Social Media as Safety Net
July 14, 2009 :: Joe LoongMy laptop’s hard drive died over the weekend, so I was computerless for about a day. (It’s all better, now — I got it fixed and was able to restore off a 2-day old backup. Remember, kids: Make regular backups — you’ll thank yourself someday.)
Besides much wailing and gnashing of teeth during my enforced sabbatical (lasting basically all of 9 waking hours), I went through the process of rehashing some of my thoughts about our dependence on social connectivity; this happens just about every time I’m forcibly disconnected from the hive mind:
* Social media, mobile media and online connectivity have woven together to form a personal psychological safety net for me.
The metaphor I think of harks back to when I was living in New York City — it was comforting to know that you could get just about anything, 24 hours a day. Even if I never actually had to go out for Ecuadorian food at 3am, I knew it was there.
I get a whole lot of tangible benefits when I’m actively using social media and online tools — staying in touch with the people I know and the resources I use — and even when I’m not using them, they serve as a mental backstop. It’s like having 911 for my id. For those folks growing up with the tools, I imagine it’s more of a foundation.
* Whenever there’s this socially-enabled redundancy of thought and attention (because lots of folks are looking at or thinking about something), you can use this collectivized effort to either engage your higher brain functions (aggregate, organize and analyze), or alternately, kick back and slack, because hey, someone else has got it covered (see bystander effect).
I’ve mentioned this safety net effect in the context of note-taking at heavily-tweeted events and tourist photography. I would also throw in the ability to use your social network to help filter the rest of the world, as defined by the news and events that interest you.
Basically, you use your social network as your massively-distributed, massively-redundant early warning network – it’s the personal equivalent of companies doing social media monitoring of their brands and issues, only here you’re using your network to monitor the world, as filtered by the worldview you share with your friends and followers.
By watching your network’s socially-shared status and links, you make sure that you won’t miss anything important (because you’ll have the potential to see it in multiple places, from multiple people). I think that’s one of the reasons why we don’t hear “collaborative filtering” as a standalone term anymore; it’s baked into everything we do.
Anyway, I wasn’t planning on making this a clip show of a bunch of my earlier posts, but like I said, I think (fret?) about these issues a lot, especially the parts about over reliance and dependence.
Do you have any insights to share from any of your own social media / connectivity outages? How about my characterization of using your social network to monitor the world (which was sort of new-ish)? Are you tired of hearing about me worry about the hive mind? Please leave a comment.
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