Research

In the past week, danah boyd has written a couple of very interesting posts about Google + and their policy of not allowing people to post using pseudonyms.  In my research, it’s rare to find people who want to be anonymous in their ongoing online interactions.  But many people do want to to be pseudononymous–they have an identity that is ongoing and important, but it is not linked to their “real” identity.  I think that is reasonable, especially when people have a profession that could be harmed by their online identity.

Danah presents her arguments well and I don’t want to rehash them.  What I find interesting is the sociomateriality (as Orlikowski calls it) or the sociomaterialism (as I’ve been calling it) that is inherent in the differences between twitter, Facebook and now Google+.  The sociomaterialism argument, as I understand and apply it, for understanding how these three social media are being used involves not only the technological differences between them–character limits on updates (or not), the possibility to “like” or retweet or +1 a status update (and what those differences semantically mean), and reciprocal viewing of updates like when you friend someone on FB (or not like twitter or G+). But also the cultural, normative, and individual use differences between these three systems which makes it impossible to say FACEBOOK IS LIKE THIS.  TWITTER IS LIKE THAT.  and GOOGLE + WILL BE LIKE THIS OTHER THING.

Yes, there are differences in use and culture between the three—FB started on a college campus with younger users.  For me, it is a personal social medium to keep in touch with friends and friendly colleagues.  I hide the posts of people who only post their business info and all the game updates/requests/annoyances that my friends post.  Obviously, though, other people use it for business purposes and for gaming purposes or I wouldn’t have to hide them.  That’s the individual use part that fits into an acceptable normative use for those people.  And the technological options make a difference (liking a business, liking an update or status, writing a note vs. a status update) but the use in practice (who you friend, what business you like, who you hide or not, how often you read, how often you post, what you want out of your use of FB) is emergent with the technology and the social (and personal) expectations.  It is NOT an interaction in the classic sense (more technology and more social desires lead to more satisfaction).  It *is* an emergent process of use that can be understood by watching and inquiring about individual developmental processes, preferred technologies and group influences.  I do believe we can understand FB in a generalizable way for particular interests and uses; but I don’t think we can ever say FACEBOOK IS LIKE THIS.

I think understanding twitter takes the same sort of efforts and conceptual approach.  I first approached twitter as if it was a new social media in which I could follow the blog authors and FB friends.  I did not find it interesting that way at all.  After about a year, I came back to twitter and began to use it as more of a professional networking tool, but even then, it took a while and a few role models to figure out what I wanted to use twitter for.  My use of twitter is mostly professional and keeping in touch with professionals in my research community. But that is certainly not how other people use it. (Thank goodness)  And indeed the best uses I’ve ever had with Twitter have involved real time conversations on time delimited events with groups of others using a # whom I may not have known beforehand.  I can’t even think of how to explain that without an emergent process. And sociomaterialism seems like an apt theoretical lens to use.

At this point, Google + is understood as developing after Facebook and Twitter.  It’s norms are set (or trying to be set) not from the ground up, but apparently as a reaction to what has already gone on with FB and Twitter.  No one is naive on this technology–neither the users nor the developers.  It’s certainly more professional than personal for me, even though I have circles for both.  But it is  best understood in context and in comparison with FB and twitter, at least now.  It may develop in ways we cannot anticipate as its culture and norms further develop (the whole point here!), but right now, at the beginning, I don’t think it’s possible to understand it outside of FB or twitter.

In any case, I hope this essay helps explain why I think sociomaterialism is such and interesting and useful theoretical approach to understanding the use and development of these social media.  Orlikowski actually argues that we should use it to understand not only uses of other technologies but also behavior in organizations–paying much more attention to the physical environment of the place of work like we do the technological features of the media on which we interact.  I completely agree with her.  But I’m starting on something a bit more manageable.