Image by L Lemos, used under the Creative Commons license.
I just saw this in today’s International Herald Tribune and wanted to share it. Anand Giridharadas writes
Twitter and Facebook are, OMG, so last millennium.
Or so it seems as I look out through my window in the forested Indian village where I am living, one of those places that the future has yet to invade.
A row of modest houses faces me. All day long, as I write, their inhabitants talk. And I have discovered through their talk that the age-old sociability of the village — ambient sociability, one might call it — harbors a strange likeness to the social-networking culture we think to be so new.
They don’t do one-on-one conversation here. They broadcast. If you have something to say, yell. Bring water! Go to school! Why did you tell her that thing? The people do not limit their talk to their own homes. Their scolds and praise and commands are for the village.
They stand in a stream of soothingly mindless hubbub. They hear opinions even when they do not ask, receive advice they do not need, get a little love from everyone and a lot from no one. Village sociability is not about sharing feelings. It doesn’t dwell on you. It asks for little. It just buzzes.
And what do the Internet’s social networks offer if not this village buzz? You build networks wider than your circle of close friends, and immediately you, too, stand in Hubbub Creek.
This is not about deep bonding… Social networks offer only ambient love. They maintain not your 10 key relationships, but your hundred semi-key mini-relationships. They are not about understanding or soul-baring, but about being simply, ambiently present…
I found this comparison of residents of a village interacting with each other to friends on social networks engaging in the same types of interaction fascinating. It goes right to the heart of scholar and futurist Marshal McLuhan’s idea that “the medium is the message.” Many people who engage in social media may find this to be true, given that they can simultaneously be a part of a social network to connect to people they know AND be aware that they are part of a networking and communications movement. But in Giridharadas’ example, the messages people communicate to each other are not dependent on a technological medium. They are based simply on face to face interaction — which certainly represents a medium of communication, but not a technological one. Divorcing the medium from technology invites the question of what exactly a “social network” is — must it be a technological medium such as Facebook or MySpace, or can a conversation among vilagers represent a social network?
Image by freeparking, used under the Creative Commons license.
Giridharadas’ example also gets at the notion of a core group of friends as opposed to a larger group of “weak ties,” or “loose connections” — people that a person knows but is not close to. (Weak ties are a common type of connection that one makes through an online social network). Following from research by Putnam (2000) and Granovetter (1982), Nicole Ellison of Michigan State University writes about weak ties in her article The Benefits of Facebook “Friends:” Social Capital and College Students’ Use of Online Social Network Sites. My colleage Fred Stutzman, a PhD student at the University of North Carolina, and Danah Boyd at Microsoft Research New England have also written about these different types of connections. In the case of the village, it sounds like a group of people who maintain weaker ties — multiple neighbors as a community offering unsolicited advice rather than offering in-depth council to only a select group of friends. But communities of this nature can be very tight knit too, strengthening the weak ties to the point that they may not be too far off from being viewed as close ties. In the case of this village, the strength of the ties between community members is a open question — whether they are merely weak ties, or strong ties that emerged through a community networked structure.
I just wanted to take a moment to share Giridharadas’ article, as well as these two thoughts based upon it.
Contributed by Aaron Bowen
Works Cited:
Granovetter, M. S. (1982). The strength of weak ties: A network theory revisited. In P. V. Mardsen & N. Lin (Eds.), Social Structure and Network Analysis (pp. 105-130). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.
Putnam, R. D. (2000). Bowling Alone. New York: Simon & Schuster.
