Social Cache.
A Nemo blog. Dealing with uncommon cents.

Navigating the murky waters of social networking sites and blogs becomes tricky when an avatar morphs into a less than accurate representation of your real life self. You get to decide what you’d like to add, modify and delete.

With your online representation, you’re in control which photos you’d like to upload, who you’d like to friend and which bands and movies to claim as your favorites. In a way, you get to cultivate a persona that may (or may not) mesh with who you really are.

VOYEURISM

In Sharing is Creepy, Nicholas Carr says that “Your online self … is entirely self-created, and because it determines your identity and social standing in an internet community, each decision you make about how you portray yourself…is fraught, subtly or not, with a kind of existential danger.”

Carr claims that there’s an inherent arrogance to sharing so many details of your life with total strangers. In some ways, he says that it has a sadomasochistic quality because the exchange can become similar to that of a celebrity and a fan. And, when you think about it, there are a group of “A-listers” for almost every blogging niche imaginable.

I understand his assertion and we’ve all witnessed blogs where the person posting receives hundreds of positive and praise-filled comments with barely an opposing opinion in sight. At the same time, there are some bloggers that are posting solid content with a genuine interest in creating a balanced, two-way conversation.

GUILT

Another factor that plays prominently in the cultivation of an online persona is guilt. In The Burden of Twitter, Steven Levy says:

Guilty. I feel guilty that I have a blog and haven’t contributed to it for seven months. Guilty that all my pals on Facebook post cool pictures, while the last shots I uploaded were of Fourth of July fireworks—from 2007. Guilty that I haven’t Dugg anything since, well, ever.

It seems odd that one would feel guilt, not out of something they did or didn’t do in real life, but because they didn’t contribute enough to their social networking activities. But, if you blog, tweet or visit multiple social networking sites regularly, there can be a sense of not being connected if you can’t log in to deliver regular doses of content.

Though, Levy’s guilt of not contributing enough can easily flip when he finally does update.

The more I upload the details of my existence, even in the form of random observations and casual location updates, the more I worry about giving away too much. It’s one thing to share intimacies person- to-person. But with a community? Creepy.

He has a valid point. Do we spill these (sometimes overly personal) details to other random strangers that we know in real life? Do you wax poetic about your new shoes to the mailman? Do you tell the person occupying the seat next to you on the bus about your hot date last night? Probably not. So, what compels you to dish out these voyeuristic details online?

WHY SHARE?

It’s human nature to want to share what interests us. At the same time, we enjoy tiny glimpses into the lives of others who may have talents, personalities (or a hot pair of shoes) that we admire.

The bottom line with social networking is that you’re responsible for what you decide to share online. You have the freedom to share as little or as much about yourself as you’d like. As sociologist Duncan Watts notes, “Now everyone is used to the idea that we are connected [through the internet], and that’s not so interesting. If I had to guess why sites like Facebook are so popular, I would say it doesn’t have anything to do with networking at all. It’s voyeurism and exhibitionism.”

Do you feel that your online profiles accurately represents you? Or, are they part of a cultivated persona? Is this a conscious decision that you’ve made?

Finally, an advertiser being honest about social media advertising. Ted McConnell general manager-interactive marketing and innovation at Procter & Gamble Co spoke recently at a forum on Digital Media where he came across as rather negative about social network platforms and advertising. He singled out the Facebook platform, saying “I really don’t want to buy any more banner ads on Facebook.”

Other key phrases of his that stand out –
Social networks may never find the ad dollars they’re hunting for because they don’t really have a right to them.
What in heaven’s name made you think you could monetize the real estate in which somebody is breaking up with their girlfriend?
I don’t think everything every consumer says to someone else and writes down is somehow monetizable by the media industry.
Fragmentation thwarts artificial scarcity.
Performance-based advertising will gain share over CPM

Ted McConnell. [Pic Ad Age]

McConnell’s premise is that social network platforms won’t be able to collect ad dollars because they don’t really have a right to them, which I believe is entirely accurate. And his negativity about the platforms appears to hinge on the wrong-headed idea or a misunderstanding of the meaning of the term “social media” – he asked – “Who said this is media? Media is something you can buy and sell. Media contains inventory. Media contains blank spaces. Consumers weren’t trying to generate media. They were trying to talk to somebody. So it just seems a bit arrogant. … We hijack their own conversations, their own thoughts and feelings, and try to monetize it.”

McConnell’s ideas strike a chord with me as I have found myself on the contrarian side of the social media argument recently. I have argued on panels and in essays that technology did not transform the way we socialize –

When we wrongly consider technology as a ‘new’ medium that simply and efficiently transformed culture, business and society, we forget our own human ancestry. We leave out Nature. In our hearts we want to belong, to share; we fear dying alone and as we age we become thanatophobic – we fear dying. Individuality is an illusion. [By that I don't mean an individual's style, taste, fashion etc, things that set us apart aesthetically from others, I mean we are forever bound to being social animals.] Read the rest of these thoughts here.

We need to rethink the term “Social Media.”

Marshall Kirkpatrick at ReadWriteWeb posts that Microsoft has hired danah boyd, who Marshall says is – “probably the most high profile academic in the world focused on the emerging web and its social consequences.”

boyd (who only uses lowercase when typing her name) is a leading expert on how the next generation is using social networks. She caused a ruffle when she concluded in a report that “The goodie two shoes, jocks, athletes, or other ‘good’ kids are now going to Facebook. …MySpace is still home for Latino/Hispanic teens, immigrant teens, ‘burnouts,’ ‘alternative kids,’ ‘art fags,’ punks, emos, goths, gangstas, queer kids, and other kids who didn’t play into the dominant high school popularity paradigm.”

She spells out her own thoughts on joining Microsoft Research New England here.

One thought re Microsoft and its compulsive obsession with the desktop…aren’t the next generation of social networkers supposed to be surfing exclusively via mobile devices?

We seem to have dropped into a musical theme over the weekend and with that in mind I wanted to point out a post that David Byrne wrote on his blog. As you can see above he is pondering the idea of less press and pr and more online discovery. I believe Byrne is doing the right thing as there will be plenty of buzz around a new Byrne and Eno album on the blogosphere. And Byrne and Eno are both influencers and trusted sources. Those two elements alone will help any PR 2.0 campaign gain traction. I posted a slide show about PR 2.0 here, and also wrote an essay about Social Media, Blogs and Advertising which can be found here. Meanwhile I’m looking forward to spreading the word on the new Byrne and Eno album, Everything That Happens Will Happen Today. You can hear a cut from the new album and download it too. Click Here.

A shadowy social network group.

Facebook is getting an assist from Visa Inc.’s marketing machine in its struggle to lure more advertisers. To date, Facebook has not had as much success as was expected in garnering revenues from advertising. The plan with Visa appears to be aimed at small businesses who are using Facebook to look for new customers.

Michael Liedtke reports:
Visa’s service is designed to provide small-business owners with tools and tips on attracting new customers, trimming costs and other ways to make more money. Businesses that belong to the Visa network on Facebook also will be able to communicate with each other to share ideas or even negotiate deals. Internet search leader Google Inc. is providing some of the features on Visa’s business network, including maps, calendars, word processing and a new template for creating expense sheets and business cards. And The Wall Street Journal and Entrepreneur magazine will contribute articles addressing questions posed by businesses that belong to Visa’s Facebook network.

Facebook’s struggle to produce revenue from its site sounds similar to the problems that MySpace has been having. Facebook has 80 million users who play games, share photos, rate music and track their friends’ activities – the idea that they can be bothered to click through on an advertisement that is not relevant to them, and one that just randomly appears on their home page or profile, is a marketing stretch.

As Michael Liedtke writes:
…while the array of applications have helped make Facebook even more popular, few programs are producing revenue for the site, and Facebook still hasn’t proven that its social playground is an effective advertising forum. Finding the right advertising approach also has been a challenge for other social hangouts like News Corp.’s MySpace. Even Google, which runs the Internet’s most lucrative ad system, has had trouble marketing on social networks.

Advertisers and marketers are labouring under the assumption that the information that Facebook has gathered about its users makes it easy to target different groups of them. This is a dubious notion at best. They are a moving target.

As Liedtke points out: …..some advertisers fret that Facebook’s audience will resent commercials amid all the site’s frivolity. Others are leery about their brands showing up on Web pages featuring racy or unsavory content.

Stay tuned.

The Tower of Babel

Cities live and breathe. As I wrote in a post last week on Social Media, cities are no more artificial [technological] than the hives of bees. As we go about our daily lives [mostly unconsciously,] we psycho-drift from block to block through neighborhoods that we know well, in amongst communities that have been drawn together by like-minded people. Think East Village in Manhattan, Venice Beach in Los Angeles, Camden Town in London, Pigalle in Paris – and here in Portland, the Pearl District.

Where we tend to live and work is often amongst communities of like-minded people, unless, as in the USA, one lives in a far-flung exurb and commutes for hours to work. Over centuries we have moved as a species from the rural countryside into large urban centres. As we have done so the ‘idea’ of the city sprang up. Throughout different periods in history, planners and architects have had differing ideas about how to cultivate urban living arrangements. There has been some success and much failure.

As James Kunstler writes in his book, The City in Mind, – “[the] nation’s massive suburban build-out was an orgy of misspent energy and material resources that squandered our national wealth and left us with an infrastructure of daily life that, left as is, has poor prospects in the new century.” Kunstler points out that as global warming, oil depletion and other epochal disorders are upon us, we must reconsider what is a ‘city.’

He argues that one of the chief side effects of the move to suburbanism is “the cultural destruction…especially the loss of knowledge, tradition, skill, custom and vernacular wisdom in the art of city-making that was thrown in the dumpster of history….”

A city is not just a series of streets and avenues with buildings on either side, a city is people, culture, society and the networks that form to bind those societies together into communities. The suburbs were literally a dream, an idea that General Motors had of a drive-in utopia in its plan for a World of Tomorrow. Kunstler goes on to point out the folly of the “Edge City,” a term coined by the writer Joel Garreau. Kunstler says “I essay to show how Atlanta took the urban model of car-crazy Los Angeles to its most ludicrous, and in my view, terminal stage. With Atlanta, you can forego agonizing over the future, because the present doesn’t even work there.” As he points out “our human ecologies – namely our towns and cities – remain devalued, depopulated and decivilized.”

In America we prefer landscape over urbanism. What then now as our dependence upon oil, refined as gasoline for cars that transport one person at a time from these suburbs to the cities, proves the folly of these far-flung suburbs? Will we see a move toward urban vitality? A migration back to the city?

Government spending at any level, state or local, does little to help. We need to “nurture the unplanned civic engagements that make mixed-use city life so appealing” – writes Douglas Rae, the Richard Ely Professor of Management and Professor of Political Science at Yale University, in his book, City; Urbanism and Its End. “Small scale retailing, neighborhood clubs, informal enforcement of sidewalk civility and new urbanist design may be the keys to the future.”

I agree with Rae on the idea of “nurturing unplanned civic engagements” as he puts it but that’s as far as I would go. The rest of his thought sounds like the issue of we humans being in control of our destinies again, trying to have the answer that is beyond nature, beyond what we actually do when we congregate in cities. Our desire for urban centres always seem to be about ‘order’ or ‘cleanliness’ and ‘organization.’ So on one hand we have the thinkers – the planners and the architects, and on the other – the citizens who actually inhabit the space that we call city. What we might call the ‘Few and the Many.’

Alongside a piece by the New York Times film critic, A.O.Scott, called Metropolis Now, where he writes about the idea of how yesterday’s film sets became today’s cities, there is a sidebar that takes some lines from Fritz Lang’s 1927 film “Metropolis” – “The minds that had conceived the Tower of Babel could not build it. So they hired hands for wages. But the hands that built the Tower of Babel knew nothing of the dream of the brain that had conceived it. One man’s hymns of praise became other men’s curses.” There’s that word again, dream.

We humans dream. We dream of controlling nature, we dream of saving the earth, we dream of organizing our cities. Those dreaming deny the fact that cities live and breathe. Not the concrete architecture, not the buildings – the people that inhabit them. When someone talks of Rome having a ’soul, a feeling’ they are misinterpreting the difference between the city and its cultural makeup; people can be said to have souls and feelings, we ‘know’ this – buildings don’t have soul and feelings.

As Fernando Pessoa writes – “Only if you don’t know what flowers, stones and rivers are can you talk about their feelings. To talk about the soul of flowers, stones and rivers, is to talk about yourself, about your delusions. Thank God stones are just stones, and rivers just rivers, and flowers just flowers.” We dream and we delude ourselves.

Richard Florida, author of The Rise of the Creative Class dreams of organizing urban centres [which he correctly identifies as 'place'] around the idea of a mythical “creative class” who are bound by the idea of the “three T’s,” Technology, Talent and Tolerance. This dream involves cities having a strong technology base, a “creative” class as he calls it, and a strong gay community. And of course the idea he spins is that to grow a city’s economic base it should invest in nurturing the “three T’s.” Once again – The Few and the Many. Planners and architects can no more decide what a city’s culture will be than we know that a stone has feeling.

The fabric of a city is its population. Like a bee hive [architecture] or an ant colony [social network], natural rules of engagement spring up through the daily interaction of those who inhabit a city. They commune. They gather in tribes in their ‘places.’ They share information, ideas, things they like. They become less ’selfish.’ They are city.

As John Gray writes in Straw Dogs – “Anyone who wants to escape human solipsism should not seek out empty places. Instead of fleeing to the desert, where they will be thrown back into their own thoughts, they will do better to seek the company of other animals. A zoo is a better window from which to look out of the human world than a monastery.”

Most large cities have a zoo.

Listen to and download Psycho Drift. Shriekback – Psycho Drift

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