Is Social Networking Really Bad for You?

This is the last post by Charlie Leadbeater for 2006. Thanks! He has done a great job. Below he ponders what this social revolution online does for children, the media and the economy in general…..More to come in 2007.
On Start the Week, the Radio 4 programme I had a bit of an argument with the very articulate Baroness Susan Greenfield, the neuro scientists. Her argument is that digital culture is probably bad for young people because they spend too much time staring, rather blankly at screens. Were that true then We-Think culture may well be disastrous. The reality is that most young people seem to see it as a way to participate and collaborate, socialise and express themselves. My six year old son, working with his 11 year old brother, created a Bebo site in about 30-minutes. It says “My name is Ned and I am a raging ball of madness.” As soon as he had created it, he wanted to be able to connect to other people -his cousins – to see their sites and get content from them. As his brother Harry explained to me, the reason they like Bebo is that its circular, not like a linear value chain, everything gets linked back together.

Nevertheless the case against social media need to be taken seriously not least because the very success of social networking and open source style methods will attract criticism and opposition. It may also produce its own disasters, mistakes and failures. And as social networking seems to be the new religion there will also be atheists and dissenters: I wonder whether we should create a political party for shy and retiring people.

What are the arguments most often used against lets call it following Yochai Benkler, social media?

You cannot find it : the cacophony argument. There is so much stuff out there that it’s impossible to find what you are looking for, or how can you be sure you haven’t missed something? Isn’t that why we need trusted professional guides to sift through material and show us where the good stuff is. But We-think collaboratives are creating new tools, rating and ranking systems – Technorati, deli-cious and the like which address this challenge. Sure people need to be able to search and find stuff with more intelligence than the average Google search but the solutions to that are likely to come from within peer-to-peer networks as much as outside them. Peer networks change the way people make and take recommendations.

Quality, trust and authenticity. How could TV stations possibly trust user generated content if we don’t know where it’s coming from? Who will attest for its quality? Once again the best solutions will come from within. Wikipedia’s editorial process might not be perfect but it is at least pretty much transparent, you can follow the debates over what to do and pitch in. Ratings and rankings, created by the participants, will be one of the most powerful ways to test for quality. That does not mean there will not be mistakes or that these collaborations will not be open to corruption. But the problems are not insurmountable.

The culture of distraction. Young people are so immersed in technology they lose themselves in constant, short term, click of the button distraction. As Maurice Saatchi, father figure of the ad agency of the same name puts it: “A young person in the course of a 30 second television commercial, can also send a text, download a photograph, log onto a website, check the music on their phone and still what the commercial, albeit at six times normal speed because its on a PVR.” Baroness Greenfield see this kind of culture as highly destructive of the way people think. Yet it could be seen just as an ability to multi task and think laterally. This is not the first panic that modern media is rotting people’s brains.

Isolation or over-socialisation. In the earlier days of the Internet some critics such as Cass Sunstein worried that it would lead people into social isolation, cut off from conversation with others, only getting exposure to a world they have chosen to live within. I do sometimes worry that blogs and discussion groups encourage people of like mind to let off steam making it hard for people who disagree to voice their views, other than to people they know will not shout at them. But you also hear the contrary worry that there is too much socialisation: we-think might endanger our capacity for independent thought because we are too influenced by the views of others, we cannot think for ourselves. That too overstates the power of collaborative filtering and preferences. The culture of online communities is far more about open debate, free speech and a diversity of views. As John Suroweicki points out in the Wisdom of Crowds, a when there is a large enough community engaged in a debate them that encourages a diversity of views and so long as there is diversity. Then it actually becomes easier for people to think independently. That means we should be careful about the diversity of online communities that claim to be open.

Shallow identities. The identities people adopt in social networking sites are often confected and shallow. People can pretend to be something they are not. The relationships they form with other people, as a result, are shallow: they do not amount to much. There is no doubt something in this. But communities organised online increasingly also have a real world presence, whether through political campaigning – the Jubilee 2000 debt campaign – or at a more intimate and local level through meet ups. Moreover why should we expect young people to have fully formed identities. Social networking creates a perfect opportunity for them to try out roles that they might feel scared to explore – boys talking to girls – in real life. Social networking might be a good way for people to pay with a try out identities, to form them.

Good professional expertise will be lost. One of the fears of journalists in the mainstream media is that markets and audiences will get so fragmented that it will eventually become impossible for news organisations to fund proper investigative journalism. The spread of we media will not lead to a new era of empowerment but instead it will neuter critical independent journalism, robbing it of its financial supports in the form of advertising. There may be a risk of that in the long run. But there is still clearly going to be a need for and demand for high quality journalism. The wider availability of information about health does not mean we do not need good doctors. We will still need good professionals. But they will need to play different roles.

We-think is certainly bad for traditional, industrial era media production, which has relied on high barriers to entry and high capital costs to protect itself against competition. But that does not mean its bad for us.