Think about all the friends, relatives, and acquaintances you have. Compare those to the online people you’re connected to, who you follow, who you’ve friended, who you haven’t yet met in person.
When I think of these two groups personally, they are unequal and uneven. They just don’t match up. These different networks we have are at odds with each other.
And somehow the first feeling I get from this is that it’s to our detriment
Either we have real life friends who haven’t yet gotten active online on whatever tools are most popular, they haven’t started a blog etc… Or we have people we’ve met digitally that we haven’t yet had the chance to meet in person. Is this a limitation or what makes our relationships with some people unique? You might have friends that are everywhere online, just on Facebook, or they might just write their blog. You might have friends who don’t subscribe to participating online at all. When you have different friends that fit into these different sort of groups then you have all of a sudden the need to classify and groups different sets of people to understand how communicate with them, e.g., “I want to share with link with my friends on Twitter, oh wait John isn’t on Twitter, I’ll have to email it to him or sent it to him over Facebook”
That’s really inconvenient. It’s maybe the one thing I like the best about Facebook. How I know most people I know will be on their and connected to me, but it still limits the ways I can communicate and share with friends. Why can’t I have MY network. I want to be able to share what I want to share, to communicate with who I want to communicate to, how I want to.
So this is a pretty common problem that everyone deals with. But imagine what could be done if these different groups were all in sync. When the channels of communication were as hidden as the backend those systems ran on.
We each have huge personal webs of resources that we’re in the middle of, but because of the issues of technologies, platforms, and participation, we have huge pieces missing from these webs. Sometimes it can still be difficult to reach out to certain parts of out network, or it could be impossible to create linkages between two different points.
Does the unique shape of this web we have create artificial behaviours we adopt in order to work as a part of this web more easily. Staying away from the difficult points, and keeping to the closer, easier to reach inner circles.
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- Groups: The Secret Weapon of the Social Web (readwriteweb.com)
photo credit Jared
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