Talk Funnel

Almost all social networks today measure success and progress by assigning a numerical ‘friend’ or ‘follower’ rating — with the clear implication that the higher the number, the more {fill-in-the-blank attribute} you are. This is merely a form of popularity-based social dysfunction that ought to have been left behind in middle school but is now enshrined in the technologies we use today. The technology rewards quantity over quality (and my tinfoil-hat self blames it on a revenue model based on maximizing advertising pageviews).

The other thing is that such relationships are asymmetric by design. I can ‘follow’ you but that doesn’t mean you automatically ‘follow’ me. This is sold as a benefit, but its analog in real-life is unrequited love or hanging around with a person who is always talking about themselves. Ordinarily we’d be better off steering clear of these types of relationships, but again, our social networking technologies enshrine this in their code.

I like the term parasocial (coined in this post by Anaiis Flox) because it distinguishes between a real relationship (where you know and care about the other person and vice-versa) and a casual one. But I think we can go even farther.

In a project I was working on a couple years ago, we came up with the notion of circle of friends as a more fine-grain way to capture nuances in relationships. I’m thinking now that even that’s not good enough to really let us capture the nature of our relationships, because we have different types of connections to each other where each can have a magnitude and direction. For example, I may have a work relationship which I might designate as level 5/10 (whatever that means) with Mary, but a long-standing movie-going relationship of level 10/10 with Tom. Furthermore, I can have more than one kind of relationship with each of those individuals (i.e. I work with Mary but sometimes we go see movies together). Each of those links can also be further classified by duration and number of interactions.

I guess what I’m saying is there’s more to having a connection with someone and ‘follower’ and ‘friend’ counts don’t even come close to capturing that element, but so often we mistake one for the other.

When I see someone with a high follower/follow ratio (i.e. someone with a LOT more followers) on networks like Twitter or Facebook what that tells me is that this person is either:

• Not interested in learning about other people,
• Is overwhelmed and doesn’t have time to use the technology, or
• They would be better off in a more traditional one-way broadcasting or entertainment model.

In either case, it’s not likely any form of reciprocated relationship is likely to emanate from ‘friending’ them (as evidenced here). At that point, you can choose to follow them but with the understanding that you’re no more than a spectator in their personal amphitheater and really shouldn’t expect much more than that. Let’s be honest and not call it a social network but a micro fan-club.

If you check those with the highest number of followers on Twitter it will quickly become obvious that the majority are using the system as a unidirectional broadcast channel instead of two-way social interaction. This is what makes Eric Schmidt’s recent comment about Twitter being a ‘poor man’s email system’ that much more puzzling, because email is a bi-directional communication mechanism and far more ’social’ (in the relationship-building sense) than any of these so-called social networks.