You'll be playing one tune and I'll be listening to another. How social media will change your life...

Things have settled down nicely since the wakeful nights and ever-early mornings of Ph.D writing and social media research. Going forward the priority seems to be acknowledgement of how best to detach from such tracts of social information, whilst at the same maintaining a more general idea of how friends are ‘getting on’ – and as such, such information it turns out is still accumulated via Facebook. Which begs the questions; why can’t one just pick up the telephone and find out? Or is that too intrusive for the socially savvy and technologically inclined? Does voice-to-voice belong to the by-gone era of the kind of social energy that never seemed to falter and got us through Web 1.0, the mobile phone, telephone, radio, telegraph, letter and all other communication before?

As it turns out anyone can (and does, all too readily, in my experience) dispense advice on such matters. Take the facebooketiquette.blogspot.com deigned to not only propose advice, but to offer a friendly banter on the latest trials and tribulations from the more digital of the community. Good advice (that you can put into practice and actually works) is out of sync with many of the candidates and accolades of social technology. One cannot imagine sitting down to a user guide for Facebook and starting from Step One of the manual and following through. That was one for the ‘The Dummies Guide To Social Networking’.

A question that arose last week; ‘Actually what is Twitter?’ prompted new discussions.
Uttered not by my father or one of his generation, but someone whom I would rate as a ‘master’ if not leading guru of Web 2.0 and the future versions too. The confession that followed, ‘Well yes I do have a Twitter account, but I don’t know what to do with it’ was left hanging with a marked silence.

Amongst the (not-so-famous) five discussing the various merits of social technology we all came with a background of blogging and almost routinised (daily) acknowledgement about the merits of social tools and enthusiasm that centred on Facebook, Twitter etc. The confession that it was possible that ‘we’ as the ‘experts’ did not know what one of these were ‘for’ highlighted an interesting dynamic. On the one hand here was acknowledgement of a sequence of information and social strategies to bridge the gap(s) between lists of friends and acquaintances. On the other it was necessary that such tools be also mitigated by the self-discipline and management of methods to allow direct attendance to contacts and disguise the awkward truth where some of the details of such utilisation were largely being ‘worked out’ on the fly or simply ignored altogether. The revelation amongst our party was that ‘Yeah, I’m on Twitter, but I’m not on Twitter’. Hence this was a ‘cool’ way to be seen and at the same time highlighted a level of engagement that got around the ‘inconvenience’ of having to describe what it was you were doing on there, or why you where doing it.

Perhaps what is required is a type of social media transitional ‘self-help’ guidance. For years psychoanalysts have directed the various schools of thought relating to everyday life and social interactions. So why not the same type of analysis for social media and its integration into daily routines?

Making a measured ‘success’ of such examinations could be tricky. Specific techniques would have to take into variance the social attachment to various media as well as the level of competence by the individual when using a particular ‘system’ to stay in touch. For example, this week I was sent a notification via my LinkedIn Account that my Profile was ‘under scrutiny’ and had ‘restrictions’ as a result that people had indicated that ‘this person is not known to me’ in my potential ‘network’. Fine, but it this was the result of LinkedIn’s own ‘spamming’ from the accumulated email addresses attached to my account that had led to such notifications from others. Likely that some would only have been in contact once, or perhaps never as a result of various user-groups and meet-up lists it was hardly surprising some had opted for the ‘Mariann Hardey is unknown to me and my network’ selection. In this scenario, less a case for the psychoanalytics of my actions and more the necessary accountability of the ‘little black box’ and automated workings of the LinkedIn site. The LinkedIn and Facebook networks do not make their millions (estimated or otherwise) because of a tentative call for other to ‘network’. These sites work precisely because they emphasise the pro-active elements of building personal connections with other – whether you are aware of a trawl through your Gmail address book or not it seems.

And so to networking and the requirements for social media success. If such accomplishments could only be reduced to one infallible system we would all be doing the same thing in the same way *yawn* and thus inevitably ignoring the more intriguing elements of ‘linked in’ technology.

‘Yes,’ as I confessed to the group, ‘Twitter was an initial mystery to me too. You can consider it as ‘not very technical’, but then that is its charm’.

Hence the only remedy and most effective psycholoanlytic direction is to continually test the social media water and go from there. Even if that reveals that you (and others) don’t really know what they’re doing or even what such tools are for.