Why some social network services work and others don’thttp://hellotxt.com/l/90zD to you by SimonUFord via Google Reader: Why some social networkservices work and others don’t Or: the case for object-centeredsociality via zengestrom.com by Jyri Engestrom on 9/11/07A while ago I wondered how our relationship to social networkingservices will change when instead of adding new contacts, we begin tofeel like we’d be better off cutting the links to the people who weactually don’t know, stopped liking, or no longer want to be associatedwith for whatever other reason. I was reminded of this on reading thatRussel Beattie has now decided to link out of LinkedIn. He explains:Yes, I thought about just deleting the people I didn’t know, but eachdeletion of a contact requires an individual request to customerservice (it’s not just a check box and submit operation) so I finallyjust decided to cancel the whole thing. I think in general, people whowould want to use this service are pretty contactable without usingthis system, no? … And if you’re a hard to reach person, you’re mostlikely not using this sort of thing anyways. Anyone can contact anyonein five hops, so what real use is it?I want to use Russell’s question about the ‘real use’ of LinkedIn as awindow into what I think is a profound confusion about the nature ofsociality, which was partly brought about by recent use of theterm ‘social network’ by Albert Laszlo-Barabasi and Mark Buchanan inthe popular science world, and Clay Shirky and others in the socialsoftware world. These authors build on the definition of the socialnetwork as ‘a map of the relationships between individuals.’ BasicallyI’m defending an alternative approach to social networks here, which Icall ‘object centered sociality’ following the sociologist Karin KnorrCetina. I’ll try to articulate the conceptual difference between thetwo approaches and briefly demonstrate that object-centered socialityhelps us to understand better why some social networking servicessucceed while others don’t.Russell’s disappointment in LinkedIn implies that the term ‘socialnetworking’ makes little sense if we leave out the objects that mediatethe ties between people. Think about the object as the reason whypeople affiliate with each specific other and not just anyone. Forinstance, if the object is a job, it will connect me to one set ofpeople whereas a date will link me to a radically different group. Thisis common sense but unfortunately it’s not included in the image of thenetwork diagram that most people imagine when they hear theterm ‘social network.’ The fallacy is to think that social networks arejust made up of people. They’re not; social networks consist of peoplewho are connected by a shared object. That’s why many sociologists,especially activity theorists, actor-network theorists and post-ANTpeople prefer to talk about ‘socio-material networks’, orjust ‘activities’ or ‘practices’ (as I do) instead of social networks.Sometimes the ‘social just means people’ fallacy gets built intotechnology, like in the case of FOAF, which is unworkable because itprovides a format for representing people and links, but no way torepresent the objects that connect people together. The socialnetworking services that really work are the ones that are built aroundobjects. And, in my experience, their developers intuitively ‘get’ theobject-centered sociality way of thinking about social life. Flickr,for example, has turned photos into objects of sociality. Ondel.icio.us the objects are the URLs. EVDB, Upcoming.org, and evntfocus on events as objects. LinkedIn, however, is becoming the victimof its own cunning: it started off thinking it could benefit by playingup the ‘social just means people’ misunderstanding. As Russell put it,That was the “game” right? He who has the most contacts wins. At firstyou were even listed by the number of contacts you had, remember?Reid Hoffman’s choice (however unintentional it might have been, Idon’t know) to encourage the use of LinkedIn as a game is what activitytheorist Frank Blackler would call the introduction a ‘surrogateobject.’ The surrogate object is actually not sustained by theeconomic, technical, and cultural arrangement that the activity relieson to sustain itself. Playing ‘Who has the most connections wins’ mighthave been fun to some people for a while, but it was not very valuableto the users and developers as a collective in the long run. NowLinkedIn is trying to change the object of sociality that it offers,and persuade people to re-orient their networks around their actualjobs. (Don’t get me wrong—I’m the first to support Reid and his team ontheir endeavour to make LinkedIn more useful as a medium forjob-centered sociality!)Last but not least, we can use the object-centered sociality theory toidentify new objects that are potentially suitable for socialnetworking services. Take the notion of place, for example. Annotatingplaces is a new practice for which there is clearly a need, but forwhich there is no successful service at the moment because thetechnology for capturing one’s location is not quite yet cheap enough,reliable enough, and easy enough to use. In other words, to geta ‘Flickr for maps’ we first need a ‘digital camera for location.’Approaching sociality as object-centered is to suggest that when itbecomes easy to create digital instances of the object, the onlineservices for networking on, through, and around that object will emergetoo. Social network theory fails to recognise such real-world dynamicsbecause its notion of sociality is limited to just people.For a much more elaborate academic argument about object-centeredsociality, see the chapter on ‘Objectual Practice’ by Karin KnorrCetina in The practice turn in contemporary theory, edited by TheodorR. Schatzki, Karin Knorr Cetina, and Eike von Savigny (London 2001:Routledge.)Things you can do from here:- Subscribe to zengestrom.com using Google Reader- Get started using Google Reader to easily keep up with all yourfavorite sites