Peter Caputa, guest-blogging at socialsoftware.weblogsinc.com says “Blogging is the Ultimate Social Software.” So far so good, but he makes that statement based on this assertion — “I think it is safe to say that sharing information is at the center of social networking.”
This I disagree with. Peter is right about blogs as a social networking tool (Dina Mehta and Lilia Efimova make the same argument) but the thing that makes it work isn’t information sharing. The thing that is at the center of social networking is social networking.
This is related to yesterday’s theme of panic about Kuro5hin’s proposed sponsorship system — despite 30+ years of evidence that human contact online has irreducibly sophisticated features, there is persistent anxiety driving people to want to express contact in terms of some other, simpler and more tangible thing.
I think this is partly because we’ve all internalized Shannon, where all communication is to be expressed as information, and it’s partly because media is supposed to be explained as a conduit for content. (All together now, communication is not “content”.)
By way of example, here, in full, is utterlybemused2’s blog entry for 7 July:
whoaaa i just came back from swimming at rachels and my hands are bright red, and my finger tips hurt….
im also dead tired and my eyes hurt too
I probably don’t even have to mention that the site is Livejournal…
If you reduce this to “sharing information”, this blog entry makes almost no sense. Who cares that you just came back from swimming at Rachel’s! (Who’s Rachel anyway?) But of course, no one reading this is reading it to see if utterlybemused2 has any information to share, they’re reading it to tune in to ub2’s life — the post only makes sense in a social context, and the effect of reading it can’t be reduced to an analysis of its content.
Blogs are a fantastic social networking tool, and they are a fantastic publishing tool, but those are different and incommensurable patterns.
1. Stewart Butterfield on July 14, 2004 5:33 AM writes...
Clay, I may disagree with you from time to time but I thank the [System of Forces] that you have the pulpit to get your point across when you're right, and you are sooo right.
It's bewildering to me that the subtly profound and densely nuanced kinds of interactions that people create and encounter through blogs and other social media are so often reduced to "communication" or even "information transmittal" as if people are like simple transceivers passing bits or cells laying down chemical pathways for one another.
Like I sometimes say, wave that freak flag high!
Permalink to Comment2. Stewart Butterfield on July 14, 2004 5:50 AM writes...
And of course, I forgot my original reason for commenting which was specific to the word "content" in the title of this post. One quible I had with Esther Dyson's otherwise perceptive NYT article a while back was that when you talk about the stuff that people are posting as "user-generated content" it is really easy to miss what's going on.
When someone uploads daily photos of his son, born at 24 weeks and struggling to survive, it is not like that is an *alternative* to watching TV or reading a magazine. "Content" is what movie studios and publishing houses create, the kind of stuff that cable companies distribute, etc. And if you confuse that with the stuff that lives are made out of, then you're just not seeing things clearly ("reality TV" to one side).
Permalink to Comment3. Peter Caputa on July 14, 2004 9:35 AM writes...
Thanks for the clarification, Clay. Your point is well stated.
Permalink to Comment4. greglas on July 19, 2004 9:47 PM writes...
Clay: "But of course, no one reading this is reading it to see if utterlybemused2 has any information to share, they’re reading it to tune in to ub2’s life — the post only makes sense in a social context, and the effect of reading it can’t be reduced to an analysis of its content."
Yes, but you're positing that "content" and "information" are something different than "tuning in to ub2's life". Can you be so objective about the difference? I agree with you and Stewart that blogging is conversational and occurs in a social context, and that this is crucial to blogging, but what kind of "information" or "content" can ever exist wholly outside some social context? Broadcast TV news and books in libraries might seem like "information" and "content," but do you really want to deny them the status of conversation?
Don't get me wrong, I'm all with the content is 14m3, wave the flag bit... I would just prefer to socialize the terms content and information instead of denying their existence in blogs.
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