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Human horizons in social networking

By Tony Henderson - posted Thursday, 1 November 2007


In computers, a social networking site is an Internet online platform where a user can create a profile and build a personal network of online contacts that connects him or her to other users. The most well known is the mainstream, thus now suspect by the switched-on, MySpace. Following MySpace came sites such as Flickr - mainly for personal pictures, then everything diversified.

Steve Ming Yeow Ng is a mid-twenties Singaporean analyst associated with Draper Fisher Juvertson Vinacapital, based in Vietnam. He is also part of The Digital Movement (TDM), and travels to Singapore regularly for purposes that he claims are, "Shamelessly 2.0", meaning Web 2.0, though with the rejoinder that actually it is just the Web, since it's not as if a new version has been released.

"My core interests at this point in time include web x.0, new media, and psychology, but my main passion is really in leading and executing new and cool stuff - however you define new and cool!"

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The Kickstart Asia event, organised by NextMedia on Bintang Island, Indonesia, late July 2007, attracted Ng and others of his ilk, plus IT journalists from around Asia, and equipment and software suppliers. At one of the sessions, Ng briefed the assembly with a talk entitled Web 2.0 and Beyond.

Interviewed at this event, Ng said: "I am very excited about the potential of collaborative Web-based applications gearing up productivity and effectiveness of teams within and outside organisations. Web apps like Attensa, Google Apps and Dabbledb all hint at a sea change in how people collaborate, and I want to be at the centre if it all, I want to put the human there!"

Despite his involvement with venture capitalism and mainstream IT applications, Ng admits: "I am a big fan of candour, straight talk, and irrelevance at work. After all, work is life, and life should be fun!"

His more recent interests brought him to social networking, which has evolved from its genesis in online bulletin boards. Facebook, a site similar to MySpace, figures prominently as an interface program for social networking. It is widely used, for example, by the spouses of US soldiers fighting in Iraq, as it is a means of communicating outside the control of the military. Kids also love Facebook.

"If you have a group of very young people wanting to be in touch with each other, they might use Facebook, but Facebook can be used for anything. The interesting thing lies in having one common central way of handling everything. One that cuts across all these different things, yet where they all use one standard interface to deliver information, they can communicate anywhere in the world."

For Ng, Facebook and its sister programs, such as Ning, are for all age groups because it is not just kids who talk what may seem nonsense to outside observers.

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"The point is to just think about how to get the information to people. That's the most important thing to know. Right now there are several things that can be done to get the information into cyberspace: the postings, the emailings, the mass mailouts, all going to people. It is very easy, whatever works. Now it is so easy to do all of these things."

There are several forms of social networking tools. Blogs are a form of informal social network, meaning you can't really see the ties and links between the various people involved. People can check out the blog and see who has left comments but it is not known what the relationship among them all is.

There are also collaborative websites - wikis are a fine example of these - made up of the collective work of many authors. Similar to a blog in structure and logic, a wiki allows anyone to edit, delete or modify content that has been placed on the website including the work of previous authors, using a browser interface. This contrasts with a blog, which is typically written by an individual and does not allow visitors to change the original content, but only add comments.

The next level is a formalised social network, such as Ning and Facebook.

"With these, you have several friends, and when you add a friend it asks how you know these guys, so I will say I met you at Kickstart Asia. What happens is that the list of 30 or 40 friendships formed at that venue are written in. So I can see who is whose friend."

The human aspect

It is not just the technology that must be considered in social networking. As Ng points out, "Even if you have the best social network platform in the world no one will use it unless you do a lot of other stuff. The technology is not the most difficult thing, the difficult thing is the people. How do I get people to contribute information? How do I get the content?"

Human engagement is important. "Going there, talking to people who are going to contribute and give them incentive to contribute, a social incentive. We do this in several ways. The first and most basic is by creating a meaning. This is what we are about. If you find it useful it will be great if you can be part of us and just help us shape our thoughts and move forward."

After meaning, contributors need to have a certain purpose: "Thus we do a lot of things so they feel recognition, and recalling that 'just talk is empty', the most important is making sure what they contribute becomes something. Then they are very happy - when what they contribute on the Wiki gets turned into real action. That consequence needs to be made clear."

This might seem nothing special or new. But people forget these basic elements, purpose and meaning, when trying to create a social network.  What is being created here is not a consumer product.  However, it has been commented that the great paradox of 'social networking' is that it uses narcissism as the glue for 'community'. "Being online means being alone, and being in an online community means being alone together", according to Nicholas Carr in his blog Rough Type: Twitter Dot Dash. "And so at last, after passing through E-mail and Instant Messaging and Texting, we arrive in the land of Twitter".

"Twitter is the latest tool to emerge in social networking.  Says Ng, "I am increasingly fascinated by the debate on the Twitter phenomenon. Twitter in case you haven't heard, is the latest thing in the social space. It permits users to type in any brief comment, up to 140 characters, any time they wish. It has been referred to as micro-blogging. The encouragement is to talk about anything, and everything, what you are doing, where you are going, what you are feeling and thinking".

This equates to a "stream of consciousness" says Tara Hung in her blog horsepigcow.com, "in the form of tweets, posts, photos or any other artifact of our day-to-day life [which] isn't really for anyone to consume. Well, not in this era anyway. It's more of a mark of our having been here. A legacy, if you will, of our lifetime. Something for our grandchildren to look back at and see how we lived".

Who owns the content?

Ownership of the information is a hot topic when it comes to Facebook-type platforms where the company running the platform owns everything that goes on, and in, Facebook. Thus, they control what happens to and with 'our' data. They can decide to expose, aggregate, process, and sell the data to third parties. In this sense, it’s not really a free service.

There is an importance attributed to owning your content and data. In an environment where you retain copyright over your own creations, sharing with a CreativeCommons license or its equivalent, you get to decide what you can do with your own productions. That requirement can be extended to an environment where you are in control of your own personal data and identity. For many people on the Internet, the bottom line is, when you give up ownership of your own content and data, you lose freedom.

But that is not the way Ng looks at it. For him it comes back to how you define the pure form Web.

"You contribute the content you get the money, that's the traditional definition. However, if the users do not care about that - and if they don't care, no one cares - that changes the script. Will a blogger allow that to happen? Never. Because it is valuable content and it’s quality content. On the other side though Facebook handles a lot more trivia, in the sense it is me saying: 'I like this book'. 'I met this girl' etc. The level of user interaction has a lot to do with it".

Bone fide bloggers are aware of the kind of licencing involved and despite losing control when they are on Facebook, do not worry about that ownership. On the other hand, kids don’t care, they just want to communicate. The value is in the exchange not the product which in this case is intangible.

It seems inexplicable to the older mind but that’s how we communicate most of the time - whether it’s kids at school or old blokes in the teashop. Just listen next time you have a quiet moment!

For entrepreneurs like Ng, there’s the jingle of cash in those apparently pointless one liners - but, and it’s an important but, there’s the joy of building social networks in societies that are fragmenting under the externally impelled forces of globalisation. Online social networking offers a way out, or through!

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About the Author

Tony Henderson is a freelance writer and chairman of the Humanist Association of Hong Kong.

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All articles by Tony Henderson

Creative Commons LicenseThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.

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