SOCIAL UNEASE

Dick Pountain/PC Pro/Idealog 228 07/07/2013

There's just been what one participant called a "food fight" on Facebook over which is better, Facebook or Google+ in which I, against my better judgment, became involved. It was a civilised enough debate with no name-calling or bad language and our conclusion (if it deserves such a description) after 122 comments was that everyone stays on Facebook because everyone stays on Facebook. Put less tautologically, people use FB because all their friends also use it rather than Google+, which is an example of what economists call a "network effect".

A network effect is seen whenever the value of a product or service depends upon the number of others using it. The textbook example is always the telephone: when first invented there was no-one else with a phone to talk to, so its value was zero, but the more people who acquired phones the more useful it became. Network effects generate huge inertia against change. Once it had become established, any technically superior competitor to the telephone would have been out of luck all the way up to advent of SMS and email (over 100 years after Bell's patent).

The main part of our debate though was about whether Google+ is in fact technically superior to Facebook, and on that point I was agnostic because I dislike them both almost equally intensely. Facebook's user interface drives me crazy, with important menus scattered at random among its different sections, or hidden behind tiny, unlabelled greyed-out arrows. Google+ certainly looks a lot cleaner, but that's partly because there's far less comment activity there - its two-column display would get pretty messy given a 122-comment debate. I do like the fact that it doesn't have all the useless crap that FB puts in its left and right-hand columns, and which I never use.

For me the thrill is gone from both networks, and social networks just aren't delivering anything much any longer. It's not for lack of trying. I currently have open (not necessarily active) accounts on Flickr, Facebook, Google+, Twitter, OpenDemocracy, Reddit, Tumblr, SoundCloud, the Guardian's CiF and LibraryThing, and terminated accounts at GoodReads and Quora. I still like to publish my pictures on Flickr because it's the only way anyone else ever gets to see them (ditto with music on SoundCloud) but there's no discussion, just people liking them. On Facebook you might get discussions, but often at a pretty unfocussed level because any passer-by can join in with irrelevancies or outright trolling. Robert Scobie the guy whose post started that food fight, argues in https://plus.google.com/+Scobleizer/posts/RLrG3vCTjkD that being less popular is a Google plus:

"Second, Google+ has a better interest-based community. Since most of our high-school friends, family members, etc, disdain Google+ we've built new social graphs that usually have more to do with our interests than with our social connections. "

Well perhaps he has, but most of the communities I've looked at have been pretty random or just IT company PR. In the food fight Jack Schofield shrewdly observed that perhaps I'm pining for the focus of 1990s' Cix conferences and Ameol's threaded discussions (Jack and I go back a long way) and he may be right. Perhaps a mailing list is still the best way to pursue anything that *really* interests you, with invited people who're close enough for sensible discussion but not necessarily agreement. OpenDemocracy is the nearest I get to that.

I think the problem is one of boundaries. A social network like Facebook isn't a real community because you don't work or eat or sleep together, which leaves it as what anthropologists would call a ritual space where you perform merely symbolic acts to placate other people (or gods). I've noticed Facebook recently becoming dominated by three different kinds of such ritual behaviour: "preening", where you show off to other people how well you're doing; "grooming" where you wish your friends happy birthday or tell them how much you lurve them; and "preaching" to convert them to some cause or other. Sharing stuff - pictures, videos or articles - simply because you think its good and that everyone might enjoy it appears on the wane as Facebook fragments into millions of smaller personal networks with few tastes in common.

To see whether the grass is greener elsewhere I posted a few items to my hitherto unused Tumblr account. A few reblogs of my ruined Scottish castle pix, but nothing much until I posted a photo of a spectacularly gnarled tree in Kew Gardens. That attracted a swarm of admirers with names beginning with moth-, dream-, meadow- or nymph-, and checking out some of their own blogs transported me straight back to the Oz era. Flowers, nudity and psychedelic squirly stuff. Fair enough, what goes around, comes around.