Colbert vs. Google

If you didn’t catch Colbert taking on Google last night, this is a must. Funny, of course, but he is making a lot of valid points:

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We will ALL be out of jobs

Sorry, this video cannot be embedded, so you have to click over to watch it (but remember to come back!).

It’s yet another story of a person (this time, a teacher) losing her job over some comments she made on Facebook.

SOON, WE WILL ALL BE OUT OF JOBS.

If things continue to go this way, soon, we will ALL be out of jobs.

People, it’s time to get used to it and stop over-reacting: With social media being so open (with or without our knowledge or consent), it is unavoidable that statements will be heard by the wrong people and taken out of context. Imagine this teacher complaining about her students to her friends, over dinner – would she be fired for that? Would she be fired for maybe, half-jokingly calling her students “germ bags” in this context? No, she would not. But because things are being taken out of the context and the original audience for whom they were intended, they are costing this woman her job.

So, we have two options:

1) Keep it so safe on social media that we all become bland, boring and dishonest, and ultimately abandon it, because an unauthentic form of communication is just not worth the waste of time.

2) As a society, start getting used to seeing comments that were not intended for us, learn to place them in their proper context, and stop jumping to conclusions and judging people so quickly and so wrongly. Chuckle and move on. (Oh, and: students, wash your hands. parents, be nice to teachers.)

This situation will keep repeating. You’ll hear about it more and more often. It’s time to learn to adjust to the new reality, or we’ll ALL be out of jobs.

Thank you, Quincy, for bringing this video to my attention.

TMI: Compulsion to share?

We’re building a culture of sharing, powered by social media. Most of it is beautiful: Sharing an experience with others helps us enjoy it more, and feel we’re enjoying it together with… (with whom, that’s another question). It’s like that piece of chocolate cake that tastes so much better when shared with a loved one.

But when does the joy of sharing become compulsion to share? Do you ever feel your experience is not complete and fulfilling unless you can share it (at least a twitpic, a facebook post, a quick check-in)? There are arguments about not being able to live fully in the moment, when attention is divided between taking it in and sharing it on social media. But that’s not what this post is about. I’m thinking now about the TMI phenomenon that sometimes results from the compulsion to share.

I see people sharing too much detail, personal detail, embarrassing, even incriminating detail, detail that could get them in trouble with their bosses, or lower their credibility online. I remember seeing tweets or status updates about boobs and bras and waxing, and things I don’t really want to know or imagine about people. Why do they share? Is the behavior driven by a compulsion to share?

I’m really interested in understanding the psychology of this compulsion.

The compulsion to share is, probably, one of the reasons why many companies ban social media in the workplace. If people are compelled to share every little detail about their lives, and often make questionable decisions about the content they share, it is probable that sensitive information can be leaked this way.

Could it be true that people make more conscious, rational decisions about what to share in face-to-face conversations than in social media? Could it be that some of the sharing we do in social media is driven by impulses we find a bit hard to resist?

What is your experience? Do you feel the impulse to share on social media? Do you feel your experience is incomplete, without the sharing? And how do you deal with the impulse? Do you keep it in check? Give in? Have you ever shared information on impulse that you later regretted?

Help me understand.

Stay safe on Facebook

Just a quick (and cute) reminder to stay safe on Facebook, and to keep in mind that information in your profile is (duh!) shared with your Facebook friends:

I don’t have too much personal information in my profile (no home address), but most users share dates of birth and email addresses, which could be used to piece together the information an identity thief needs.

So, be careful who you friend on Facebook, and/or be careful to edit your profile so you don’t share information you don’t really mean to share. Click the “Edit my profile” link under your Facebook photo to access the screen pictured below, where you can check and edit the personal and contact information you wish to share:

While you’re at it, read more about how you can change various privacy settings on Facebook (though these are changing) and make sure you know what you’re sharing with whom.

[Update Dec. 12 2009] Facebook has started rolling out their new privacy settings – or should I say “privacy,” since they’re recommending that you make all your Facebook content available to everyone on the Internet (yes, that’s everyone, including search engines). Please watch this video and take some time to make sure you make wise choices about your Facebook privacy settings:

Twitter barrier of entry and ego inflation

Twitter is wonderful, as many of us know. But Twitter is hard, also, The barrier of entry is high, and one of the most difficult things is finding people to follow (here are some tips).

So Twitter and Twitter users have introduced a couple of ways to overcome this difficulty: #FollowFriday and, most recently, Twitter lists.

The tools are meant to help people find people to follow. The problem is, every time someone recommends you should follow person X, either in #FF or by placing her on a list, person X is flattered. Her ego gets a boost. Now, depending on the psychological perspective we use to look at this (Western or Eastern), the ego boost may or may not be a good thing for person X himself. But what makes it annoying for all of us is that person X cannot keep it to himself. He has to count the number of lists he’s on, the number of times she’s been recommended, and let all her followers know – usually, this is done in the form of thanks: “Thank you everyone for putting me on 500 lists!” It is annoying, because along with the sincere thanks we see an overinflated ego that cannot be contained within oneself.

So, #FF and Twitter lists become ego-inflating tools, and many of us find them annoying. The question is, even though annoying, do they help newcomers find people to follow?

Unfortunately, Twitter got rid of what I thought was the best way of finding people to follow: Seeing all @replies enabled one to identify new people connected to the people she was already following. Now, you can only see @replies if you follow both people in a conversation. As Twitter adds capacity, I hope they’ll come back to the old model – it will help newcomers build their social network slowly and organically.

Now, back to the annoying part, should we blame the tool or the people? Or, is this not a problem, and no one needs to be blamed?

Personally, I would like to see a bit of humbleness… What’s your take?

New Pew report on social media use

PIP_Twitter_Fall_2009 –

Building Relationships part 2

In the previous post in this series, I argued that Twitter is great for building bridging social capital – loose connections with large numbers of people who are quite different than you. Bridging social capital has several benefits, innovative thinking and new work opportunities being among them.

In this post, I draw upon Dale Carnegie to give you very simple advice about how to build relationships on Twitter. This question seems to be on my students’ minds a lot.

I fully believe that at this point in our social media world, the most precious and scarce resource is attention.

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To build relationships, give people attention.

How do you give them attention? Reply to what they said. Jump into conversations, or reply to lonely tweets. Say something nice, or interesting, or supportive, or ask a question. Be careful with humor, it may or may not come across right in writing.

I was reading a women’s magazine’s yearly mandatory article about how to have fun at holiday parties. This line from a fashion model’s mother sounded like the perfect blend of Dale Carnegie in the attention economy:

“Look everybody in the eye and make them feel special. Give them warmth and attention.”

What are some of the things you do on Twitter that make people people feel special? How do you give warm and attention on Twitter? Can you share some tips with my students?

Building Relationships part 1

This is part of a series of post about building relationships online and the relationships we build online.

The initial idea was triggered by reading in one of the books for TECH 621 about marketable relationships. Marketable relationships were defined as relationships we build for the sake of the relationship, without expecting an immediate reward. However, the rewards, often in the form of employment, speaking engagements, etc., come as a result of having these connections. Nothing new here. This is how connections work.

I don’t particularly like the term “marketable relationships,” but luckily, the concept does go by another name: social capital.

Social capital was defined by Bourdieu as one of three types of capital:

1. economic (financial resources)
2. cultural (knowledge resources)
3. social (connections, acquaintances, people we know who could do us favors)

Putnam (the one who wrote Bowling Alone) further broke down the concept of social capital into 2 sub-types: bonding and bridging capital.

1. bonding capital = close relationships  among homogeneous groups (birds of a feather, your close group of friends, family, etc).
2. bridging capital = loose connections with diverse people. It is out of these types of connections that most benefits and innovations emerge.

So, here are some hypotheses:

• Many people use Facebook to maintain bonding capital
• Many people use Twitter to build and maintain bridging capital

Are these the predominant uses of Facebook vs. Twitter? To how many people do these hypotheses apply? Do they apply to you? Are the trends changing towards Facebook becoming more open to loose connections and to building bridging capital? i.e. do you “friend” people you don’t know very well?

[update 10/25: Facebook's new News Feed vs Live feed feature makes Facebook technology more conducive to maintaining bonding capital, because the algorithm selects the updates to show you in the News Feed based on the previous level of interaction -connection depth?- with that person.]

Next posts in this series:

• Apply Dale Carnegie’s ideas to building social capital on Twitter
• Apply Mead’s Symbolic Interactionism theory to building social capital on Twitter

How social media change organizing

I gave this presentation in TECH 621 today – I’m pretty proud of the way I synthesized and organized (what I thought were) the most important ideas from Clay Shirky‘s book “Here Comes Everybody.”

I’m not sure how well it went over in class – students seemed tired, and we didn’t have time to discuss as much as we might have liked to. So I’m posting here and inviting students and readers to continue the conversation in the post’s comments. If you have read the book, I believe you’ll appreciate this synthesis. If you haven’t, I’m not sure how much sense it makes…

So…

Questions? Comments? Cabbage jokes?

Brizzly: making Twitter more like Facebook

I’ve been playing around with Brizzly this morning, and here are some initial thoughts. My default Twitter app is Tweetdeck, so I’m comparing to that.

• for most part, it works as advertised in the demo, except it’s a bit slow sometimes, and when I tried to save a search, it experienced an error (but it’s a private beta, I can live with that)
• I like that I can see photos and videos on screen, and don’t have to click links to view them.
• I like the option to store groups on the side column, because I hate lateral scrolling in Tweetdeck. With Brizzly, I can see myself creating more groups.
• How about mobile? I haven’t found a corresponding iPhone app, so if only for this feature alone, I’ll stick with Tweetdeck.
• Auto-refresh is spotty, at best. I still haven’t figured out if or how it works. Sometimes I see a message to refresh the page, or a bubble next to a Group, sometimes I don’t – but I refresh the page and see there are new updates anyway.

But here’s the major change that Brizzly introduces, and for me, a concern:

• The user experience is a bit more like Facebook, but that can be very misleading. See the screenshot below:

My reply with a comment about the cat shows up (for me, in Brizzly) – right under the photo. So the context of my comment is very clear to me. However, for the recipient, if she uses another Twitter app, my reply will show as a usual @ tweet in her stream.

The problem is that for me, the context is very clear, but for her, it may be confusing. If I reply “awww…. !” she has to put 2+2 together to figure what my tweet is about. I usually try to include context in my tweets – I’d usually reply “awww… cute cat!” – so she knows that the tweet is about. I try to avoid using “this” and “that” in tweets and instead specify what I’m referring to.

I posted a photo, and people’s comments didn’t show under the photo, like in Twitpic, but just as replies in my twitter stream – so no context there for me on the receiving side.

It’s confusing to have context for some people, in some instances, but not for others. If some people use Brizzly and others don’t, I can see a lot of misscommunication happening on Twitter.

Although Brizzly might enhance MY Twitter experience, the confusion about context might reduce the overall community experience.

Watch the Brizzly demo:

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