39 Ways to Look at Social Networks
Slashdot posted an article over the weekend on 35 Perspectives on Online Social Networking. Things like:
2. The youth perspective
Social networking sites are places that help young people be young and let them âpracticeâ youth. Therefore, the sites are mainly a reflection of youth culture.
3. The friendship perspective
Social networking sites are places where young people can maintain and nurse their existing (offline) friendships and create new (online) friendships.
4. The identity perspective
Social networking sites are spaces for identity construction. Here, young people are continuously constructing, re-constructing and displaying their self-image and identity. Also, the network sites make them co-constructors of each otherâs identities.
It reminded me of what I thought was the best part of danah boyd’s Incantations for Muggles keynote at ETech.
I want to address four key life stages that i think are relevant to folks interested in social media:
1) Identity formation and role-seeking (aka youth)
2) Integration and coupling (aka 20somethings)
3) Societal contribution (aka “adults”)
4) Reflection and storytelling (aka retirees)
I’ve been using that list to address adults who say things like “I don’t have time to hang out on a social network.” Not every network is about hanging out. Nobody ever hangs out on LinkedIn. That’s a network for adults in phase #3. That’s also been the phase where I’ve seen the most successful uses of CrowdVine networks. People who create networks for conferences or for niche professional communities are trying to be more social because being more social helps them be more effective contributors (and a little bit because being social feels good).
The 35 categories might be good when you’re categorizing the behavior of an individual social network user but danah’s categories are a lot more useful when you’re trying to categorize the value of a particular network.
Tags: socialnetwork, socialsoftware
