Relationships are awful (online, anyway)
People get excited about relationships. Online friend systems have in many cases become a realm that I'm sure interests the kind of people who want to create drugs for the next hip mental disorder. Anxiety? Oh no, my friend, you have online paranoid friendship issues. Here, take four of these, six of these, and for God's sake, don't check Facebook for at least two days! The silliest part about all this though is that relationships online don't matter.
The Problem
...one of my primary concerns has always been that we not accede to the heedless restructuring of everyday human relations on inappropriate and clumsy models derived from technical systems - and yet, that’s a precise definition of social networking as currently instantiated. -Adam Greenfield
Annotating places is a new practice for which there is clearly a need, but for which there is no successful service at the moment because the technology for capturing one's location is not quite yet cheap enough, reliable enough, and easy enough to use. In other words, to get a 'Flickr for maps' we first need a 'digital camera for location.' -Jyri Engeström
Human relationships are insanely complicated. They are not only impossible to model, but they change by the second and so any system attempting to track them would need constant input. So, we abstract them down to the point where I can point at somebody I know and go "Friend," or point at my mother and say... well... "Family," or I can delve into a myriad of details and specify that my friend is a colleague at work and we went to the same school and so on and so on. Each new relationship that we specify tells the system something else about us and, in turn, we're rewarded with a higher friend count. We go along with what the system gives us, clicking on boxes and filling in forms, until we get bored and move on to another social networking site, where we basically end up doing the same thing.
I am so insanely bored by this.
Humans can handle relationships. We're really good at it. Our brains can keep track of all the minutia, all of these little bits of data ("Joe gave me a small piece of cake at the office party - that bastard," "Sally always opens the door for me, she's so nice") that combine to make a full relationship from one person to the other. Our actual feelings also tend to differ from our outward appearances, so even a careful observer could easily get our relationships wrong. Put on top of this that relationships are not mutual, they're unique and one-way, and you start to wonder why people try to model them around SQL tables at all.
But, let's step back for a minute. Let's talk about objects.
My definition of a geek is, "Somebody who socializes via objects." When you think about it, we're all geeks. Because we're all enthusiastic about something outside ourselves. For me, it's marketing and cartooning. for others, it could be cellphones or Scotch Whisky or Apple computers or NASCAR or the Boston Red Sox or Bhuddism. All these act as Social Objects within a social network of people who care passionately about the stuff. -Hugh MacLeod
Objects, in this sense, are anything. My computer. Your computer. Your chair. My hat. This blog. This sentence. Your latest tweet. Whatever is going through your head right now. The dinner you had last night. Anything at all. However, some objects become social objects. Social objects are the reason that specific people connect with specific other people. Fascinating conversations occur around social objects - think of a social object as a rock dropped into a pond. The ripples that occur is the effect that that social object had on the social space (the pond). Social objects are not just the instigators but are also the binding agent of many, many relationships.
Do you see the problem yet?
When we focus too much on the relationships between individuals, we lose track of what provides the most interesting fodder for all parties involved. The role of social networks these days is not to keep track of who friended who, but rather to make communication among these completely ad-hoc social-object-based groups as easy and efficient as possible. It's all about communication.
The Solution
The key to effective online socialization (which, mind you, often translates very nicely into offline socialization - just ask anybody in the Portland twitter scene) is open communication. We currently have walled garden applications all over the place that keep hold of your data, hoping that you'll only interact on these objects using their service. You can't stop communication.
I think DiSo is probably the best bet for an effective future where I don't have to spend most of my time online answering or sending friend requests and setting up completely arbitrary relationships. DiSo represents a network where social objects and the communications around them are easily exchanged, and that's definitely something I can get behind.
I want to communicate, not check boxes.
Reading more
First off, Chris Messina's post titled Relationships are Complicated was what started me thinking about this. Jyri Engeström's presentation about growing social networks, which you can watch online, was also a huge influence, as was his blog post on a case for object-centered sociality. Hugh MacLeod also helped tie a lot of bits together, especially his thoughts on social objects.