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Finding, filtering and forwarding
The sharing of links among social networks is the foundation of the world of connected media, suggests Mark Pesce.
We all live in hierarchies. Status has always been conferred on those in the know. To be among the cognoscenti is to possess a mystique, an allure, which confers authority and commands a high position in human hierarchies. Marketers and advertisers understand this. It’s time the rest of us learn that this is the main force driving our social networks.
If you want to understand the emergent behaviour of ‘always-on’ users, observe what they already do. The ad-hoc techniques developed by the swarm of network users to manage the avalanche of media inevitably become the automated techniques of tomorrow. The first and most important of these emerging techniques is simply known today as ‘link sharing’.
If the surveys are to be believed, we each spend up to two hours a day working with our electronic mail. Some of this is dedicated to the minutiae of our business lives—meetings, planning, and execution of commercial activities—but, for many of us, it is also a continuously reinforced connection to our social networks of friends and family. Some of this correspondence is the simple reaffirmation of contact, but, increasingly, these emails contain a link to some piece of network-accessible content, be it a web page, or an audio or video file. They’re good for a few minute’s diversion, and if we like what we see, we’re bound to pass it along.
This seems an innocuous activity, but it is the essence of the new era of the internet. The entire idea of ‘viral’ distribution of media is predicated on this behaviour.
Social networks, flexible and dynamic, constantly reconfigure themselves based on the perceived value of relationships of each member within the network to every other. Laid out against this is another metric: expertise. One friend may be an omniscient source of information on IT issues, while another might be expert in dance culture, another, television, and so on. No one connection absorbs all of the attention within a social network. In an ideal situation, everyone contributes something utterly unique, drawn from their own strengths. Furthermore, because our digital selves are all fundamentally egomaniacs, clamouring for attention, recognition, and ascendancy in the social hierarchy, we’re constantly competing for attention within our social networks, each constantly trying to outdo one another. This constant struggle to maintain our position in an ever-changing social order produces a kind of selection pressure—not unlike biological evolution—that quickly winnows winners from losers.
This behaviour breaks down into three basic domains of activity: finding, filtering and forwarding.
Finding A successful competitor for our limited attention knows how to find just those bits of information which are sure to excite interest. These individuals have deep knowledge in narrow fields—we might call them ‘nanoexperts’. A nanoexpert maintains broad connections into their community of interest. That’s their passion and the root of their capability.
Filtering An expert absorbs a lot of information, and much of it is judged to be of little value—perhaps even annoying—to the social network which the expert serves. An expert knows how to judge not just the quality of information, but its relevance. This activity is not automatable. While Google can tell you if a website is popular, based on the number of links into it, Google can’t digest a titbit of data and tell you if it’s of any significance. Salience is a characteristic of sapience. A good filter—like a good editor—improves the quality of information by cutting it down to size.
Forwarding Once something has been found, once it has been weighed, it needs to be distributed. This is perhaps the most difficult (and most social) part of the process. We could easily blast everything we find to everyone we know, but we’d make a lot of enemies in the process, and destroy our rank in every social network. Instead, we dole out expertise parsimoniously, choosing where and when to reveal it, in whatever manner best supports and extends our social standing. Cognoscenti maintain their value in a social network as much by withholding information as by revealing it.
These three activities—the ‘Three Fs’ of finding, filtering and forwarding—scaled up to the swarm of a billion internet users, describe the network media world we see today. This is more than the ‘death of marketing,’ more than a world where a few ‘cool-hunters’ detect and amplify the trends of the mass culture. In this new social order, there is no mass market, no mass media, and no mass mind. Instead, there are networks of experts, each feeding into collective networks of knowledge, social networks which both within themselves, and, pitted against each other, struggle to raise their standing in the world.
As we move into a world where these ad-hoc techniques become formalized, these link-sharing networks will become the individualized equivalent of the mainstream media. More and more of our precious attention is being taken up by content that’s been forwarded to us, and every day, in every way, we’re getting better at finding, filtering and forwarding. How the media industries of the present day—predicated on mass communication to mass audiences—negotiate the transition into a world of microaudiences, each fiercely guarded by an army of ever-vigilant nanoexperts, remains an open question.
Mark Pesce is the princpal of FutureStr, a consultancy based in Sydney. He has been working in interactive media for nearly a quarter of a century and was one of the original creators of the Virtual Reality Modelling Language VRML. This is an abridged extract from his essay ‘The Three Fs’.
Copyright © 2006 Mark Pesce. All rights reserved. Reproduced with permission.
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