(Image from Flickr: “FB-TG-080314” by Glenn Zucman)
Agree or Disagree:
If you want to know how someone uses a social network, ask their criteria for adding someone as a friend on it.
My friend ilicco tweeted the above and I think it’s profound. “Away,” used to refer to geography and now it refers to connectedness. When was the last time you went away?
Clive Thompson, NYTimes, suggests that Twitter is a return to the small town:
This is the ultimate effect of the new awareness: It brings back the dynamics of small-town life, where everybody knows your business.
I don’t agree.
Many of my friends who grew up in these gossipy small towns didn’t have a choice of where they could live. And as soon as they had an opportunity to, they moved away. Twitter is different in the sense that the “small town” in which you live is a small town you create.
In small towns the “juicy” information that tends to surface is usually one that their residents had no intention of sharing. There’s a choice in Twitter about what information is shared, and as a result, more control over how you shape people’s perceptions of you.
I recently met a few people who were hyper-vigilant about their personal brand, trying to control what people were tweeting about them and filtering pictures that showed them in social situations drinking, smoking, etc. Perhaps the small town analogy is a better fit here in the sense that you know your social activities always have the potential to be broadcast to people you would rather not know about them.
I prefer cities.
I interviewed MsJen who shared her perspective on Dana Boyd’s theory of superpublics. I am especially interested in two comments in this interview:
1) people who do not have history on social networks may actually be at a significant disadvantage
2) we grow and change within our social networks. What we post on Myspace at 16 is much different from what we share at 24.
For more on Dana Boyd’s theory see:
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