To me the web used to be this great place to GET information, GET entertainment and GET to know people, that is; if I wanted to. But for about a year now I have the feeling the web is taking the lead in our relationship. I get more and more emails from people I (vaguely) know inviting me for all kinds of networks. It seems that every other website I visit, wants me to register before I can do something (because that is how they think you build a community), so now I am a registered user at a gazillion websites. I joined Myspace and LinkedIn but not all my friends are on there. In short; my beloved web is giving me a headache at times.
In search for people who share my overload feelings, I stumbled upon Deborah Schultz, who coined the term Continuous Partial Community. This term is derived from Linda Stone’s Continuous Partial Attention which addresses the infoplotion overload many of us live in today.
The continous partial community is described by Schultz as: “we are spread very thin and what we end up with is nothing like a traditional idea of ‘community’ but more of being partially connected continuously to a number of hubs through a variety of complex spokes.”
The time of social network divergence is not over. We see new social networks pop-up everywhere. It is time for convergence! A first sign of that is 8 hands. It’s a tool with which you can access all your social networks (MySpace, Blogs, Flickr, YouTube etc.) from a single entry point, and knows exactly what is happening on all of your social networks in real time. The virtual one-stop-shop for all you social networks.
It is still a beta version and not for the Mac yet, so I have yet to test it. But I am glad there are more people like me and convergence tools are being build. 8 hands seems like something I ‘ve been waiting for!
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i have some trouble with your thinking. i can imagine you are somewhat overwhelmed, but nobody is forcing you to participate. what is wrong with some communities? what is wrong with a number of places where you know people? sounds quite like ‘ordinary’ life to me.
i consider myself old but if a ‘digital native’ reads this she probably has no clue what the problem is. what is the problem? is the problem of all these communities ‘all these communities’ or are we in a world that ‘we are not equipped to deal with’?
i think it is the second. perhaps 8 hands is a tool to help digital immigrants impersonate a digital native kids.
Nobody is forcing me to participate, but if my friends are spread out over various social networks and I do want to be in network with them, I have to join all those networks.
Wouldn’t it be great if we’d be in the same place? Think of it as a messenger tool. If half your friends would have msn, some skype and the rest would be on two other services you’d have to run four applications. I’d rather run one.
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And I get an overload feeling because I have to register at every other website, once I want to do something interactive. As a registered user I am part of their ‘community’.
Thimon, interesting thought… I cannot really qualify the problem yet… is this a problem of the product or the generation. Some comments:
First, I think there are many varieties of what is a Community. Eg. what is the difference between a band, a tribe, a group and a society?
Secondly, personally I dislike tools like these (same as RSS readers). I tend to see them as leeches on the community… Like you are eavesdropping on a group of people without attending there. Communities are only valueable if you want top be a part of it, usually because they add to your (self-choosen) identity. A clear example is the fact that people with RSS readers hardly ever comment, while visitors of a site feel for more connected.
So maybe 8-hands (or technology) is not your solution, but CHOOSE. you can’t please us all =)
I disagree on the comment that ‘readers’ and ‘aggregators’ are leeches on the community. I’m a big fan of Netvibes (www.netvibes.com) which is both a RSS-reader, and a social network aggregator (and actually a virtual replacement of my computer). It allows me to cover more bases and actually interact much more than I used to. In addition a recently joined Twitter (www.twitter.com) which is all about eavesdropping; I can see/read what my friends are doing and opt-in to join a discussion. The fact that it’s non-intrusive actually lowers the barrier for participation.
First of all… nice to hear from you Almar!
Interesting thought. I still think that rss-readers (so far) focus too much on the content and not the context and are thereby undermining the community. WHat I mean is that the mark-up of a text, the images, the comment-tree, the place within the site is content too. It’s like a real conversation where you have the body-language which is a huge part of the message. RSS has very limited body-language (I must admit it starts to improve a little). The structure of an RSS is very post based while I think the story is not within the post… the horizontal intertextualiity (how the post relates to the rest of the content) is evenly important. Therefor I think that RSS-readers are leeches for your community. But hey… you have that in real life as well… but evenly irritating =)
I’m not saying we should stop it or it should be made technically impossible because I agree that it helps you cover a broader base… but by empowering you to choose more selectively how much you interact with a site, post, community makes for me the inter-persona-bonding less. It is like diluting your attention span… it becomes broader in its footprint but to my opinion flatter in its intensity.
With an internet so far highly focussed on eyeballs… people will cheer for a broader distribution of your attention span (let’s be honest without the tools you describe above you might have never visited our blog)… but I suspect that Web 3.0 will be more and more about deeper relations than more relations/ contacts etc.
So will Span of Control migrate to Span of Attention?