Entry tags:

ideas, networking

Social Networking Casserole
I've got 34 tabs open right now in Firefox. I'm spending the morning trying to "clean out the fridge" and make something out of all the odd bits in there. Everytime I try to do this, a theme emerges, something that's been marinating in my subconscious (what *is* it with the food metaphors?! Happy post-Thanksgiving!) and is just ready to serve up.

So, let's see what we can make out of all this social networking-themed stuff....

Expanding The Network (Toolkit): I've been working my social-networking presence this past week. I've added some more friends on Facebook (here's my profile), on Virtual Worlds Connect (that profile), on SLScout (another profile), and started Twittering (my profile there, and catch my and my friends' tweets on RSS at sophs_twitter   ). I it's brought me closer to another network node of people I really like: IYan Writer, iAlja Writer, Grace McDunnogh, Tara5 Oh, which is great fun!  *pokes John Zhaoying and Centrasian Wise for being silent on about 100 channels each*  :D

PITA: Maintaining all this stuff, even to the extent of a basic Salon announcement, is a huge PITA. Here's the Salon PR routine:

• Post to the LL events list.
• Post to the Your2ndPlace.com calendar
• Email Rik's Picks
• Post to my LiveJournal, Virtual Worlds Connect blog, SLScout blog
• Create an event in Facebook (the Salons are all in Aachen, Germany, thanks to Facebook's refusal to recognize digital events- more on that in a minute!
• Post inworld to the Digital People and Extropia Citizens groups
• That's all Monday morning. I do a follow-up post to the SL groups on Friday, and then Saturday at 11 or 12, I send announcements to those groups and most of the social networking sites.
• After the event, follow up with a post-event post to my blog and the Extropia blog.
• The annoying thing is, it's almost all the same content, yet I have to enter it over and over - grr!

And, my photo social networking is a disaster.  I've got photos on LJ Scrapbook, Flickr, Picasa, and Photobucket.  I take a ton of photos, but don't have the time to participate in photo social networking, which is kinda sad.  I'm living vicariously through Vidal on that front....


Bloggers, Slashers and Rezbians, or the Fannish Divide: Here's something that isn't ready to be served up yet:  the implications of choice of platform.  There was an article this week in the Wired Campus Blog (not affiliated with Wired Magazine) suggesting a class divide between users of Facebook and MySpace. It's long interested me that SL bloggers vastly prefer Blogger or Blogspot to LiveJournal.  I'd seen the former two as designed for would-be pundits, and the latter as, well, social networking.  LiveJournal has strong communities, and the Friends page (which I use as my RSS reader) makes it easy to get conversations going among groups of friends.  Yet there are terribly few active LJ bloggers. Interestingly, there seem to be a number of active Furry communities on LJ, but really nothing else beyond the main LJ/SL comm, second_lifers , which I'm not really fond of for various reasons.

There's also a relationship between choice of platform and sexual identity/interest, I think.  LJ is *very* fannish, and it's surprised me that there seems to be remarkably little overlap between fandom and SL (there's an interesting paper to be written mapping the convergences and divergences between SCA, fandom, Furs, and SL, with sexual preference overlaid on that....).  And, fandom sexuality is really focused on slash: predominantly-straight women reading and writing gay male erotica. SL sexuality, as we know, is all about what blogger Kit Meredith calls "Rezbians": predominantly straight women in lesbian relationships.  Gay male expression is virtually invisible, and *much* more so than in any comparable atomic-world group of creatives. How and why do blog choice, fannishness, synthetic worlds interest and secondary sexual preference correlate?  I need to know!!

Transmedia storytelling could bring these two lobes of creative engagement together, but it hasn't yet. CSI was an odd choice for an SL transmedia event: CSI fans seem to be very predominantly old-media passive TV watchers.  Heroes has done fantastic things with transmedia, and is a much more fannish show, despite its high Nielsens, yet hasn't taken advantage of SL.  Other fannish shows - Supernatural, Lost, the sci-fi shows, haven't done that much transmedia, and haven't come near SL.  Is that odd, or is there some real separation between fannishness and synthetic world residence? And what's with that sexual overlay anyway? 

Bimodal distributions: This came out in the "Clubbing In SL"salon a month or so ago.  There was a consensus that there are two good SL nightclub sizes: 20x20 boite, or full-sim, with anything in between really difficult to sustain. It turns out there's actually a sociological basis for that observation. You've probably heard the anecdote that the ideal group size for primate brains is about 150 people. I first came across that in Matt Ridley's The Origins of Virtue, an *amazingly* thought-provoking book. It's actually called Dunbar's Number, and there's more nuance to it than just the 150 figure. Grace McDunnogh, next week's Salon Spotlight Guest,explains it really well:

Chris Allen hypothesizes that that different group sizes impact a group's behavior and their choice of processes and tools. Based on empirical data from MMOG and online communities, he suggests that for non-survival groups, the equivalent Dunbar number falls somewhere between 60-90.

Allen argues that group dynamics have more than just the Dunbar number as a break point; three group size nodes emerge and Allen provides some insight into the group construct as it relates to size. Groups with too few people suffer from insufficient critical mass, experience group think, are unable to sustain conversation and the infamous "Echo Chamber" effect is evident. Read some of Eric Rice's "Echo Chamber" analysis regarding the failings of artificially small groups, aka elites. Overly large groups have far much too noise and cannot sustain an equal and unstructured trust. Cliques and inappropriate politics emerge and social contracts start to break down. From a Second Life perspective, an example of this might be the recent Second Citizen forum meltdown. Note that it's the group size that creates the breakdown of the cohesive bonds, not the "newbs". When group sizes grow beyond these normalized sizes, even the most senior members of the group can suffer the ill effects.Allen also hypothesizes that there is a correlation between group size and the level of group satisfaction in an interesting double humped graph where satisfaction peaks at levels of 5-8 and 50-70, with a devastating chasm in the middle between 9-25 people.

"Devastating chasm," huh?  This has huge implications for Extropia's growth: we're at 10 citizens right now.  I've had a sense all along that there were two and only two viable models: a small friends-and-family sim kept closed and close, or something Caledon-sized, around 15 sims.  I've been hoping to take us *quickly* to about 6 sims or 50 people.  This shows that my gut instinct was tuned into something very real.  Now just to *get there*....


Deposits and Withdrawals: I'd been frustrated with my blogging over the past month: it was *all* before-and-after event announcements, and it was even boring *me* to look at.  HorsePigCow, a *terrific* blog on online communities, analyzes the phenomenon of "social freeloading" by breaking actions down into social-capital deposits and withdrawals.  It's a terrific etiquette guideline for social networking!

The balance is a hard one to strike. I've been working at setting up the Salon lineup for the next six weeks or so, and to get there, I've got to expand my network.  I've pretty much  tapped out my first degree of separation, the people I already know, so I'm having to start working the second, FOAF, degree. But I've been leery about wheedling introductions - I've wanted to make sure I'm contributing more value to the network than I'm asking of it.  Which is hard when I'm barely keeping afloat on my own projects!


Privileging The Atomic World: I've had trouble really *getting* Facebook - what do you *do* with it?  I think it's a really atomic-world tool, but I'm not sure if that's an essential aspect of the medium, or just of built-in biases specific to Facebook.  That whole "you have to enter a city" thing for events is just stupidity, atomic-world bigotry.  But *is* there a way for Digital People to use it effectively?  If anybody's a Facebook maven, please talk to me! 

Here's another wacky example.  dandellion Kimban, among others, has had some fun blogging about the Barbie world ("Barbie Girls" and "Fear and Loathing in the Barbie World").  Here's a hilarious piece from Wired's Threat Level: 

But as an ingenious (and presumably profitable) bulwark against internet scum, Mattel only lets girls chat with "Best Friends," defined as people they know in real life..... It's sort of like an RSA token, but with cute fashion accessories and snap-on hair styles. THREAT LEVEL foresees a wave of Barbie Girl parties in the future, where tweens all meet and authenticate to each other -- like a PGP key signing party, but with cupcakes.

Read the blog comments - they're pretty interesting stuff. OK, security against predators is important in Barbie World, I get that.  But *what,* I ask you, is the point of a social networking world where you can only talk to people you have direct physical access to in the atomic world? That takes us back before telephones, pretty much to tin cans and string, doesn't it? 

I mean, isn't the whole *point* of Web 2.0/Web 3D/synthetic worlds to enable communications that *can't* be done better with old media? Facebook, sure, it's a good way of organizing a lifetime of disparate atomic-world contacts. But aren't Facebook and the Barbie Girl authenticator missing something?

Charity Begins at Home: I'm hosting Alanagh Recreant of SL Africa in the Salon in a few hours, and I'm really excited. Why, though, I asked myself this morning, when I'm usually really down on atomic-world activism in synthetic worlds? There's more to it than Alanagh being a wonderful, warm, fun person (with the most adorable tiny warthog av!).  So I picked at that till I got some answers. 

It goes back to Social Freeloading (see, synergy!).  IMO, most SL activists take but don't give.  They drain the resources of *my* world to support *their* world. Charities, politicians, NGOs, come into SL and consume resources. They take Resident time, money, attention, and remove them from the world to benefit their own causes and interests. They're parasites, and smugly virtuous ones at that. It's the same phenomenon as the wave of bad corporate presences we saw this past year: trying to take, without giving.

SL Africa, from what I've seen, doesn't do that. Their efforts run both ways. They're doing charity fundraisers, yes, but enabling content creators, working with SL creatives and entrepreneurs, and giving back to the world by expanding its reach to include people and perspectives we *need* amongst us.  They're good citizens of *this* world, not just of the atomic one.


Cherry On Top:  Apropos of nothing here, but I want to get another tab closed:  LesbianGamers.com is a *fun* site!  It's got great snarky game commentary, creative features and a fantastic sense of humor, all on a really attractive site.  "Lara Croft in 20 Years" and "Lesbionic Woman" both just cracked my shit up!  :D


Okay, that's it for today.  I've got to go do the round of Salon PR now.  But hey, I'm down to 29 tabs!  :P