Social Networking

One of the interesting consequences of all the noise around Web2.0 is all the renewed interest in social networking. If you read some Web2.0 evangelizers, or if you just google 'social networking', it may seem that the whole concept has just been invented a couple of years ago with MySpace, YouTube, Flickr, LinkedIn, or any other of the zillion sites that are, more or less, trying to get attached the social networking label.

Obviously, as much as you try to upgrade them with the 2.0 version number, social networking is not only about those web sites, but rather an activity quintessential to human nature. Social networking is about linking and relating to other people and how to use those relationships to acquire and share knowledge, to get things done, or just to enjoy them. Technologies and technological artifacts do mediate in social networks (actor-network theorists would say that they are part of the social networks...), but no technology, and specially no trendy name applied to a tecgnology, can change the fact that we maintain links with other people and that we use those social relations tor multiple purposes.

The study of social networking is not something new either: in the early sixties Everett Rogers studied the process of diffusion of innovations and concluded that between adopters plaid a key role in the speed at which innovations were accepted, or rejected, by users; and in the seventies, Mark Granovetter published his seminal paper on the strength of weak ties in social networks, that opened the field of social network analysis.

But although social networking is a natural human activity, its characteristics and effects are completely mediated by specific cultures. In Maximum City, a book about Bombay (Mumbai) writen by an American of Indian origin (an NRI), Suketu Mehta captures very well the difference in importance and meaning attached to social networking in two different cultures: India vs the US (and the UK):

There is very little you can do anonymously as a member of the vast masses. (...)It has to be one person linking with another who knows another and so until you reach your destination; the path your request takes has to go through this network. You cannot jump the chain by going directly to someone who doesn't know you connected only by the phone line. Then it becomes a buyer and seller transaction rather than a favour. A friend went from Bombay to London and told me she was horrified that she could spend an entire day (...) without ever needing to make a personal connection.

Technologies (telephone, e-mail, Web2.0,... ) can mediate the formation and maintenance of social networks, expanding its reach and increasing (or diminishing) the strength of certain social links. It is also very probable that the adoption and use of certain technologies will help changing the cultural values and meanings associated to social networks and how they are used. But that does not mean, as it may be inferred from some of the media hype, and as much as some marketing gurus may like it, that social networks are not specific internet sites or features added to web services.

(The worst example I've seen of the misappropriation of the social networking concept and term is the title of an article in cnet: Ten reasons social networking doesn't work. Of course, it talks about some reasons why some of the web sites dubbed as social networking sites do not stand to the expectations created)