A few days ago I gave a talk at the IA Summit on ‘The Real Life Social Network’.
Bridging the gap between our online and offline social network
View more presentations from Paul Adams.
Here’s the core diagram I spoke around.
April 12, 2010
15
I have just gone through the 216 slides. It resonates a lot with my intuitions. It gives me practical data for talking to other audiences. There is a workshop in a few days about Privacy API in London, UK on July 12-13, 2010.I’m pretty sure you would be more than welcome if you were sending an email to the organizers. A lot of your slides relate to the topics of the workshop.
I will introduce myself “From Privacy To Opacity – Digital Me Management”. Privacy is very loaded and has a very different meaning depending on the circumstances. Privacy when imagined by people has this very binary representation (private/not private), when most of our communications exposures are a long series of diverse type of aggregated data. It’s why I prefer to use *opacity*, a notion which is foggy, infinitely layered like our social relationships.
See http://www.w3.org/2010/api-privacy-ws/papers/privacy-ws-3
If you could make it to London, that would be wonderful.
Interesting rfead. Thanks for sharing.
Gorgeous presentation!
This was an amazing slideshow. Thank you so much for sharing. Eye-opening!
I just finished the 216-slide second version of the slides on SlideShare.
Very informative and illuminating, presented in a very clear style.
There were some areas where I have questions or disagreements, however, and it is a measure of how positively I view this presentation that I’m willing to spend some time delving into them.
1. I prefer “ephemeral” to “temporary” in describing ties with people that have a duration of only minutes, hours or even days.
2. I agree that social networks are far more granular than are typically supported in online social networks, and yet I don’t believe most users would be willing to spend the time required to configure and maintain finer-grained boundaries.
3. While strong ties are very important, for all the reasons you mention, and posting status updates that might be seen by others outside our innermost circles or intended audiences can lead to negative unintended consequences, such actions can also promote positive unintended consequences (aka serendipity). This is why I tend to prefer Twitter to Facebook.
4. With the exception of my wife, I don’t believe that my friends – even my strong ties – typically tend to heavily influence many of my decisions or make my decisions for me. Which leads me to suggest that
a. Spouses or primary partners are special cases that ought to be singled out in analyses of social influence … or at least spouses or primary partners that are viewed as strong ties
b. I would not be surprised if most people believe they are not heavily in (a sort of Lake Wobegon effect)
c. It would be interesting to see how of levels of influence – for influencers and influencees (?) – varies across the population, as well as the range of decisions that are influenced by others.
5. I think music is a special case regarding social influence. Elvis Costello is said to have said “writing about music is like dancing about architecture”, making less social sources of influence less useful in this domain.
Anyhow, thanks for sharing the presentation – I’m sure I’ll be referring back to it in the future.
Oops – 4b above should have said
“I would not be surprised if most people believe they are not heavily influenced by others (a sort of Lake Wobegon effect)”
Nice slide deck – I hit on this problem and called it “conflation of social sub-networks”.
My presentation is here: http://jochenleidner.posterous.com/the-interaction-between-news-and-social-media
I just went through all the slides and I wanted to say how extremely well done it was. I’m one of those people who is always torn between censoring myself and creating a dozen different email/facebook/what have you accounts to control groups. And most of what that does is create a hassle on my part to update and check all of them, and on my close friends who I would share everything with to “friend” each one. If you can get some good developers to listen, more power to you.
To sum up: EXCELLENT job! Thanks!
Great Analysis – I was wishing that someone from “big brands” get a proper picture of what social media should be and what relationships/friendships really mean.
It is very important that Social Media platforms understand the concept of friend groups instead of friend lists.
Really enjoyed your deck. Sent it to my colleagues working in this area.
You hit on a lot of reasons why I left Facebook. Until they (or whatever replaces FB) allow complete control over what gets shared with the platform and what gets shared with sub-groups and how, it’s a waste of time. I had stripped out group and all sorts of personal information before I left because I didn’t want all parts of my network to see it and had instances where I could see the privacy controls didn’t mitigate the flow of information.
The biggest barrier is the news feed. I agree transparency is a huge problem and introducing nuance to who sees I bought sunscreen is important.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts.
Great presentation, thank you. I think current social networks are lacking not only a mechanism for establishing new ties, but a mechanism for breaking existing ones too. That’s the reason of appearing guides like that: http://www.wikihow.com/Unfriend-Someone-on-Facebook-Without-Actually-Unfriending-Them
The good part about the real life friends is that you can give them more trust as compared with your online friends.
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I agree with Joe McCarthy that “temporary ties” may not quite be the right term; “ephemeral” does a better job, highlighting the shortness of the relationship. However, given the specific nature underlying these particular ties, i.e. transactions, I think “transactional ties” would be the most appropriate term.
Consider that the time involved in transactions can be highly variable, sometimes lasting only minutes (as in a shopgirl), or months (in the case of a realtor). Temporary and ephemeral capture the fleetingness of the tie, but not with any accuracy or determination. Transaction, on the other hand, addresses the root of the tie, highlighting the one factor that determines the very nature of it.
Also consider that when the transaction ends, the tie may sever and it may not (flirting with the shopgirl, inviting your realtor to the housewarming)—that tie may get an upgrade.
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