but also any number of other random things anywhere on the web. The term “social network” will have a whole new meaning.
As with all of these things, once the momentum builds, the current commercial advantage to remaining a walled garden will flip completely and all the networks will have to open up. They will each want to act as “home base” for as many users as possible.
I am unsure whether I care about divisions of the Internet into Web 2.0 or sequelae, but I do know that I am addicted. To the Internet. To the instant gratification of questions I have. For relief of insomniac nights. For tedious afternoons or evenings when I need social interaction that my remote location cannot afford me.
I had no knowledge of many of the social side of Web 2.0 (FaceBook, Second Life, those sort of things) because I had considered them for adolescents. But I am willing to investigate, and after doing so, If they were the only representative of the Web, I would toss it all away. I have to admit I prefer blogs to be more my style and comfort zone. But, as when I started a blog in 2006, I return to the question, “Who reads all this?”. Particularly, my pithy writings, even though my first blog was nominated for an award. Who would want to read the ramblings, thoughts or polemic of a middle aged hobbler? So what is the point? Where does Web 2.0 lead?
Celebrities and academics, intellectuals and journalists, technologists and philosophers, (you get my drift) might produce very interesting blogs, with interesting analysis and information, much like your own, but then the comments. What do you do about the comments? You as a blogger cannot possibly read all the comments, and if you do, do you respond? Some comments include valuable points that ought to be mentioned, but amidst a sea of other, sometimes unclear thoughts, these worthy points are lost. A shame. I guess I am not helping by adding my own, quite probably worthless reply, but I think that from now on I will simply observe, read and digest, keeping my thoughts to myself.
P.S. I do hope that your fractured arm does not give you too much pain. Are you still able able to type? One handed typing can be so dreadfully slow. And I am quite sure that breaking one arm will not keep an Internet addict down!
Best wishes for a speedy recovery.
can i ditto flookwit?
almost all you said… (see, it was a valuable comment.)
and Mr Fry,
if you need an arm, you’re welcome to use mine anytime.
it’s even double jointed.
and plays the banjo.
badly.
“Web 2.0 was christened, so far as I am aware, by Tim O’Reilly. Oh really? No, sir, O’Reilly.”
Haha, love the Bonzo reference there.
jophndoyle: That’s why I said “in this context of envy and malice.”
Oh really?
No, O’ Reilly!
I missed this, for which I am very sad:
http://www.slapstick.org.uk/
Lovely Neil Innes.
I quite miss you on Facebook. Very hard for me to find other fans of Flann O Brien and Donleavy!
Actually that sounded slightly self important and familiar. Sorry there.
Similarly, Dutch power users of the online service Twitter are treating it much the same way we used on IRC: to chat, rather than a status update app.
Fountain Lover…
I hope i can get true you’re spam filer so i can say that you have a great blog and thank you for the link back, greets….
I have to be one of the people who doesn’t think Web 2.0 is really a big deal. The World Wide Web (1.0) was founded on the idea of people creating content. Even fairly early on, there were primitive multiple-user online art galleries and journal applications, powered by CGI scripts and HTML. Lots of artists and writers had websites early on and posted their stuff there, then joined webrings and submitted their URL to Yahoo and Altavista to make sure people could find it.
Everyone had a site on Geocities or Angelfire or what have you–so many sites out there that were titled “Welcome to my corner of the web!
” and plastered with animated gifs, but otherwise lacked any real content.
MySpace and Facebook are basically searchable versions of 1997’s Geocities. It’s not content–it’s a presence, more or less. “I’m here, I don’t have anything interesting to say to the world, but talk to me!” Things haven’t really changed that much.
“Is it part of some deep human instinct that we take an organism as open and wild and free as the internet, and wish then to divide it into citadels, into closed-border republics and independent city states?”
People have a need to belong to certain groups and demographics, and a fully open network like myspace just doesn’t cut it for some, so a progression towards closed niches was bound to happen.
Web 2.0 hardly has any meaning any more, since just about any site worth mentioning has adopted the principles of social collaboration, widgets and user-generated content.
Social networking is becoming a must-have feature for any site, so we might as well drop the “2.0″ and call it “Web”.
http://www.pijoo.com/#yorkshireblogger
[...] Networking – Social networking through the ages By CoryAdd commentsSocial Networking News Social networking through the agesThese days web 2.0 refers both to user-generated content and to social networking sites. Rather than [...]
I can’t believe no one’s linked to this yet, so…from XKCD, a webcomic of math and sarcasm, a map of these webby dominions we’ve all staked out:
http://xkcd.com/256/
Overjoyed to see you back on the net, Stephen (thank Cory at BoingBoing for hipping me to your blog). Been to Idaho yet? It has three capitals, you know…
Social networking has been going on ever since the first cave-to-cave sales man started selling brooms. We all need something from someone. If it’s not business related it might be that handy trailer the neighbours have.
However I think social networking is changing the way and the scope of our communication. I blogged about that in detail here: http://www.onepostperday.com/?p=224
The gist is that social networking provides us with contacts we call friends but are in fact assets that have something we might be able to use. Sounds more cynical than it maybe is.
“The medium is the message”, Mr Fry.
Throughout our history as humans, and especially more recently, to borrow your idea in the Wallpaper podgram, we have been uglifying our surroundings, churning out more and more crap. Personally, I think Facebook and, in particular, the comments and ratings system on YouTube are symptoms of this eternal trend.
The internet is vast, and the internet, on the whole, has life-changing material within it; it is a wealth of information so vast and so varied that one could quite happily waste multiple lifetimes absorbing it. The problem I find, in my limited teenage experience, is that we have to sift through so much garbage to find things of worth on any user-generated forum/site that it quickly becomes tedious and unpleasant. There is a plethora of wasted verbiage on YouTube, trillions upon trillions of spewings of people confirming their existence to a global community that doesn’t really care, and yet actually saying the square root of bugger all.
Granted, one may argue that worth is subjective, and also one may argue that, since previous comments have already expressed this, this comment is just a crushed cup on a Staten Island of internet garbage, but I guess that’s not something we’re going to solve in any great hurry.
It tends to breed cynicism in me, which I guess may be why I am a little too hasty to condemn things as pointless (I refuse to upgrade my mobile phone as it meets my requirements and any extra features will just help to add to my own personal rubbish dump, as well as wasting my life away)
Sorry for such a long and stilted rant, teenagers to speak their mind even when it’s complete drivel, it gives us something to post on Facebook.
Regards
Claire
P.S. Stephen, in case you actually read this ever, your facial expressions throughout Jeeves and Wooster are quite out of this world.
Enjoyed your reading your observations. Think its an interesting point- why are we so keen to close down the possibilities of such a great open space, surely defeating the point of the internet in the first place.
I can’t decide whether its a good or bad thing to have closed networks. Maybe if we had more open or universal ones we could communicate on different sites without having to sign up and create new profiles all the time. It does seem to slow down the process and deter people from using more than a few different sites.
Ever time I fill in a registration form I get more conscious how much personal information I’m putting out there and whether it can be manipulated for someone else’s’ benefit. Maybe this is a good thing though as it makes us more careful, as privacy is always going to be an issue.
On the plus side of closed networks and possibly why the trend is moving towards niche network sites is because people want to feel they belong and having a closed group of people with similar interests creates a sense of community and a group identity that we want to associate ourselves with.
Speculation over facebook’s drop in popularity I would have thought to be due to its decision to open up to the general public, eliminating its exclusivity to students which I think had damaged its cool factor and has increased the take up of applications due to the different type of people who participate on these networks.
The whole of society works on the basis of the in and out groups. Those who are in have power and superiority over those they don’t let in but they have to let enough people in for it to be seen as a desirable and well known group. Therefore I think trends will always switch between open and closed areas to keep the balance right.
At http://facevaluebook.blogspot.com/ I discuss more issues about the new buzz word that is social networking and its use as a marketing tool
Social networking theory is part of my academic specialty.