hyalineskies

“I have cancelled all speaking engagements. I am afraid to leave my yard. I will never feel the same. I will never be the same,” fellow 9rules Network Member and (far superior) O’Reilly Media author Kathy Sierra stated in a long, panicked post on the death threats and disturbing images she has received over the past couple of weeks, which Sierra allegedly levels as being the work of some prominent A-listers such as Cluetrain Manifesto author Chris Locke. Kathy wasn’t the only one with such attacks levelled at her: Robert Scoble’s own wife Maryam was also targeted. Such authors, far up the blogging A-list, being attacked within the blogosphere by other A-listers, seems utterly incomprehensible; thanks to the anonymity afforded by the Internet, as well as the misogynistic audacity that technology-industry, testosterone-fueled groupthink plasters on message boards and blogs worldwide, it seems that no one is safe.

Previously, the vitriol levelled at those in the blogosphere — as well as the obsession with negatively attacking public figures in their own sphere — was primarily the domain of celebrities and politicians. The Internet’s ability to spread negative information far and wide, such as the now-renowned Paris Hilton celebrity sex tape (link goes to Wikipedia), cause an array of problems for those living in the mainstream limelight. Lesser public figures, with less Internet exposure and material published online, have generally been able to avoid the worst of the drama.

However, blogs and other online publishing sources have, for better or for worse, given the reputable author both exposure to a large audience as well as all of the negatives that such fame brings. We see those obsessed with the popular in any social sphere; people are naturally attuned to following the popular. A July 2004 article in the magazine Psychology Today, Seeing by Starlight: Celebrity Obsession gives us a much greater look into what is is that’s making those obsessed tick. “Stars summon our most human yearnings: to love, admire, copy and, of course, to gossip and to jeer,” the author of the article states. “It’s only natural that we get pulled into their gravitational field.” Of course, this addiction to star power and position goes both ways: on one hand, those with influence have “fans,” who in some way cognitively resemble the star or find comfort in their material; to a blogger, these people are their biggest reader base. With any public notoriety, however, comes the other side, the side of those who wish to gossip and insult, or, in some cases, stalk and threaten. Periodically we are reminded of the dark side of public influence: just recently, San Francisco mayor Gavin Newsom was stalked by a 42-year-old obsessive fan, eventually leading to the arrest of the man. Anna Politkovskaya, a popular dissident of the Russian Federation and Chechnya, is certainly among the worst cases of threats levelled at her due to her significance: after multiple death threats in 2001 drove her to temporary exile in Austria, the journalist was assassinated in her central Moscow apartment last October.

While all of this negative attention eventually occurs to those extremely prominent, why, then, would someone attack a blogger like Sierra? She’s certainly not anywhere near as popular or exposed as Newsom or Politkovskaya. Before the threats were issued and publicised, Sierra’s name wasn’t broadcasted across all sorts of media when she does anything at all; instead, Sierra is little more than a pseudocelebrity, an influential person within a tiny network of web designers, information theorists and online marketeers. Not surprisingly, however, her enemies are born from the same industry, with people such as those that ran the now-defunct MeanKids.org, or Locke, who ran a similar blog called “Bob’s Yer Uncle,” causing a fair amount of her troubles. Obviously some people — equally important within the same social segment in their own right — found Sierra to be an utmost authority in the world that mattered most to them.

Much to the dismay of our own egos, however, we as bloggers are certainly very unimportant when we look at our impact upon the greater world as a whole. Sure, we have made tools and theories, books and applications, but the overall influence any one of us has on the world of commerce or human culture is still very small compared to many others, including vapid celebrities and terrible political leaders. However, as publishers within our already limited social sphere, as well as the constant tracking of statistics telling us of our importance in Alexa or Technorati rankings, our egos are inflated and our skewed exposure to those joining the blogosphere for the first time or working within it for the past decade underscores us as being VIPs in a world that a select few really care deeply about. This mirage-like, mini-exposure causes our professional and personal personae to become intertwined, and, as we find the attention we get in the blogosphere attractive and/or profitable, we push more of ourselves out into the electronic space to move even further into the upper echelon of the electronic elite.

A rhetorical trap

Social tools, such as our blogs, Twitter accounts and MySpace profiles, give those wishing to follow, replicate, or insult our every action unprecedented access into our lives on a greatly expanded timeline, both in our personal and professional lives. The things we post, no matter how professional or how utterly banal (my Twitter account is a good example of rather meaningless posting,) are all somehow extremely attractive to those who are fans of our content: people naturally enjoy talking about the things that are going on in our lives. It is common knowledge that we enjoy talking about ourselves (and enjoy being revered as people,) and with social media outlets we are given a virtually unlimited space in which to express our feelings, desires and analytical thoughts. While we will generally share some shell of ourselves, be that a façade or a diluted version of our true personalities, we share closer information with our friends: I’m sure that, if I were a very good friend of Kathy Sierra, and I asked about personal information that she is now fighting to keep secret, she would gladly share such information. I do with my friends, as do most other people: we want to trust those who are around us. (The Psychology Today article referenced above goes further, stating that those who are obsessed with public figures inherently trust those figures as family or friends, causing a paradox where the trust is not reciprocal.)

There is little, however, that is keeping the social media author from trusting their own tools: aside from mechanical failure, I have no worries that my iBook — a rather simple machine — will run away with my secrets or other information. To do so would be silly: after all, what is it that an inanimate object is going to do? It can’t necessarily betray me. However, we place a fair amount of trust into the analogies that social media developers have placed into their applications, and while we trust our websites and content management systems to hold and protect our content, we quickly seem to forget just how public a fair amount of the information we publish into these systems really is. While it is, on some level, a fault of the way we are as humans, we cannot place all of the blame upon ourselves: the analogies and other rhetorical devices used in social media interfaces give us a blind trust in an untrustworthy social sphere, leaving us with an artificial feeling of protection by using common trustworthy language and methods of “privacy”. In some way, it’s our own software design that’s failing us.

1. Social media tools display a simplified relationship of large social networks.

At the core of a lot of social media tools we are given a linguistic familiarity: the friend. While this is seemingly innocuous, a thesaurus search for “friend” gives us a list of associated words — which we associate with “friend” in the real world — all of which highlight some type of true emotional connection of trust or romance. Instead, as a USA TODAY report shows on social networks, hardly anyone knows who the majority of their “friends” really are, diluting the definition of friend in the social media sphere.

Instead, the way we truly perceive friends in a real-world scenario is much less polar. We have some type of variable structure in how our relationships work, much more like relationships are in The Sims than Facebook, a quantitative, possibly relative-based scale as to how we perceive relationships around us. We have degrees of friends: some people we know as acquaintances and some we know as best friends; some we deal with only at work and others we care to see constantly. We give these relationship “points” to people who have gained our utmost levels of trust, and we have far more acquaintances than we do good friends, which take a lot more time and involvement to acquire. Most social media tools do little to highlight these different degrees of friendships; Flickr is one standing example that does a good job of realising the way we understand our true relationships.

Of course, we also have enemies, which social media rhetoric does almost nothing against. In the scale above, enemies would have negative points, being people we horribly hate (with zero as a stranger.) Instead of “Enemy” lists that are prominently built into our social networks, we instead are given “Privacy” lists, with more technical, less allegorical terms such as “Block User” instead of “Add as Enemy”. While we’ve built the technical terms into the part of the social network that, in rare cases, could be dangerous, we leave the “friends” part of the network — which is arguably the profitable part of such a social media system — in a wonderfully optimistic, naïve state.

One of the biggest real-world issues that social networks fail to replicate is that of reciprocity. Many social disasters occur when we perceive someone we know (or feel that we know due to celebrity status) in a different manner than that person actually does: look at the thousands of times history has recounted unrequited love, or, in the creepier cases, dangerous stalkers. On online social network services, generally this is supposed to be avoided by requiring the other person to approve you as a friend; however, the public nature of most information on said services allows for virtually anonymous contact and content consumption. Even with this rather limited (and rather ignored) issue with social networks, reciprocity is not always required: the geek-popular site Twitter takes this a step further than the most popular social networks, allowing you to “friend” anyone, even without their approval of you. On Twitter, the greatest celebrity could be your “friend”, even though to that user you are nothing more than a “follower”. Twitter’s unilateral, reciprocity-optional definition of a friend is both a terrible misrepresentation of friends in a real-world social circle as well as an ironically real definition of the way we psychologically view celebrities and role models.

2. Social media tools alter social network hierarchy and our traditional perspectives of publication.

As I have stated before when explaning social network hierarchy, we do not see much of a hierarchy at all: in the end, we are all the centres of our own social universe, connected by degrees of separation from one person to another. At the greatest extent of our entire social network, not just that online, is currently believed to be limited to Dunbar’s number, a statistical range of 100 to 230 people. For example the 2,220 feed subscribers at Bryan Veloso’s currently-defunct Avalonstar make up a nearly 1000% greater number than Bryan himself could ever consider being in his “true” social network, even at Dunbar’s upper bound of 230.

Furthermore, it appears that we generally do not witness our actions to be influential upon this first degree of separation, even within the blogosphere. Even if we recognise our own feed readers and blog statistics, we do not generally think of our content as having a great impact out beyond those readers and perhaps their friends. In the rare case that something “goes viral”, this perception changes for that specific content until the buzz dies down, but generally we do not think of the rest of our content as being influential to more than those directly reading it.

However, especially so in the connected world, who we generally seem to perceive as our audience is only an extremely small fraction of what it actually is, especially so in the case of heavily influential bloggers. Influential content is quickly referenced, sourced and otherwise “remixed” into posts by (generally) “lesser” bloggers, and, in some cases, that content is then referenced by other bloggers, leading into a cycle that is actually an exponential decay rather than a direct linear relationship. Instead of being a direct influence to those reading the content on-site, blogosphere content follows a system much closer to that of the macroeconomic multiplier effect rather than that of a 1:1 broadcast system that we are traditionally used to seeing with newspapers and other print publications. Because of this, our actual reader base spans infinite degrees of separation. The audience is much greater than we could ever imagine.

3. Social media tools offer very little reaffirmation that the use of said tools is extremely public even if the use of the tool is not publicised.

At this point, most social media developers believe that the concept of social content as public information is implied in using the tool, although it seems that very few people, regardless of how heavy their use of the tools are, recognise this as a hard fact of socially-generated content. Of course, even to those who realise that the tool is effectively public, we seem to fall back on the cognitive desire to be able to trust the people we are broadcasting to, although this is not always the actual case. Because of this ignorance and the compounding psychological desire, we feel a much greater comfort in an “anonymous” public sphere like the Internet.

Generally speaking, the way we should be treating social media tools is with the public speaking test: would we say this in person to a group of thousands at a conference? If the answer is yes, then it is probably something that would be fine to post online. Most everything I currently post on hyalineskies is something I would certainly lecture about to a general audience, although I can’t say that has always been the case.

Even with recognition of some information being public, we still seem to have some idea that we can effectively hide this content in plain sight due to the sheer size of the Internet and the rate at which new content is produced by other social media users. This is also not the true case. Just recently, I had an entirely unknown person “friend” me on Flickr and favourite photos of mine deep within the stack of 900 photos in my photostream. While this type of behaviour is certainly regular, the same user found my Twitter page — entirely unpublicised, with only three updates at the time of the user’s friending me — and even now I have little clue as to how he found it other than simply going to Twitter to see if I was on that, too. The Twitter account, which I was keeping private until I had done enough research on the application (for this post and possibly a following one,) had effectively been discovered by a member of the public, even though I had never openly advertised the profile’s existence to anyone. To me, it had lived outside the canon of my “official” electronic life, but this obviously wasn’t what was actually true.

We are all celebrities.

Our own ignorance and false comfort with social media tools, as well as our own human impulses to be exhibitionists constantly requiring greater influence and approval, cause us to spread our own information across the globe in an easily-archived public sphere. Our lives are just as public as those of celebrities; the ironic difference is that we are essentially our own paparazzi. We are the ones pouring gasoline onto the fires of our own reputability and influence online, ignoring the fact that some of the residual vapour is also causing us to feed the flames of our enemies, detractors and stalkers.

As if the issue wasn’t complex enough, there is no simple solution to solving this social paradox from a user’s perspective. We have cemented the social media vernacular by now, and changing the rhetorical architecture would take time and most likely only be adapted to newer social platforms, where users would already require some type of learning curve. Meanwhile, there is little we can do to change the way that we as humans perceive the social media sphere from our rather ignorant psychological constructs; instead, we can only hope to improve understanding as well as the interfaces with which we interact to publish user-generated content online. At the very least, the best we can do as bloggers is to recognise that, in some social segment, no matter how small, we are celebrities in the psychological sense, if not so in an influential one: maybe it is time for us to step out of our own inflated egos and recognise that maybe, for once, that little delusion of important inside of us is actually half of the reality.