Efficiency v Belonging: The Real Heart Of Social Tools

Ryan Carson has poked at an interesting hornet's nest in his recent post, Why I Don't Use Social Software, leading to a spate of concurring voices, especially Nick Carr, but supported by Phil Edwards, Cloud Street, Rob Hyndman, James Robertson, and Greg Linden.

Nick Carr wonders if it's a pet rock or not:

[from Social software in perspective]

Is social software a phenomenon or a passing fancy? The reality seems to lie somewhere in between, though considerably closer to fancy than phenomenon.

[...]

The crux of the problem is that, in most cases, social software is an extremely inefficient way for a person to get something done. The crowd may enjoy the product of other people's inputs, but for the rather small group of individuals actually doing the work, it demands the investment of a lot of time for very little personal gain. It's a fun diversion for a while - and then it turns into drudgery.

The scale of the net means that it's very easy to confuse fads for trends, so it's always good to keep in mind that, out in the real world, hardly anyone has even heard of Flickr or Digg or Delicious. And even very popular services like MySpace and Facebook appear to be used mainly as substitutes for email and instant messaging rather than platforms for social production.

The implicit premise behind this lynch mob's logic is that social software is supposed to make users more efficient: for example, personal productivity in sales or online research. And I guess, by more efficient, the authors are focused on how time-pressed they are (several mentioned that they are too busy to use such apps, the presumption being that if these apps made them more time-efficient, they would be attractive).

I reject this mindset out of hand. And I won't get into a hand-to-hand battle about which social tools do or do not warrant our attention, since this is discussion is about the socialness of these apps, not the functional jobs that they do, really.

Social apps are not about personal productivity. They are about social involvement, learning and enlarging perspectives through connection, and -- ultimately -- about the productivity of social groups as a whole.

An example may help. I am a strong believer in instant messaging (a social tool so engrained in our world that the various authors don't mention it in their dismissive lists of social apps they *do* use, although I bet they all use it). But instant messaging is a great example of social productivity. If you accept interruptions from your buddies, asking for advice or help, while you are busily working on the quarterly budget projections or this week's cold calls, then your personal productivity will go down. So, if you want to maximize your personal productivity, you should simply ignore all interruptions. Which works fine, on a short term basis, until you ask one of those buddies for insight or advice next week, and they ignore you in return. Time is a shared space, and social apps are increasingly the mechanism we use to share it. The whole notion that we could turn away, at this juncture, from the tools we use to mediate our sharing is ludicrous. This is no fad, this is a quantum shift. You might as well wish away rock-and-roll, teenage sex, and cell phones in public places. Get over it.

There is a constant social tension between personal and network productivity. And if your primary measure of success is personal productivity, you will naturally decrease your network involvement. But its simply the wrong metric for today, and tomorrow.

Personally, I am a network hound: I will always interrupt my work on a report to help some pilgrim I met at a conference. I will always add a gazillion tags to a post so it can be found by others, and I will comment on posts, and create trackbacks, even when it only benefits others directly, and the network as a whole, and benefits me only in a very indirect fashion.

I am not holding myself up as a saint, not at all. It's not altruism. It's just that I am trading in the new currency, and I have devalued the old, personal productivity currency to almost zero. It's social productivity I am banking on.

In the social space, being personally productive still works, but leads to different results than network or social productivity. You can be less productive, but gain more centrality, which is one apsect of the new currency. By becoming central to others' productivity you become more valued in the network.

What do you get from tagging all the stuff you think is interesting, and publishing that at del.icio.us? I don't know, but it's certain that you won't get a big return in the near term: any return you get will take a while, perhaps years later, and may require an serious investment over that long term. People may come to rely on your tagged info, so you could get a job offer, or inspire someone to start a new company. Centrality.

By comparison, looking at the time spent and simply saying "If I spent this time doing X, I could make Y dollars," means that a near term and personal focus will always lead us away from social participation.

But, on a completely different level, I think social tools are worthwhile because they change the nature of people's interaction: they change the way we interact, and ultimately, shape culture. However, if you don't want to shift into a different social matrix, and if anything more than the cc: line on an email is way too social for you, well, no surprise if you find it all a bit cloying.

I have some support. Matt Ingram argues that we will become habituated to the small costs of participation in social tools:

[from Social Software Is Not A Fad]

I think that over time, social software features such as tagging, sharing, sorting and voting Digg-style will become more and more a part of all kinds of services, to the point where we hardly realize they are there. Will everyone use them? Unlikely. But I believe that most technology starts with “edge cases,” as Robert Scoble put it — including email, the Web and cellphones — and gradually moves towards the center.

Kent Newsome is a bit more ambivalent:

[from Finding Social Applications That Matter]

It's not about productivity as much as it's about longevity.

The challenge for these applications is to stay relevant and fun enough to get an allocation of a user's leisure time- because they are largely within the leisure sphere and outside of the productivity sphere. On that, Nick and I agree.

Mathew Ingram says that to measure the cultural effect of these social applications, you have to look at them as a group, and not just individually. He also believes that some of the parts of these applications, such as tagging and sharing, will eventually find their way into mainstream applications.

Nick says about social applications, in a quote that many would apply to blogging, "it's a fun diversion for a while - and then it turns into drudgery."

It's drudgery if you have a task to complete and the application doesn't assist you in completing that task. But social interaction is not always goal driven. The stuff that provides fun and connectivity has a good chance to become a permanent part of online life.

The other stuff may very well be the new pet rock.

Lastly, I think that very serious bloggers are in general bad candidates for other social tools. For those of us who have labored long in the blog mines, shifting to a social matrix which is less about personal declaiming and the power of persuasiveness can be a hard, if not impossible transition. It's like asking the great actors of the silent movie era about talkies, or mainstream journalists about blogging. This is not an impartial group.

Finally -- like so many other things! -- our orientation to social tools is a political act. Determining what you believe is good, or right, or what is the purpose of our lives in no small measure will determine whether you think Last.fm, Plazes, or 43places are cool. Participation in open social tools is egalitarian, at least to some extent. Our contributions become somewhat collective rather than personal, and that levels things out. If you are a progressive, and hope for an equalization of the inequities in the world, you might find joy in that participation. If you are conservative, you may view that dilution of personal investment as a sort of tax, or a waste of time. The eventual return of benefits through the generalized network may seem like wishing on a star: the fantasies of dewy-eyed idealist fringe lunatics.

tags: nick+carr, social+tools, social+software, last.fm, plazes, 43places, rob+hyndman, ryan+carson, phil+edwards, james+robertson, mathew+ingram

Comments

[Ethan]

"I will always add a gazillion tags to a post so it can be found by others,"

OK, this is hair-splitting on my part, but are the gazillion tags helping? I looked back at some archives posts and one was tagged "breakfast sandwiches" because you made a passing mention to, uh, breakfast sandwiches. Not sure who this is helping, or how, as short of being a semantic tag, it accomplishes little else. Following this convention, if I sneeze while writing an article, should I tag it "hayfever+symptoms"? If so, will anyone learn anything from it? Will the person who follows the tag find value in my fleeting mention? Or is this "just" about reeling in the inbound traffic by any means necessary?

Yes, this is trollish, but seriously. Tagging just to tag kinda hands people like Nick Carr their "productivity" argument, no?

(BTW, your Zoom Cloud thingy assigns a fair amount of weight - assuming that the darker blue is for emphasis - to the tag "sandwiches". Here is what comes up when you click it:

http://zoomclouds.egrupos.net/tag/Message/sandwiches

Yep, one post. Why I'm not ga-ga for tags, illustrated.)

[David Mantripp]

I don't think its trollish at all, Ethan. I think it is an extremely valuable point. A "breakfast sandwiches" tag here would be pure noise. And once you've introduced noise into a system, you'll never get it out. There is another word for this: spam.

[Rob Hyndman]

"The implicit premise behind this lynch mob's logic is that social software is supposed to make users more efficient: for example, personal productivity in sales or online research. And I guess, by more efficient, the authors are focused on how time-pressed they are (several mentioned that they are too busy to use such apps, the presumption being that if these apps made them more time-efficient, they would be attractive)"

Lynch mob? Hardly. And no, that's not at all the point I made, actually. The point I made is that these tools are often very inefficient ways of doing what they attempt to do. So inefficient that they are often 'useful' only to the tinkerer - people who find the experimentation enjoyable enough that it's an activity in itself, and who don't mind the loss of time that could have been (in my opinion, better) spent on other activities. (And in any event, arguing for a possible future benefit as compensation for a certain present loss is hardly efficient - sure, the theory is that it will accrue, aggregate, compound and eventually compensate, but at present anyone's guess as to whether the returns are there is sweet and entirely wild-assed, IMO).

[Dimitar Vesselinov]

I believe in facts. Myspace has 106,251,544 users.

[Phil]

Once I'd got over my initial reaction against being labelled as an anti-social right-winger and lynch-mob member, I realised that I actually agree with a lot of this. Or rather, I realised that you don't actually *dis*agree with what I wrote. I didn't saying anything disparaging about the quality and value of social software. What I said was that, in terms of scale and adoption, the hype has far outstripped the reality and is likely to continue to do so - and I gave reasons for why I think this. And, er, that's it.