YouthNet blog

Tuesday Apr 17, 2007

I've Got Social Web Angst

I had a bit of a funny moment this morning whilst working my way through my bowl of muesli at my desk. It was triggered by Fiona, our Chief Exec, passing me a clipping from today's Guardian Comments section. The clipping showed an interesting article by James Harkin about the psychological effects of social networking (as in the web 2.0 meaning of the term), and you can read it here.

Whilst I was looking for the article on the Guardian website, I came across another piece called "Farewell to Facebook" by Alex Stein. Both of these articles are interesting, and both adopt a cautionary tone about the perils of social networking.

What's interesting is both articles are written by people who, judging by their pictures, are not what is commonly taken as the typical social networking demographic.*

This got thinking about a seminar I went to last week, about how non-profits can use the social web. It was a great seminar - really interesting and very good to see what other people are up to in the non-profit world.

I couldn't help but notice though that the youngest person there was probably one of my colleagues, our Communities Development Officer for the community section of TheSite.org. In fact, most of the delegates were probably over 30 years old. I know there's a good reason for this – the work related nature of the seminar meant it was more relevant for a slightly older demographic.

One of the discussions at the seminar was about the risks of user created content and the importance of moderation. The conversation moved onto Tim O'Reilly's proposed Bloggers "Code of Conduct", and what was acceptable in terms of moderation of comments and posts.

At this point someone in the audience compared the conversation we were having at the seminar to conversations on blogs. Their point was that fruitful conversations occur when all parties have followed the thread of the conversation, and if that doesn't occur then of course it'll descend into anonymous abuse, name calling or potentially much worse. I disagree – the web should be the opposite of an exclusive online "club" (eg. you can only contribute if you're clued up), and a truly valuable conversation doesn't need two highly educated people - but that's beside the point.

My point (and believe it or not I do have one), is that the vast majority of people (myself included) that talk about web 2.0, the social web, the read-write web, whatever you want to call it, are not primarily in the age demographic that drives it, as quite a few readers of Alex Stein's article recognise judging by the comments. (*I know there are plenty of people outside of the 16-24 year old age range that are completely immersed in all things 2.0, and I know that often the demographic of sites like MySpace isn't quite what you might expect, but I still think most people would agree that the Social Web is predominantly driven by young people.)

That's an obvious point that people must have mentioned before, but shouldn't we be a bit worried about it?

Or is this the way that most big (massive?) social changes happen – the people doing it just get on with it, whilst the rest of us observe, take notes and come up with names for what we're seeing?

Given that this time, the social change we're seeing arguably is the people that are doing it, doesn't that make it different?

Having talked to quite a broad range of people about "web 2.0", I would say that most of them don't know what I'm on about, a few of them don't really relate to the term "web 2.0" at all, but happily live their lives predominantly online, and the others are, in the nicest possible way (and I include myself in this), geeks, who are passionate about technology and social change.

So, my questions are:

Does any one outside of "Web 2.0 World" care about this stuff at all?

Does the majority of "the people" that is at the heart of this huge cultural social shift know they're part of it?

Does it matter if they don't?

Phew, existentialist crisis over.