(2013-02-06) Deep Dark Social Network

Back in Oct'2012 Alex Madrigal wrote about a rough attempt to recognize the size of "Dark Social", the passing of links through media like EMail and Instant Messaging that didn't provide Referer data. Everyone else had data to back them up. I had my experience as a teenage nerd in the 1990s. I was not about to shake Social Media marketing firms with my tales of ICQ friends and the analogy of Dark Social to dark energy.

Richie Siegel pondered the benefit of a FaceBook group for students who would be attending a particular college in the coming year. The only benefit of the group I can think of was that it helped gather “background information.” You could see if you had mutual friends and find out where people lived. But this information isn’t enough to sustain a friendship let alone spark one.

Ben Brooks writes about the incompleteness of the picture we get of people through Social Networking. “I thought you were fired?” “No, I was harassed.” “Woah, that wasn’t on Facebook.”

After Aaron Swartz's suicide, Danah Boyd writes about the challenge of giving/receiving community support through the public Internet. I spent countless hours anonymously talking to strangers about my demons without being tracked or identified or outed. I used Live Journal to be deeply vulnerable among friends in an environment where we all understood that it was a site where you shared your struggles and everyone respected that. I lashed out in ways that helped create friendships as a byproduct of getting help. And I started blogging in a context where putting yourself out there enabled a small community of caring folks to listen and be supportive in all sorts of unique ways. Today, I don’t have that luxury. My internet is painfully public... Where are geeks allowed to be vulnerable today?.. We’ve made geek culture something to watch, an economic engine, a dependency. And in doing so, we haven’t enabled Safe Space-s to grow.

• I Commented: We need to join small private spaces where it’s understood that you don’t copy/forward other people’s words. (update: see Social Warrens)
• She responded: the solution is not just to find better ways of being pseudonymous or to find ways of locking down and privatizing conversations in a secure way. Yes, these work to a certain degree. But this wouldn’t have worked for me growing up because I wasn’t cool enough to be in those communities. I didn’t know who I wanted to see, who would give me support. The value for me was that, in a time when the internet was geeky, I could assume certain values writ large. So jumping into IRC or Usenet meant accepting certain norms without having to define them or bound them. We’ll never go back to those days. And we don’t solve it by trying to create weird artificial constructions. But I genuinely don’t know what it means to construct safe space for geeks in this configuration of the internet. I’m at a loss. This is why I think it needs innovation. And by innovation I mean more than a repurposing of existing technical blocks. And... as blogs got larger audiences (circa ?2004?) and social media spiked, blogging started feeling more siloed. I was blogging to my audience; you were blogging to yours. The audience wasn’t necessarily other bloggers. And it became a performance, not a community.

I still think some sort of private space would allow people to be more real/vulnerable/Deep: Deep/Dark Social Networking. You'd want some level of integration-with, or recognition-of, the more-public Social Networking world, because you'd want to keep the lite stuff out there, so that the private space would have a reinforced culture/value of depth and privacy. And the public, less-vulnerable bits would stay public to, among other things trigger Group Forming (there are definitely people I've "met" online that I would feel safe around in deeper conversations). (So I think PathCom fails at this - plus the Mobile-device limit is typing-long/deep-thoughts-hostile...)