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Laurent Haug a écrit un article sur le phénomène de la "désamification" (supprimer des contacts sur les réseaux sociaux, comme Facebook). J'opte personnellement plutôt pour une politique "d'ajout paresseux", et il est rare que je supprime des contacts.
Dans le monde hors-ligne, les gens disparaissent de nos vies, mais en ligne, on charrie effectivement avec soi toutes ces relations passées. Il peut cependant y avoir parfois un intérêt à les réactiver.
Ce qui rend à mon avis ingérable nos réseaux sociaux en ligne, c'est si on s'impose de maintenir des liens aussi forts avec tous nos contacts en ligne qu'avec nos relations actives hors ligne. C'est OK d'avoir des relations superficielles. Si on accepte pas ça, on risque le pétage de câble numérique ;-).
[en]
Yesterday I read Laurent Haug‘s post Defriendization is the future of social networks. (Laurent organizes the Lift conference, next month in Geneva — are you going? Here’s why you should.) I’m not sure I’m with Laurent about defriending. I guess I’m more of an advocate of being lazy about friending. That’s why I have 200+ people waiting in friend request purgatory on Facebook.
It is true, however, that with an online social network, you keep on dragging your past connections with you unless you defriend. In offline life, connections loosen with time, you stop seeing people, stop calling, stop writing, lose track of where they live… and connect again on Facebook. We have two movements here:
- the fact that people tend to drift out of each other’s lives, and online social networks do not really have a way to reflect that
- the fact that in a way, we like “collecting” our contacts, even if they’re not active anymore, as a way of making present or tangible some part of our past lives.
Sometimes, reconnecting with people who have drifted out of your life can be a great thing. I think that’s because in many cases, there is no real reason (like conflict, for example) for having drifted apart. It’s more a combination of circumstances and the absence of a strong incentive to not let the relationship dissolve.
I think that one of the obsessions with defriending has to do with having excessively high expectations about what one owes one’s connections. One of my keys to social media survival is “you can’t read everything”, which as far as relationships go translates to “you can’t have an active relationship with all your connections”.
It sucks, I know. I do believe that there is a psychological limit to the number of people we can handle in our lives (cf. Dunbar’s number). I also believe that social media, in a way, allows us to cheat with this — but it’s only cheating. It makes it easier to keep loose ties alive, and reactivate old relationships, but it doesn’t fundamentally change how many people in our lives we can really care about on a regular basis.
If you try to keep your online social network connections as meaningful as “regular friendships”, you can only fail.
I think this is part of the explanation of what I’d like to call “social media burnout” and that we’re seeing popping up all over the place. The links I’ve collected in relation to this theme are of high-profile social media people, but this happens to “normal” people too. They go wild about Facebook for a few months or a year, and then drop it all because they got sucked into it too much. Now, the people I’ve linked to above are not doing the “all-or-nothing” thing, and they might very well not be properly burned out, but they have in common that at some point, they have realised that their social media “life” was not sustainable as is. This happens outside social media too — but I think there is something specific to social media here, in the way that it dramatically lowers the energy necessary to establish and maintain connections.
Though one must never forget that the people at the end of our social media connections are real people, we must also acknowledge that it does not automatically entitle them to a deep, meaningful relationship with us. It’s OK to keep things superficial. It’s necessary, or your brain will fry.
Coming back to Laurent’s article, he points to three links that I would like to comment upon, in my typical rambly and disjointed blogging style 
. I initially wrote a huge long post, and then decided to chop it up. Keep reading (after the lunch break):
- Scale in Community and Social Media: Bigger is not Always Better
- Log-Out Day: Victims of Technology, or a Chance to Grow?
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- Scale in Community and Social Media: Bigger is not Always Better
- Log-Out Day: Victims of Technology, or a Chance to Grow?
- LeWeb’09: Facebook, Facebook Connect, Identity (Ethan Beard)
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- Lijit Feedback
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- Twitter Killed My Blog and Comments Killed Our Links
Digital Crumble
Twitter Killed My Blog and Comments Killed Our Links
[fr]
Un titre un peu provocateur pour une réflexion que je pourrais résumer ainsi: l'apparition des commentaires sur les blogs a réduit le nombre de liens que les blogueurs faisaient entre eux (et leurs articles), et a distendu la blogosphère. Celle-ci s'est distendue encore plus avec l'arriveé de Twitter et Facebook et notre obsession pour le temps réel et l'immédiat de la discussion.
La partie plus "sociale" des intéractions dans la blogosphère s'étant déplacée sur Twitter/Facebook, il est temps de nous rappeler, blogueurs, que nous sommes des gens qui écrivons. Le flux de nos discussions dans l'instant disparaît dans le passé du temps qui avance, mais nos articles d'il y a cinq ans sont toujours aussi lisibles qu'au premiers jours.
Nous sommes en train de laisser la blogosophère glisser de nos mains dans celles des marketeux, experts SEO et autres professionnels de l'image. N'attendons pas qu'il soit trop tard.
[en]
I hope the provocative title grabbed your attention.
Let me say it straight out: my blog is not dead, neither are our links.
But I still have a point.
Twitter is IRC on steroids, for those of you who have already experienced the irresistable draw of a chatroom full of smart witty people, 24/7. Twitter is my very own IRC channel, where I do not have to hear those I do not care about. It’s less geeky than IRC, which means that many of my “online spaces” collide there.
It’s intoxicating. I love it. I can spend all day there.
But that’s not why I would provocatively say that it has killed my blog. Twitter is a content-sharing space, not just a super IRC channel. Found an interesting link? Five years ago, it would have morphed into a blog post, because that was pretty much the only way to share it. Nowadays, dump it in Twitter. Arrived safely at destination? Again, 5 years ago, blog post. Now, tweet.
New tools have an impact on how we use old tools. Sometimes we abandon them altogether, but most of the time, we just redefine the way we use them. This is what I was trying to explore in the first panel I ever moderated, at BlogTalk 2008 (crappy video).
So, no, Twitter did not kill my blog, but take a group of bloggers and give them Twitter accounts, and the temperature of the blogosphere changes. All the high-speed stuff moves to Twitter.
If you just look at the present, it’s no big deal. People are still connecting. That’s what all this social media/software is about, right? Connecting people. Online. But the problem with us spending all our time swimming in the real-time stream is that it’s just that, a real-time stream. Not much is left of it once it has passed.
Take this short piece about translation I wrote nearly 10 years ago. It’s not a masterpiece, but it’s still there, as readable as it was when I wrote it. Had this taken place on Twitter, nothing much would be left of it. Gone with the wind, if I dare say.
Many many years ago when I first started blogging (can you tell I’m on a nostalgic streak?), blogs did not have comments. Hell, I barely even had permalinks when I started. Permalinks were the key, though: they allowed bloggers to link to each other’s writings.
And we did. Conversations would bounce from blog to blog. They weren’t chatty like on IM, IRC, or Twitter. They were blog-post-speed conversations. We would have to think (a little) before we wrote.
Even though comments are a wonderful invention and I would never want to take them back, they did ruin this, in a way. People started leaving comments all over the place and didn’t come back to their blogs to write about the conversations they were participating in. It’s one of the reasons I was so excited about coComment when it came out, or services like BackType (which also seems to have backed out of tracking comments one makes) or Disqus. (Aside: see, I’d love somebody to hire me to do some research and write a memo on the current state of the comment-tracking-sphere and all the players involved. I could totally see myself doing that.)
With comments came less of an incentive to link to each other on our blogs. With Twitter (and Facebook), less of an incentive to share certain things on our blogs, and also, less of an incentive to comment, as it became much easier to just “tweet a quickie” to the post author (therefore making our activity visible to all our followers). And with the death of Technorati tags (I’ll call it that), we bloggers are now connecting to each other on other social networks than the blogosphere.
I think it’s time to actively reclaim the blogosphere as our own, after leaving it for too long at the hands of marketing and PR.
Bloggers, it’s time to wake up! Write blog posts. Link to your fellow bloggers. Leave comments on their posts, or better, respond to them on your blogs.
We don’t have to abandon Twitter and Facebook — just remember that first and foremost, we are writers, and that “conversation” (though ’tis a wonderful thing) is not writing.
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