Ahead of the Crowd

I ran into Vinny the barber on Friday at Starbucks and sat down with him over a latte to ponder the state of the Net. He had stumbled upon the Twitter web site, and wondered what was happening. As he put it, “I thought connecting with others to make better social and political decisions using the wisdom of the crowds was such a good idea. Now we have behavior that seems to have no social purpose whatsoever, merely generating stupendous amounts of inane chatter about personal events no one cares about in the first place. What’s going on?”

Taking a long pull at my latte, I gave his question some thought, and came up with several possible explanations, none of which consoled him. First, it seemed to me that pushing social networking to its extremes is by no means unprecedented; small-town behavior, where everyone knows everyone else’s business, has been doing that for centuries. Nor did I feel that the fact that some site produces such trivia is an indication that social networking is doomed; on the continuum of group behavior there are always extremes, which tend to wash out over time.

These remarks did nothing for Vinny’s despair over the deterioration of social networking, so I tried again, recalling Michael H. Goldhaber’s article on The Attention Economy and the Net. Goldhaber argues that the product of the Net that carries value is not information (of which there is a glut) but attention, which can be viewed as existing in inverse proportion to the amount of information. But that was no help either, for I wondered how any of these non-stop personal situation reports like Enjoying the weekend with family… Just got a great $400 haircut could generate much attention for the typical twitterer.

I finally gave it my best shot, arguing that not all such services would be worthless. For instance, imagine a service that reports your child’s whereabouts at any time. In spite of the privacy concerns, as a parent who has lived through his child’s struggle for independence, I have been torn between the desire to let her make her own way and the need to protect her if necessary.

Vinny seemed mollified, if not encouraged, by these observations, but time will tell whether social networking will produce useful results or just chatter.

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