I remember when “call waiting” was introduced by our local phone company in the late 1970′s. It was considered a really useful technology, in that, if you were waiting for an important call, you could still take other calls in the mean time. However, as our society became ever more obsessed with newer, faster, more immediate gratification, it revealed its dark side: it made people rude.
At some point, we (our society) decided that it was much more important to talk to the new, exciting, and (as yet) unknown person who was calling us, than to continue talking with the living, breathing, and oh-so-real person that we were already conversing with.
It reflects an obsessive belief that “newer must be better” and that “I need to find out what’s happening” rather than “continuing the existing conversation.” Of course, when you state it bluntly like that, it’s rather obvious what’s happening.
Fast forward thirty years, and Steven Hodson is commenting on the real-time web:
At what point did the quality of opinion and thoughtful discourse become less important than knowing the minute something happened in the world in a 140 characters or less? Just how is all this real-time web making it any easier to find and/or share content of value when we have to spend so much time just watching stuff go by on Twitter and Friendfeed because we might miss something?
Today, it’s not just telephone calls that get relegated to the back burner when someone new appears; News itself is being overwhelmed by fast-breaking, often faulty real-time transmission of information. By forcing people to respond in 140-character chunks, Twitter and its ilk have compressed an already soundbite-oriented culture into something of an incoherent scream.
The social web may be a good place to learn of breaking news, but it has been proven to be exceptionally poor at the facts. For example, the terrorist attacks in Mumbai were broken via Twitter; however, many of the tweets sent during the initial chaos were misguided or simply wrong.
Two key words that people use when talking about the “real-time” web are discovery and tracking. With a real-time flow of information, you can discover interesting new nuggets of data; when you have a known subject, you can track the pulse of the community regarding that data.
Discovery requires filtering: the ability to isolate useful, informative stuff from the vast amount of dross that fills the web. Often, the phrase “collaborative filtering” is used, meaning that a lot of people have similar interests; those, the sorts of things that are mentioned by a lot of people must, therefore, be the most interesting. It’s an interesting idea, but hugely flawed: the problem with the logic is that it’s the people with the largest audience that have the most interesting ideas. Because of the multiplier effect, an error made by a famous person can get rapidly propagated, but a brilliant idea by a loner will be seen and heard by no one.
Tracking is simply keeping up with current trends, and here, for once, social media proves its worth. If you want to take the “real-time” pulse of twitterers on a topic, just run Twitter Search. There is only one major problem here, and that’s assuming that people on Twitter are representative of the larger population as a whole. If all you care about are Twitterers, then it’s a brilliant tool.
There are a couple of concepts that appear to be totally missing in the current discussion about social media. The first word is *trust,” that is, understanding the reliability of those who you follow. If you indiscriminately track, or follow, a large number of unknown people, then you can easily fall prey to the rumors and ill-conceived statements that flow through discussion from time to time. If, on the other hand, you limit your sources to reliable, trusted individuals, you’ll have much more success (see Robert Scoble’s “Likes” for an example).
The second major concept is sampling. A crowd is not a representative sample. Because we’re used to dealing with large groups, we tend to assume that those large groups carry more credibility, especially in the sphere of opinion or ideas. However, because of the non-random nature of the Twitter population, they do not represent an average sample of modern culture. Thus, the ideas propagated through that group are heavily biased towards the connected, computerized, and mostly progressive population. This tends to make those populations far more liberal (politically and socially) than the population at large, and far more idealistic and progressive. While to many this may seem like a good thing (and I’m not going to pass judgement on that, at least here), it has to be understood that this view is skewed and out of line with both current and historical opinions in our society.
Sometimes an essay gets out of hand, like this one, and I apologize if I’ve been long-winded. However, I would like to see more independent, calculated thought in the social media community, and less blind following and faith in the wisdom of crowds. As with call waiting, it’s not always the new and unexpected that carries the most value; sometimes it’s the person with whom we’re already connected.
