Want a glimpse at the future? With history as a guide, I would argue that our relationships online have and will continue to move towards how we organize them in real life. Simplistically, imagine that sometime in the past the only people living on earth were 50 villagers making up one small community. If Friedman is right that the world is flat (and he is right) and if the idea is that the internet and technology is meant to shrink the world in the sense that connecting to any one person in the world becomes easier and easier, let’s consider what the end game might look like. We started as a community of 50, so the end achievement of technology must be that we communicate and interact in a way that mimics the behavior of a community of 50. Everyone is close, everyone is reachable. This is our end game or our reference point for considering what technologies will prevail: simply, we ask ourselves what must be true in order for us to be closer to that end point? The logic is that this community is supposed to be representative of what technology and the internet seeks to accomplish: take the labyrinth of complex, distant relationships and simplify and localize the connectivity to a size as manageable as our 50 person community.
Everyone has a name in this community, so our electronic equivalent at first was email addresses. In the daily interactions of the community, they tend to value the opinions of some people over others with different levels of priority for each person. Hence, filters were born to organize what is a natural human process. Communication has to instant, which is what instant messaging provides. But you are limited to only knowing the people found on your buddy list. But in our community, everyone has access to everyone else because it is compact, which is what social networks aim to do. In a small community, try as you may to keep some information private, it simply does not work in the long run. The stories are simply bound to come out. So where does that leave a community like LinkedIn that requires you to get “approval” to speak to different people in the chain? To some extent, even in a small community, there is a chain of command: say the president of the group, her or his “cabinet,” and down the chain. That part then is not unnatural. But in a small community, there are always ways around the chain of command. After all, the President can be found working in the community just like everybody else. As information the web makes the world smaller and smaller, companies like LinkedIn will struggle because they are too rigid in upholding the chain of command.
Even a service like MySpace that allows everyone to view everyone elses’ profiles suffers from lack of openness. My colleague Jon has made this point that inevitably it will move to an open system – whether it likes it or not. Somehow, someway. As my colleague Jon has suggested, privacy could simply be something that is a construction of the past 100 years, and not something that has historical been available. Not until the advent of credit cards did the credit card statements have to be protected. Not until the advent of telephone records, cell phones, laptops or PDAs did the information they contain be considered private. The more information we make, the more implied need for privacy exists. Does privacy exist in a 50 person community? The more interconnected we become, the more we know about each other, and the more inevitable it seems that in the grand scheme of tens of thousands of years of our evolution, privacy is comparatively ephemeral. That does not mean that we should have zero expectation of privacy; that simply means that we should be thoughtful in considering what information is benign and therefore safe to share online and what information is truly worth protecting. This may be a thought change that requires an entire generational shift.
So where does that leave us in terms of opening up of information on walled garden networks? Yahoo has made a half-hearted attempt at it: letting content flow in, but not permitting content to flow out. I view there being room exclusivity players like thefacebook. In a community of 50 people, there are still group meetings where only certain people are invited according to certain qualifications, whether it be seniority or other marker. In this case, thefacebook’s marker is based on whether or not you are a student. While in the 50 person community, information about each student in the group will inevitably come out, there is still room for the formality of a meeting. Since thefacebook has an iron grip on the college market with approximately 80%-90% penetration at every school in enters, it would be a supreme challenge for another service to usurp their authority as a campus directory of students. Even in a 50 person community, the bonds of self-selected groups can be strong and institutionalized. Universities are by definition that very thing and certainly are not going anywhere. But the question is do students on thefacebook also maintain profiles on other social networks as well, and on a basic level, is that not a bit redundant? Separate buckets for school, professional and dating can exist, but I believe individuals will demand that their information be available to be shared. This will be a bottom-up revolution where the user wants their LiveJournal blogs posted on their facebook profiles and they want their facebook wall to show up on their MySpace profile. In this way, it is possible for the social networks to give their users what they demand but not lose the value they have in their network.
Consider Dave Pollard’s conception of the overlapping networks of relationships that people have. His argument suggests that if buckets of social networks can exist, there will always be overlap, which reinforces the need to have a certain degree of openness of information amongst the networks.
In short, for all of the vast geography that the internet and technology has opened up, it is a race to finding a way back to the behavior of a 50 person community. This is a thought that is very much in the early development stages and I plan to come back to it in the future. Your comments are welcome as I try to make sense of it myself.
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