The Human Network of Social Media

Hamburg.
We're now starting the second and last day of the next09 conference here in Hamburg - and we begin with a speech by Brian Solis from Futureworks. His theme is what he calls 'the human network': the social and cultural networking which is enabled and supported by social media technologies (but is so much more than just the technology itself). For Brian, the share economy (which gives this conference its title) is the social economy - an economy in which conversations represent social currency, in which we earn social capital and influence rather than simply monetary value.

This is strongly focussed on the individual, on the user, who in the process creates themselves - but at the same time, there is too much 'me' in social media, Brian says - this is actually about sharing that personal identity (and there are various levels of sharing personal information, from merely connecting with others to becoming online socialites and celebrities). We are what we share - and this can work both for and against us: we are what people seeing all of that information believe we are.

Twitter, with its fundamental question 'what are you doing', is a good example of this - what we are doing most of the time is simply spreading meaningless self-broadcast messages. A better question might be 'what inspires you', 'what did you learn today' - but exchanging information on that level also requires us to listen, not just to broadcast ourselves. Constantly broadcasting, advertising ourselves turns us into just another face in the crowd. The social Web is a privilege, not an entitlement, Brian suggests - so we need to use it wisely. In this context, the emergence of social media celebrities (such as the founder of Digg) is a problematic step towards reformulating the nature of online relationships as more hierarchical.

Online and offline relationships are complex and distributed; they are measured by the mutually beneficial rewards we experience over time. We invest in each other and harvest the fruits of our collaboration and interconnection, which is why we seek out those who share our affinities and passions. And our social graph changes based on the themes and topics we're currently concerned with. Our friends in social media communities are not some amorphous, homogeneous mass.

Another important aspect of all of this is also the passing on, the retransmission if messages from one node in the social network to the next - retweeting has become an important phenomenon in Twitter now, for example (and people are advised to keep their tweets below the maximum length of 140 characters so that there's space for others to pass them on without the need to edit. This is another sign that attention is the major currency of the share economy.

And that attention economy operates across multiple social media spaces, of course - messages cross over from one to the other, and the attention paid to them depends on a number of factors (for example, the timing and style of the message); there is an 'attention aperture' which messages must manage to pass through to make an impact.

So, social media is ultimately about sociology, not technology. The social Web is bigger than any one of the major networks; there is a 'conversation prism' made up of many many social media spaces. This also requires us to become information curators, managing the information related to our own interests, and thereby becoming a significant participant in the social network. So, Brian challenges us to become experts, to practice restraint, to strive for truth, high standards, and ethics.

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