Sequencing Insatiable Socialisation Satisfactorily

Meg Pickard has done rather a good job of explaining the problems of "friends" on social networks over here. Meg has focussed on Facebook ( how surprising but it is true for any social network site. To quote:

For example, at present on Facebook, I have (among others) the following listed as “Friends”:

- My husband
- Several people I’ve known since I was 11
- College friends I haven’t talked to in 15 years
- My boss
- A couple of people from university I’d lost touch with
- Several people I know from t’internet, but haven’t met / don’t actually know
- A few people on a mailing list I belong to
- A handful of family members
- A few people who work for me
- At least one ex boyfriend
- People who I’ve seen around the office but never exchanged more than words of greeting with

While I obviously wouldn’t have connected with these people via Facebook if I hadn’t wanted to, it’s pushing the definition a bit to lump all of them together into the same bucket, labelled “friends”. Why? Because most of them aren’t strictly friends (although they’re all lovely, obviously).

We've argued the same for quite a while (see here for eg) - these online social nets are just not nuanced enough to manage the various types of "Friend", and you wind up with a number of issues around Intimacy. As Meg puts it for herself

I’m constantly aware of being snooped on as much as I snoop on others. Whatever I write, or add, or play is going to be potentially (mis)interpreted differently by every “friend” on there. As a result, the lowest common denominator for values of “appropriate and relevant” information usually wins - i.e. nothing.

Or in the case of many others, Everything! On Facebook et al a whole raft of casual acquaintances suddenly know a huge amount about you.

We've had this discussion/argument a number of times over the last few years - there is definitely a "let it all hang out" brigade who think that those who believe this is not necessarily a Good Thing are scaremongers when they point out there is a Dark Side to all the groovy kids. Charles Frith has an interesting take, labelling such as children of the Cold War Era. Sez Charles:

there are roughly speaking two types of people plodding around the planet at present. Cold war survivors and the ones after, lets call them Post-Coldies. This has only a little to do with age as its a mindset that can easily be absorbed from say parents and different environments.

He goes on...

Cold war survivors are a guarded bunch. MSM and their parents taught them to be that way. They manage their online identity with Stalinist control, feel uncomfortable with online pictures of themselves, default to using very spy-like online monikers, never use 'include message in reply' in their emails and compartmentalize their offline lives with a strict policy of not mixing say work friends, then family, and life friends.

As Lloyd Davis (Who pointed me to Charles' post) noted:

Charles also points out that post-coldies don’t mind their friends meeting up, whereas the others will do anything to keep “different” areas of their life separate, even to the extent of lying to their “friends”. No wonder there’s such drama at weddings & funerals.

Whereas Sez Meg:

Put simply, I wouldn’t consider having a party to which they were all invited at the same time - apart from a wedding - so how can I expect to engage with them socially in a single setting online?

So.....Is Meg merely a Cold Warrior, or a pragmatist ? Time will Tell, but the past X thousand years of human history don't make us think that a new Age of Aquarius is dawning just yet, so our view is on Meg's side - Be Careful Out There

Meg has also done a useful analysis of the way she would design her own network - to build on that and generalise it, our own work for various assignments has led us to design an "Onion Ring" model, which maps our Identity against layers of Intimacy and maps what part of our Identity we are prepared to show to whom. Here is a simplified slide of this model.

:

Within these Onion layers (this is simplified btw - one can add a plethora of subgroups, and they should be user-configurable) one would choose to expose various amounts of your Core Identity, in a controllable way. It does need to be toggle-able, as there are some very private data that one will reveal to friends and not family (and vice versa), and must allow differential blocking of visibility of the networks - I don't really want my workmates to see my niece on Facebook (and I'm sure she doesn't want her mates to see me!). This is one of the drawbacks of Linked In...being asked to pass on what are effectively sales calls to my network irritates a lot of people.

However, there is also a risk to making it too controllable, in that setting it up and managing it becomes too complex, so we believe some form of Templated "Reduced Layers + Toggle" will suffice - so for e.g. you may set up say "Pub Friends" in the same category as "Work Friends" template, and then just toggle a few details.

We are in the early days of SocNet design, and - imho - they are not nearly nuanced enough yet to allow us (i) to manage our complex social nets properly and (ii) to test for cheats, frauds and other snake oil salesmen in the multiple ways we as a species have developed over millenia. This must be the next step for them to work without being abused and - again imho - is crucial before social nets can be opened up fully.

(Postscript - Meg's proposal to make this do-able in Facebook is to break your ID up into multiple Groups and shift your friends into the various Groups for their type. Won't work fully as F/B is currently structured, as Group functionality is low and you still can't set network intimacy levels for types of Friends - you would need Multiple Megs as ID's today)