Networks, Complexity, and Relatedness

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Over the past two or three years, I've been mulling the way that the term social media is used in a variety of contexts, in which the same terms are used as if interchangeable but are really not. I started putting some definitions around social terms in this blog recently (see Socializing), and then I was asked to give a talk about "social media" for a client (this is available on SlideShare). That was the opportunity I needed to break out the distinctions in social media.

I am starting with the "4 SMs":

Media SM
Customer SM
Enterprise SM
Personal SM

Each of these distinctions comprises a different context in which the tools of social computing are used; but in all contexts the use of social tools has shifted forever the relationships to a focus on conversation over the presentation and consumption of content.

Today, I'll summarize the Media SM, and move on to the other SMs over the next few days. During this time I'll also be mulling (and hoping for your ideas) on the shadowy "5th" SM -- the networked, community, purposeful use of social media to bind networks, causes, and events. I just don't have a name for it yet.

Media SM

We first started thinking about social media at the advent of the age of the blogger. Beginning in 1994, news, commentary, and opinions were no longer the exclusive purview of the traditional, established "media" who were using the web to re-publish their static pieces. Clay Shirky describes the phenomenon of the independent, blog-based information media as "mass amateurization."

I see the Huffington Post (launched in May 2005) as the, uh, poster child, for the professionalization of the blog as a news and commentary platform, though the established media have done well in catching up and incorporating comments and conversations within the context of their opinion pages. (The New York Times can boast having 22 of the top 50 newspaper blogs.)

Mass amatuerization extends to the reporting of news; "citizen journalists" play an important role in both large and local events. I understand these things to be true, though I am not expert in the history of the socialization of the press. Nor am I an active participant in the side of the blogosphere that deals with the news of the day. I might spend more time doing some research to fill out these points if (1) this was a topic for which I had passion or (2) if it were not such a sunny and beautiful spring day.

But there it is, the first SM: media SM, or the transformation/socialization of "media."

This year, I'd like to honor my own cohort in technology, and the many women I've worked with on the "support and services" side of technology. As many of you may know, I began my career in technology as a technical editor at IBM. IBM sent me to programming school in the 706 building in Poughkeepsie, New York, for a total of 24 weeks one long winter many years ago. On completion of my training in software programming, I was offered a choice of jobs: as a programmer, or as a writer. The programming manager was really up front: the job he had was pretty boring, nuts and bolts stuff. The writing manager offered me the opportunity to develop users' guides and to put my stamp on how I thought technical writing should be done. Guess you know which path I took. (Well, I did do some engineering later on, but only to advance technologies in support of producing higher-quality documents.)

And I never looked back, even though I continued to work in an industry that valued the "real engineers" over those those who made the engineering products actually usable and useful. I've had the good fortune to work with people in the training and information sciences areas as well as in my native "documentation" specialty. These disciplines, like technical writing, were not dominated by women, but women were well represented in these fields, particularly in higher levels of management. They are the ones who have often been the singular woman on an all-male staff in a highly technical company, who have had to stand their ground often in defense of the value that their groups brought to the company, and who have made technology friendly. Curiously (or not) I have seen that these three fields -- information sciences, technical writing, and training and development -- have (together with consulting practices) provided fertile ground and expertise in the field we now know as knowledge management.

These women have been my role models, my mentors, and my friends. Today, on Ada Lovelace day, I salute them.

Over the past decade, weve gone from talking about social circles to social networks. A circle draws a line around us. Networks draw lines among us.

I liked the way he phrased it, and I also note that it is the word social that connects the concepts because we are, at our core, social beings. The observation also begs the question about how those lines get drawn, and this leads me back to an inquiry I've been having for some time. The word social is now attached to so many concepts that it is hard to keep up with the proliferation of terms that are coopting it and putting it in different contexts. (Just as when I was young I had trouble parsing "ice cream social" because I didn't see "social" as a noun.)

Because I am called upon to give talks about, uh, social media and the like, I thought it best to take the time to do a very quick run-down of the terms and my sources for the definitions that I use. This is necessarily an incomplete list (see the word "proliferating" above). Here's my current take, divided into three pieces: technology, practice, analysis. First, social media.

Social media appears to be the term that is showing the most legs in terms of collective use with respect to the web-based digital technologies that shift focus from content to conversation, from publishing to interacting. Penny Hagen, who nicely ties together some of the definitional threads to provide A working definition of social media and why we couldnt answer the question, captures thinking from Danah Boyd and Clay Shirky that suggests that social media is both about technology and the social habits that are being entrained by our use of it. So the media is not just the message (as per McLuhan) but it is the message and the messengers.

Technology

Social software becomes, therefore, the technology side of the definition of social media, and we use it when we refer specifically to software that enables and supports personal interaction. The personal interaction becomes social to the extent that there are named and identifiable people on each end (or in all the threads) of the transaction. These may be either tools, platforms, or social networking sites/services.

Social tools are the individual programs and products that use, either in concert or individually, for example, blogs and wikis.

Social software platforms consist of suites of social tools that are packaged as solutions aimed at one or more business segments. Jive, for example, is a collaboration platform designed with a social perspective. Ning is perhaps the largest open (free) platform available to groups of any size or inclination who want to form a community or to collaborate. Andrew McAfee

first used the phrase emergent social software platforms in his May 2006 definition of Enterprise 2.0. Its acronym, ESSP, is often taken as Enterprise Social Software Platform.

Note that existing software platforms that predate Web 2.0 can be socialized by the addition of social tools, but the design centers for these platforms remains unchanged (SharePoint, even SP10, remains designed around content management.)

Social computing. Dion Hinchcliffe, who is so talented at graphic representations of the relationships among concepts tackled social computing as the overarching and encompassing term for the mishmash of themes and terms. I don't want to contradict him, but merely point out that each of us has to resolve the distinctions for ourselves and that his model is a good starting point for anyone who wants to try to make sense of this (as I am now doing for myself and sharing it with the expectation that it may help others start to make their own sense of things).

Social networking sites are a special case of social platforms. To use Danah Boyd's definition, they are

"web?based services that allow individuals to (1) construct a public or semi?public profile within a bounded system, (2) articulate a list of other users with whom they share a connection, and (3) view and traverse their list of connections and those made by others within the system.

Andrew McAfee has similarly used the term social networking service to refer to these sites, which include Facebook, MySpace, and so on.

Social bookmarking lets people share the URLs of websites that they want to revisit and organize them in a way that is browsable by others.

Social tagging offers the ability to provide descriptors for information artifacts that can be used by others, including bookmarks.

Practice

These technologies are changing the way we work, the ways in which we grow relationships with other human beings, and the ways that we process, filter, and give context to information. These are the practices that are emerging that make us comfortable with, dependent on, and successful using social media. It is in this area that some of the more interesting new terms are sprouting. I say "interesting" because the terms themselves challenge us to think anew about who and how we -- and our enterprises -- are in the world.

Social Business is a term proposed to lead us to rethink how business is done:

An organization designed consciously around sociality and social tools, as a response to a changed world and the emergence of the social web. (Stowe Boyd)

(Stowe also acknowledges the need to disambiguate this use of the term with the use related to nonprofit businesses that address social objectives.)

Social architecture is the intentional use of social media in the design of how people work. For me, the term architecture implies design, as is evident in these definitions from two of my favorite people:

Social architecture is the conscious design of an environment that encourages certain social behavior leading towards some goal or set of goals. (Andrew Gent.)

Social architecture is a user experience oriented approach to the design and analysis of social tools. (Stowe Boyd)

Note there is no single architecture, but a sense that we can harness the extraordinary capabilities offered by social computing to change the ways we work and learn.

Speaking of learning, Social learning

[is] the development of knowledge, skills, and attitudes while connected to others (peers, mentors, experts) in an electronic surround of digital media, both real-time and asynchronous. (Harold Jarche).

Even as I include that definition, I feel that we must also acknowledge, via Jay Cross, that informal learning occurs by many means (especially face-to-face) that can't be controlled or programmed, but by its nature when the learning comes through exchange with other human beings, it is social learning. I have also blogged social learning at theappgap.

Social team (from Boris Pluskowski): a collection of individuals who have a common understanding of the "game they are playing" (i.e. the team's purpose); know in which goal they are trying to score (i.e. have a shared understanding of what a "win" looks like); and are collaborating together to achieve that aim. Boris is extending the concept of team using the concepts from Here Comes Everybody to illustrate the potential to tap the expertise, passion, and abilities of a large number of people to support a shared purpose.

...(in a nutshell) is the reason two people are talking to each other, as opposed to talking to somebody else. (Hugh McLeod)

This notion brings us back down to earth in the sense that when we talk about what makes it possible for people to collaborate, we must understand that there is something shared between them, an artifact that prompts discourse or a shared emotion.

Social capital. the stocks of social trust, norms and networks that people can draw upon to solve common problems. This is what we build, or can build, daily, by acknowledging others, through respectful collaboration in shared endeavors and in social media through retweets, comments, and references.

Analysis

One of the things I have come to understand in my work in social network analysis is that being able to make sense of the connections -- the lines among us -- gives us access to questions and insights we might not otherwise have.

Social network. a collection of people who can be identified by a something that they have in common, a kinship, an interest, an organizational tie, a membership. What we see in social media are the networks of common interest implied by membership in a single social networking site (so Facebook represents a "network") but more rationally are any set of people who have a somewhat narrower set of criteria. I participate in many social networks on Facebook, don't you?

Social graph. The representation of the social network. As I like to say, if it's a network, you can draw it (or imagine it drawn), showing individual people and their connections.

Social network analysis comprises a set of methods and tools for collecting information about the graph of a social network and displaying that information visually and quantitatively.

Social analytics. The aggregation and correlation of the data collected from social software that reveals social structures and relations to assess interaction and conversation patterns. (See Mike Gotta for the basics and also for his thinking about how this is an emerging topic for 2010 .)

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