Synthetic Interaction In Context: the social network debate

There seems to be a debate raging in relation to social networks recently – particularly surrounding their patronage or perhaps it’s more apt to say their end user “vigor”. Two stories in the press and subsequent blog discussions have grabbed my attention.

The first was a story suggesting if users had to pay to for Facebook or Twitter – they wouldn’t. Of course they wouldn’t! Paying for a social network like Facebook or Twitter is going back to the Web 1.0 archetype - and we’ve past all that. It’s the wrong question to be asking in the first place because it is suggesting a return to consumers of old. There may be a result from the survey – but it isn’t going to properly reflect the new directions of consumer movement. It’s quite obvious that they won’t pay for the use of social networks – especially because they are already free.

The second story floating around which does a rotation ever 6months or so is the dwindling popularity of perpetual worlds like Second Life in comparison to apps like Twitter. What we can say is that yes, SL has seen a downward turn in its media coverage in the last few yes – but we can’t base popularity on this media hype. Twitter is receiving a fever pitch of media coverage and an assumption is being drawn between media coverage and attendance of both sites. Having studies Second Life for four years and completed a PhD on the subject – I think its much better to look at the internal uses of such programs – that is how are the participants utilizing the social apps to integrate it into their everyday life. That’s when I believe you will see a vast difference between programs like SL and Twitter and Facebook. As it’s all about the process of synthetic interaction – and each interaction will have a differing context. And context is everything!

Research needs to properly address this context of synthetic interaction so that it embeds itself in the right story, asks the right questions and seeks to understand the everyday (synthetic) experience which makes the use of online social tools noteworthy. Consumers are not social dopes – they are the ones we as researchers should be watching intently for the next move. How are they transforming their world?