Mike English dot Net

Following up on the FriendFeed discussion from Robert Scoble’s post, some interesting questions were raised.

Susan mentioned that Robert was acting as “bionic human socnet filter” after which I asked if we were all becoming part of a social super brain. The discussion turned to the segmentation of the social web with George Smith commenting that:

“Birds of a feather flock together. And sometimes it’s people with polar opposite views arguing. But I don’t think one place really has a large enough spectrum of human discourse…yet. We have to remember there is still a large portion of the population that does not participate in these conversations.”

The web is often hailed as great boon for democracy and learning with freedom of information and global interconnectedness, but I think George makes a good point. The social web is, and tends to be segmented because that’s simply how people are tending to react to the capabilities of the Internet as a new communication medium.

So what brings people together?

A group of individuals is not a group at all unless they have something in common. People are brought together either under the leadership of an individual (as in Seth Godin’s Tribes) or by a shared interest in some thing (as in Hugh MacLeod’s Social Objects)

It shouldn’t have to be said, but most of the users of new web services share a common interest in… new web services – as well as technology in general. Therefore it follows that the conversation on these new social platforms is dominated by technology-related topics. (The other group I’ve found to have a strong presence are marketers. The so-called “Social Media Specialists” range from genuinely helpful, intelligent people to the spammy, hapless victims of pyramid-scheme, get-rich-quick thinking, and due to the sheer volume of the SMS crowd it can be hard to sort the wheat from the chaff. I digress.)

Should we be offended that the only people talking on Twitter are Twitter users? No.

I also don’t think that we should be concerned that FriendFeed is mostly populated by tech-junkies.

Rather than bemoan the fact that FriendFeed is cliquey and may never become “mainstream,” why not envision a forum where a ‘large enough spectrum of human discourse’ is represented? Articulate that Purpose Idea as a Social Object and you’ll create the community you’re looking for.  And if you happen to be doing this in the context of a startup when technology makes the next leap forward in features, (with the help of the right SMS and marketing gurus) you just might have the “next big thing.”

But whether it’s FriendFeed or it’s some other company that’s there to capitalize on this is hardly relevant to me as a user. I count myself as part of the mob demanding our social data be “free” and “open” and “portable” and I think that with a user-centric Web 2.0 paradigm, we’ll get what we want.

The real question now is, what social object can bring together the most diverse cross-section of the population and get them talking to each other? What are the ideas that all mankind takes interest in? To what degree can we fight the inevitable segmentation and inequality caused by phenomena like Power Laws?

While technology will ultimately facilitate solutions to these problems, I don’t think its scope of knowledge is sufficient to fully answer them. Before we can begin building the right tools or networks, I think we need to frame these questions philosophically, sociologically, and most importantly anthropologically. If we don’t look carefully at the impact of this technology on the human person, it’s likely that the freedom offered by these new technologies will cause the ‘global village’ to degrade and disintegrate into pockets of micro-villages, segmenting the population even further. Instead of bringing people together, the Internet could easily lead to increased extremism and isolation.