{Cheese and Beans}

Over the past few days I’ve been thinking a lot about social networks – perhaps triggered by the reaction to my recent post about community, and children. I hinted that social networking was in many ways a part of the problem with modern society, and the breaking down of community.

Take Facebook for example. While on the surface Facebook enables you to keep in touch with friends far and wide – and allows discovery of friends from the distant past, it does not mirror real world communities. Facebook only serves the discovery and interaction with existing friends. It is insular. In the vast majority of cases it relies on the real world as a feeder mechanism – therefore you are far less likely to befriend strangers. You have no neighbours, no postman, no milkman, no boy or girl delivering your paper.

If Facebook is insular, you might imagine Twitter is the opposite – with your posts being dropped directly into the firehose with millions of others. The story Twitter would like you to believe is that the community will embrace you based on the value of the content you share. The truth is that given a large enough network, any meaningful communication on Twitter dies. You might liken it to situations in the real world – a small group of people in a room can each have a voice, and be heard. A larger group of people – in a football stadium perhaps – can still communicate with their immediate neighbours – only on Twitter everybody is heard by everybody, and therefore everybody stops listening.

It seems rather strange in this “connected” world – especially when I work on the corporate coal face of the IT industry – that I should be pondering the failures of the technology I use, rely on, and am helping to drive the adoption of.

There is a famous term, repeated endlessly – that modern communication methods have made the world smaller. Who would have imagined we would also have become more distant ?

I grew up in small town England in the 1970s. I can still remember moving house when I was five years old, and spending the first nights on bare floorboards. I remember the sound of footsteps on the landing, and the novelty of stairs. I also remember being turfed out into the neighbourhood – probably on the first night – to make friends with the neighbouring children.

We made friends instantly – in the way small children do. Within days we were visiting each other’s houses, running riot through each other’s gardens, and knocking on each other’s doors to ask opening gambits along the lines of “Hello Mrs Smith, can Claire come out to play?”, or “Can I go on your garden to get my ball back please?”

Now think about it. When was the last time you saw any young children playing outside, unsupervised ?

I watched an interesting video on the internet some time ago – detailing a list of dangerous activities that children should be allowed to do; among them “playing with fire”, and “using knives”. The presentation showed inuit children gutting fish, and cooking it on an open fire. It strikes me that the presentation missed something much more basic – letting kids play outside.

Do you know the names of your next door neighbours? How about anybody else in the neighbourhood? I’m willing to bet (if you are from a similar generation to myself, or older), you knew everybody in the street – adults by last name, and all children by either first name or nickname. Your parents didn’t arrange play dates for you – you figured it out yourself. The only rule governing your adventures and exploration was “Dinner Time”, and “Bed Time” in the summer. If you weren’t back when dinner hit the table, you were in all sorts of trouble.

Adults were allowed to reprimand other people’s children too – and the children didn’t answer back. You would never tell your parents if Mr Jones up the road had told you off, because the punishment would almost certainly have been multiplied.

Forgive me for stepping into crackpot theory territory, but I tend to think there is a link between not letting kids play outside, and community vanishing in front of our eyes. If you don’t learn how to make friends of your own volition, you are not going to naturally form similar bonds later in life.

Technology is supposed to have come to our aid in the form of “Social Networking” – with the likes of Facebook and Twitter providing a back channel to our daily lives through which we can maintain friendships that would otherwise founder.

Social Networking is a the solution to a problem that didn’t exist. It allows community to form between self selecting group of people who are already known to each other – which is quite different than a real world community, where the members are brought together randomly.

On another level, social networking was created to assist us, when in practice it causes the most basic forms of communication – speech, and physical interaction – to erode.

You could argue that modern communication methods – social networks, and instant messaging – are causing the beginnings of H G Wells Morlock and Eloi – which we can distill into the disparity between the “haves” and the “have nots”. Those with the iPhones, Blackberries, Laptops and other such gadgets hide behind walls – both real and imaginary – pretending to form friendships with many they will never meet. Those without such modern “essentials” will meanwhile be helping, supporting, and talking to each other. Visiting each other unannounced.

When was the last time any of your friends knocked on the door without calling first ?

As I have wrestled over the past year with the idea of stopping all this blogging nonsense, I have been turned around each time by an avalanche of comments and emails. It’s very easy to forget while thumping away at a keyboard in the dead of night that your thoughts and opinions will be broadcast across the world when you hit the submit button – in the same manner that you occasionally dig through the flotsam and jettsam for voices that speak to you – your voice may speak to others. Thousands of others.

What has brought all this to mind?

I recently lost one of the voices I read for many years – an amazing, opinionated, honest writer in the American mid-west. She was killed in a car crash in the early hours of the morning. News of the accident circled the globe in minutes – passed from country to country by those that had read her.

This evening, while trudging through the personal hell that is my Google Reader blogroll, I happened upon a post from another long time inspiration, announcing the retirement of her blog. It was a shock. Another voice gone.

What on earth is happening?

My resolve became focussed as I read a post from another corner of the world about the mania to monetize blogs. Given the impending death of the newspaper industry, and the empowerment that the internet as a publishing platform has brought to fruition, I can understand the reasons the hoards of shallow money men and marketeers have arrived, but it doesn’t make me like the situation any more.

I can’t help feeling that everybody is missing the point. We are the point. People. Our thoughts. Our voices. The community we have built, on the platforms we have built. Anything else will eventually prove to be unimportant. You only have to look at the current success of twitter to realise that all people really want to do is communicate. They don’t care how, and they will put up with a huge level of interference in that communication before they cease trying.

It is with this belief in mind that I find myself quite unexpectedly digging my heals in. Standing my ground. If nobody else is going to, then I damn well am going to carry on writing, and tell my story. It will be heard by those who choose to seek it out.

I will not go quietly into the night.

I have been playing with Tumblr again (my page lives at jonbeckett.tumblr.com). I know I shouldn’t but I can’t leave it alone. It’s addictive. Imagine Twitter with images, videos, sound, quotes, and full blog posts. Imagine Facebook without family, and no walls – no borders.

Tumblr seems to be filled with creative people – photographers, artists, writers, readers… and supports those who appreciate great content too; allowing the sharing of anything as a central feature.

Rather than comment, you are encouraged to show content on your own page, with your own comment as an additional part of the content – a good analogy might be buying a print of a painting from a gallery to show in your own house.

Tumblr has lots of toys too – an opt-in directory of members, global search, all manner of apps (including a wonderful iPhone app), and integrations with numerous blogging platforms.

The lack of comments is liberating. While we like to encourage others to comment on blog posts, what purpose do they actually serve? How many of the A-List bloggers allow comments any more? There’s something uncomfortably self-absorbed about encouraging comment on the content we produce as bloggers.

Above all, Tumblr wins because everything is open. By default all of your content is available to everybody – member or not. This brings responsibility, but there is no requirement to provide a real identity within the site either.

Oh – one last thing – Tumblr has no censorship. You own your content. Remember what I was saying about responsibility?

I was going to title this post “To blog, or to microblog”, but I’m not quite sure if “to blog” is grammatically correct or not (if it is in the dictionary, I will headbutt the table rather theatrically, and make disgusted murmurings about the erosion of the English language).

While life and work have recently conspired to restrict my participation in any online activities to speak of, it has afforded me a perspective on the communities I frequent that I would otherwise not have had.

It would appear that the Twitter bubble has burst – or rather, the unwashed masses have exposed themselves as more lazy, shallow and disinterested than most had perhaps predicted they would be. The great majority of plebs on twitter post only about themselves, never reply, never send direct messages, and never invest any effort in contributing to the community.

There is more wrong with Twitter than most users realise; the service itself encourages thoughtless output of banality. Considered opinion is impossible, and each voice becomes drowned within the flood. Conversations are hopelessly disjointed, and there are very few controls to prevent marketers from scraping relational data from the system.

More worryingly, I have noticed that the blogs I used to follow and enjoy on a daily basis are slowly drying up. Perhaps a form of natural selection is at work – perhaps my own relative disconnection from the internet in general has been shared by the group? Who knows.

I look forward to the return of those I read, and the return of “blogging” in general – the shared and considered thoughts and experiences of a self-made community spanning the globe as we go about our “normal life” – which of course is relative.

Why do we find each other’s lives so fascinating? One thing is for sure – you cannot express how good or bad your day has been in 140 characters. You need paragraphs, punctuation (shock horror!), and at least a passing knowledge of the rules of grammar in order to form coherent posts that appeal to, draw in, and endear those who stop to read.

Is it all about what we are sharing, or about the readers who happen upon it?