Social networks neither ‘social’ nor ‘networks’ — what should we call them?
Neither Social
When I first joined MySpace it was about sharing the latest album with your friends and meeting people from other towns. In high school, we used Facebook to share pics from house parties and to talk about our early college experiences.
When we got bored, we’d just call each other on the phone to pass the time. Now we scroll and occasionally tag each other.
These days when I scroll through my feed, 98% of the content isn’t coming from my friends. It’s just a machine learning curated list of posts made by brands and content creating professionals that’s designed to keep me scrolling to reach the next advertisement.
I got into Instagram because of photography, so I still make the occasional post, but now my friends rarely share anything.
We’re just passive consumers. This goes against everything that made Web 2.0 beautiful.
Nor Network
The best way to define a network is graph theory. When social networks originally came out, they largely resembled complete graphs; where every participant is pretty much connected to every other participant.
The apps start out with this experience as their growth engine to get more people on the platform. However, then they shift toward content mega producers, which makes the graph resemble a hub topology.
Here, many disparate participants are receiving content from a syndicate — much like a newspaper.
So rather than giving us a voice… it makes us sheep.
What to Call it? Crowdsourcing Ideas.
We need a new name that characterizes this. The fact that it contains the word ‘social’ makes it seem less harmless than it is. It has to be just as catchy as “social media.”
- Scrolling media?
- Antisocial media?
- Crowd idea: Psuedosocial media
- Crowd idea: Scrollbait
