How social are we?

CC BY-NC-ND by /dam

Are we really being social and collaborative on the net or is it all a bit too self-centred? We all love sharing our favourite links, videos, news and pearls of wisdom but where's the social element in that? Isn't it all simply about collecting followers and likes and cultivating our own image? These questions are raised in an interesting article by Brain Andreas, The Secret, Selfish Side Of Social-Curation Sites, where he argues that we haven't really grasped the collaborative nature of today's social web. Most people, instead of engaging in discussion about someone else's post and genuinely interacting, simply "like" or retweet the post without spending any more time considering the post's value.

"Being constantly inundated with our social updates tires us out--we’re fatigued and we’re annoyed with each other. Here’s why: while it is true that no one care’s about your trip to Mexico, your weird tastes in music and the dinner that you just made, we still want to be involved. But we hate the self-serving. We’re re-pinning and re-tweeting without context, without collaboration. The Internet will always suffer from social media fatigue until it allows for seamless collaboration among multi-platforms, multi-dimensions, and multi-media. This may be idealistic view but it’s not impossible."

Of course we all love to get reactions to our posts. There's an awfully empty feeling when you write something particularly clever and no-one even "likes" it. We're all busy curating our identities and trade marks and there certainly is a lot of egocentric activity in social media. There's a degree of interactivity there but it's not real collaboration. One of the comments to the article notes that collaboration is best when identity becomes subordinate to the task, as in Wikipedia. Here the identity of the authors is unimportant but the result of the collaboration is the sole focus. Social media need to be lifted a stage higher to escape from the limitations of liking and retweeting.

"My hope that social curation becomes social, becomes collaborative--a dynamic way of sharing multimedia content with others to create results with substance. I believe in a better way to curate, taking the genius behind Storifying, Pinning, and Instagraming and elevating it to create global connections. Now, one question that remains--is technology willing to open itself to collaboration?"