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Russia Has World’s Most Engaged Social Networking Audience?

According to a recent study by comScore, Russia has the most connected population for web-based social networking, so long as you exclude internet cafes and mobile access. (I wonder where the most connected place is with those considerations folded back in?)

[via Russia has World’s Most Engaged Social Networking Audience - comScore, Inc]

Two-Thirds of Global Internet Users Access Social Networking Sites

Of the 1.1 billion people age 15 and older worldwide who accessed the Internet from a home or work location in May 2009, 734.2 million visited at least one social networking site during the month, representing a penetration of 65 percent of the worldwide Internet audience. The Russian social networking audience had the highest engagement among the 40 individual countries reported by comScore, with an average of 6.6 hours and 1,307 pages consumed per visitor. Brazil ranked close behind at 6.3 hours, followed by Canada (5.6 hours), Puerto Rico (5.3 hours) and Spain (5.3 hours).

I want to see the comparison with TV viewing.

I guess it is no surprise that most of the top ten social networking sites in Russia are Russian, with Facebook at the seventh spot. No Twitter to be seen.

More Etiquette Lessons

[At Meetings, It’s Mind Your BlackBerry or Mind Your Manners - NYTimes.com by Alex Williams]

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Yet another piece wagging it's finger at all the people remaining connected during business meetings: the war on flow.

Strangely this one doesn't mention Twitter as a contaminant, just email and Blackberries.

In Defense Of Distraction by Sam Anderson

Sam Anderson talks to the attention police, those that say we have lost our productivity and god-given focus, and fallen into a cesspool of narcissistic web wandering, and comes out with a masterful counter argument in support of unfocus and mental nomadism.

As I have said for years, writing about flow, they will say that the cognitive and societal changes arising from web participation are illegitimate, addictive, illicit.

[The Benefits of Distraction and Overstimulation -- New York Magazine by Sam Anderson]

This is what the web-threatened punditry often fails to recognize: Focus is a paradox—it has distraction built into it. The two are symbiotic; they’re the systole and diastole of consciousness. Attention comes from the Latin “to stretch out” or “reach toward,” distraction from “to pull apart.” We need both. In their extreme forms, focus and attention may even circle back around and bleed into one other. Meyer says there’s a subset of Buddhists who believe that the most advanced monks become essentially “world-class multitaskers”—that all those years of meditation might actually speed up their mental processes enough to handle the kind of information overload the rest of us find crippling.

The truly wise mind will harness, rather than abandon, the power of distraction. Unwavering focus—the inability to be distracted—can actually be just as problematic as ADHD. Trouble with “attentional shift” is a feature common to a handful of mental illnesses, including schizophrenia and OCD. It’s been hypothesized that ADHD might even be an advantage in certain change-rich environments. Researchers have discovered, for instance, that a brain receptor associated with ADHD is unusually common among certain nomads in Kenya, and that members who have the receptor are the best nourished in the group. It’s possible that we’re all evolving toward a new techno-cognitive nomadism, a rapidly shifting environment in which restlessness will be an advantage again. The deep focusers might even be hampered by having too much attention: Attention Surfeit Hypoactivity Disorder.

[...]

Which brings me, finally, to the next generation of attenders, the so-called “net-gen” or “digital natives,” kids who’ve grown up with the Internet and other time-slicing technologies. There’s been lots of hand-wringing about all the skills they might lack, mainly the ability to concentrate on a complex task from beginning to end, but surely they can already do things their elders can’t—like conduct 34 conversations simultaneously across six different media, or pay attention to switching between attentional targets in a way that’s been considered impossible. More than any other organ, the brain is designed to change based on experience, a feature called neuroplasticity. London taxi drivers, for instance, have enlarged hippocampi (the brain region for memory and spatial processing)—a neural reward for paying attention to the tangle of the city’s streets. As we become more skilled at the 21st-century task Meyer calls “flitting,” the wiring of the brain will inevitably change to deal more efficiently with more information. The neuroscientist Gary Small speculates that the human brain might be changing faster today than it has since the prehistoric discovery of tools. Research suggests we’re already picking up new skills: better peripheral vision, the ability to sift information rapidly. We recently elected the first-ever BlackBerry president, able to flit between sixteen national crises while focusing at a world-class level. Kids growing up now might have an associative genius we don’t—a sense of the way ten projects all dovetail into something totally new. They might be able to engage in seeming contradictions: mindful web-surfing, mindful Twittering. Maybe, in flights of irresponsible responsibility, they’ll even manage to attain the paradoxical, Zenlike state of focused distraction.

Journos As Noobs, Playacting As Pundits

Newbies posing as pundits, and spreading do's and don't's about how we should conduct ourselves, should stop. They have arrived at a superficial appreciation of what is going on, but they don't understand the deeper truths that motivate our actions online.

The social web is a fairly open place: the confusing term 'democratic' is often used to denote this. Newbies can show up, knowing not very much about the social interplay that goes on in various corners of the Web, and in general, aside from a bit of sniping here and there, webheads are fairly gracious in helping the newcomers learn the lay of the land. How many times have I had to explain how direct messages work in Twitter, for example, or in previous years, how buddy lists work?

But when journalists affiliated with large papers take their Sunday supplement approach to the social web, it can become a bit annoying.

One of the topics that makes my teeth itch is online etiquette.

On one hand, I am aware that etiquette exists for sound social purposes: to avoid causing offense. Fine. When all parties are schooled in the etiquette of business card exchange, or which fork to use, then no one is offended. (Aside: Unless you head to Japan, where business cards have to be examined, and a question has to be made that indicates you have really read it ("is this your primary phone number?"), or you are dining in Ethiopia, where no implements are offered at the table, and you must not use your left hand to eat (don't ask).)

On the other hand, I get upset when print journalists set themselves up as arbiters of online morality, and begin making lists of 'don'ts' where social norms have yet to establish themselves.

A recent example is some strident bloviating by Bridget Carey and Niala Boodhoo of the Miami Herald, telling us we shouldn't pipe out Twitter streams into Facebook, or our streams from social network X into social network Y:

[Mixing networks can cause annoyance - Business - MiamiHerald.com]

Last week, we took part in an online chat about social media etiquette. The discussion started off with a question: Is it poor etiquette to automatically feed all of your tweets into your Facebook status? (For those who don't know, Tweets are the short messages sent out from your Twitter account.)

We took a firm stand on this: Don't do it, for a couple of reasons. Facebook status updates and Twitter feeds were designed to be used in different ways. We think it's not only disrespectful, but confusing to the Facebook audience to put your Twitter feed in your status.

For starters, Facebook's status is designed to be written in the third person. (Example: ''Bridget is watching The Office.'') Twitter users write full sentences in the first person. (``BridgetCarey: I'm watching The Office''). Put your Twitter feed in your Facebook status, and it looks strange, and oddly repetitive (``Bridget I'm watching The Office'').

That's awkward; but it gets worse.

In Twitter, messages are sent off in short bursts and are typically part of a conversation. Twitter users also often use shorthand and codes that just don't translate in Facebook. So if you're seeing lots of @, #, and seemingly one-sided status updates on Facebook, odds are, you're seeing someone feeding from Twitter.

Before joining Twitter, we were confused and somewhat annoyed when people did this. And now that we're on Twitter, even though we understand, we still think it's wrong.

Disrespectful? What?

Ok, it is true that conventions that arise in one context -- 'RT' to represent the reposting of a message in Twitter, a 'retweet' -- may not carry over into another context in a perfect way, and these as a result may not be perfectly understood, but language is in general imperfectly understood.

It is no a sign of disrespect to friends and fans who congregate (at least some of the time) in social network A that I opt to cross post my natterings from social network B offered up to my friends and fans there. First of all, there may be some overlap in those groups.

But most important of all, the primary driver of social tool use is the desire to become and remain connected to others. Etiquette will have to flex around that driver, not the other way around.

Newbies posing as pundits, and spreading do's and don't's about how we should conduct ourselves, should stop. They have arrived at a superficial appreciation of what is going on, but they don't understand the deeper truths that motivate our actions online.

I will give Carey and Boodhoo credit for turning their pronouncement into a call for input on the issue, but because their framing of the question leads directly to a yes or no answer, instead of an examination of what people might be trying to do, it does not really lead to anything very helpful. The question isn't about disrespect or whether Facebook prompts with "Stowe is" as the prefix to a post. It's about connection. (And, the 'is' in 'Stowe is' is editable now, guys.)

So, the general rule of thumb is that people should not concern themselves that they are polluting one social network by redirecting their stream from another (or many others) into it. Our social contacts in all networks get to decide who to follow and why. The nature of streams is to converge, and we all have to adapt to the natural laws of flow, not the other way around.

Ambient Antipathy

tombiro the more i poke fun at a particular political hashtag, the more people of that political persuasion follow me on Twitter.

jayrosen_nyu @tombiro That's called "ambient antipathy."