We used to swim in the pool. Now, we swim on the internet. With every person clicking a mouse button on the internet – there comes a “piece of information”. With so many “lead by business motive” social networks – we forget the boundaries of our actual social connection and push things – without a second thought. Who cares – if the audience is your father or a stranger? When you are provided a “wrong” working environment you’ll work wrong. Which is obvious.

In most of the present social networks when we share, nobody cares. Or saying it more precisely nobody cares who we don’t care about. Or nobody who doesn’t have similar interests to us cares. I, for example,  care about a few people’s updates, a few bloggers, and a few sites that I visit regularly on the internet. If there were “settings/preferences” to wipe out every other update on the internet except those people, sites, and interests that I enjoy checking out – I would have checked that option forever.

With such humans as we are on the internet, the only “someone” that always cares about our shared information is the software code that sits in the servers of social networks or sites we use daily to send updates. It parses, analyses, and tracks our updates to “discover” some patterns, and trending information about us, our actions, our interests, and our social connections.  A social network – if provided complete control of your data, complete control over the interface (UI), and complete control over your actions, can you answer – who the hell on earth would pay the “social network business” if you won’t? So there come the targeted advertisement business models. That tracked information about users is now on sale.  We are getting “noise” because we are stuck in the free but business-oriented models of our actual social life online.

The internet was designed to be an open environment. Thoughts about developing an actual social experience online would always be just a thought. Seth’s said, Cities don’t die (but corporations do) and I think social networks systems which model social structure online with closed motives will die too. Now or later, sooner better. We will adapt to/use new social networks online but they will have similar issues too.

The existing social model online is not reducing the single-to-noise ratio in the online information flow – they should have but they won’t. With the give-everything-as-free service business models – we users have to compromise on our data, and our activities and bear with the targeted/untargeted noise if we use those systems.

Conclusion:

The social network can be modeled around actual life’s social structure. There are no technical difficulties. But, no social network organization with business motives will give “that much of real-life control over the system” to its user. This is how free-of-cost social networks will always work.

However, we have a choice. We could stop using social networks or stop expecting as if they modeled/cared about our real-life social structure online – they never did, and no other social network will ever. We shouldn’t act wrong, because we were given a bad social networking environment online. It’s always us, the users, who are responsible and should be about what we share online. If we don’t care about the social structure/connections online, how would anyone from heaven believe that we would care about those social connections in real life – in our homes?

Category: technology
Tagged with: Social Networks • Writings

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Social Networks – As if they cared..
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