Will Davies over at iSociety gets
exasperated at us in comments in the Granovetter thread:
This is socio-economics. Its an analysis of the social character of capitalism. Can we please, please not pretend that business networking is some enlightened, libertarian project, or that competitiveness is synonomous with “social progress”. It isn’t; its about $$$$.
He
continues the thought over at iSociety, including this:
I've been reading various bits of Stephen Graham recently, and he stresses the material and economic conditions of the information society. Money, effort, hardware and politics are all involved in technology networks, and the way money is made is through reducing inter-operability, not through increasing it [...]
This is a good characterization of the fight around social networking tools. Customers matter to any business, and getting them to contribute value to each other, as with Amazon book reviews, say, is a great strategy. The social networking sites, however, take that logic to an extreme, providing a very thin possible layer of brokering on top of raw material that is almost all the individual members.
So one idea is "Provide the bit necessary to overcome collective inertia around social contacts, own that, and grow rich." Another idea is "It's our relationships Friendster is raising money on, and the connection layer is so conceptually simple and thin, we could build this for ourselves."
I don't think social software is a outside the realm of economics as Davies does, nor that it as resistant to market forces as he, but I do think "fragmentation as a market tool" is one of the core issues in the development of social network tools.
1. Will Davies on January 10, 2004 12:37 PM writes...
I probably exaggerated the point slightly. To suggest that you can't make money out of the web (or social software) is clearly false. Yet I do find it interesting (even if obvious) how the world wide web bucks trends of network disintegration and fragmentation. However, perhaps large firms simply then have to find *new* ways of reducing integration, both technological and social. To quote Stephen Graham again, this time in The Cybercities Reader:
“Urban digital divides are not just about the usual focus of debate – uneven access to the internet. Perhaps just as important are the powerful and often invisible processes of prioritisation and marginalisation as software and code are used to judge people’s worth, eligibility and levels of access to a while range of essential urban spaces and services."
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