Modern Romantics and the Social Graph

I’ve been letting the Facebook Timeline design settle in now for a while. Today a developer friend was showing me the new Open Graph API (described as Facebook’s core), and it reminded me of some thoughts that have been nagging me about the deeper implications of the Timeline user experience.

The Timeline is a wonderful narrative form through which to share your story. I have been a fan of the Feltron Annual Reports for some time. I admire the way that Nicholas visualizes the data from his life, bringing it to a level of art and storytelling that is really fun to look at and digest. But it is a difficult translation into the interaction design of a social network, and I think the timeline misses some of the key areas wherein social media has the most potential.

What makes up the timeline? Fragments of data – tweets, check-ins, snapshots, other people’s videos, and numbers. And these fragments come together to paint a picture of a user. Certainly, the way this data is collected and contextualized makes it interesting and rich from a storytelling standpoint. But it also turns “sharing” into a form of modern romanticism, so focused on the individual and turning the individual into the “core” of the platform. There is something sad about this – and something strange in the conflation of such romantic expression of one’s life with the promise and reach of social media. It feels like the social graph becomes millions of separate emotional projections competing for validation.

Social media at its best – in fact, the promise of the Internet itself – is not simply a canvas on which to publish our stories. Yes, it can do that. And yes, that is an important human function. But the transformational promise of this medium has always been one of interaction, not one of narrative. Interaction is light, not heavy. Interaction is fluid and dynamic – not linear. Interaction is unmanageable and prone to deviate from any course set for it. Interaction creates complex adaptive systems – not memorial walls.

This is why I have come to feel that platforms like Instagram and Twitter are more aligned with the positive potential of the Web. They encourage and empower the lightweight sharing of fragments – but stay focused on that. The content isn’t meant to be so precious – there is no bid for immortality. They remain focused on the stuff you share, without trying to immortalize the content as a grand gesture of its royal author. They simply provide a means to an end, not the end itself. That happens elsewhere. The form is more in tune with the function.

What do you think?

Views expressed here are my own, not my employer’s or anyone else’s for that matter. All rights reserved, (c) Jason Sack 2012. Reproduce freely with link and attribution.

Experience Design + Community Building – MinneWebCon ’09

I had the pleasure of speaking at the University of Minnesota’s MinneWebCon event on Monday, April 6th. I even got Doc Searls’ to autograph my copy of his legendary book The Cluetrain Manifesto.

Enjoyed meeting everyone – keep the conversation going.

Bon Iver’s Breathtaking Beauty, Brought to You By the Network Age

A couple weeks ago I stumbled across a profile of Justin Vernon’s musical platform Bon Iver. It wasn’t in Pitchfork, or City Pages, or The Onion. Believe it or not, it was in fact the Wall Street Journal. My colleague Paul Isakson had turned me on to Bon Iver last year, lending me a copy of For Emma, Forever Ago. I had become an ardent fan of Bon Iver through that word of mouth; the album is a masterpiece full of gut-wrenching, heart-rending songs about love and loss. Delicate and urgent, it’s acoustic guitars and layered vocals float against a backdrop of subdued, ethereal electric guitar textures. Simple drums are placed only where needed to drive the emotion. It is really a phenomenal album.

Justin Vernon of Bon Iver

So why the profile in the Wall Street Journal? Is Vernon also a financial planner who predicted the current recession? The profile is focused on the way Bon Iver achieved such critical success in such short order. That is to say, the Internet. Although it shouldn’t be news to anyone at this point that the rise of interactive media has upended the marketing and distribution channels of art and entertainment, I just can’t stay away from a good success story. There are so many Bon Iver’s out there who even a decade ago would never have made it out of their backyard. And yet here’s Vernon, recording his heart out on a computer in his parent’s cabin in Northern Wisconsin, and lo and behold, the work actually found it’s way into the world.

Vernon received great interest after posting the songs on MySpace (oh yeah, WSJ, MySpace… now I get it. Well I ripped MySpace enough in my last post, so I guess this evens it out). In his own words, the buzz spread “like wildfire” – and Bon Iver was on the map. Now Vernon had played in a band previously and so he had a credible platform, but nevertheless, the immediate impact within the digital landscape was substantial, allowing Bon Iver to sign with an Indie label and release the album in real space. He has since toured heavily and appeared on Late Night with David Letterman, and the album has sold nearly 100,000 copies and landed in the Billboard Top 200. The people-powered network has catapulted Bon Iver from the woods of Northern Wisconsin to Paris, to Australia, and to the stage of the Ed Sullivan Theater – in one album’s time. Bon Iver’s newest album, Blood Bank, is slated for release in a just a couple weeks.

As Shakespeare said, the truth will out. Never has it been truer than in the network age.

References:
Chart Info on Wikipedia