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.

Amen, Aimee Mann

A colleague accidentally clicked on a promotion while we were discussing YouTube’s video UI, and when I saw Aimee’s name it caught my eye. I’m a big fan, some of her songs are on my best “rip your heart out, despair, and keep going” list. No one does bittersweet like Ms. Mann. I mean, she played a nihilist in The Big Lebowski.

The Aimee Mann Freeway Video Contest promotion calls for fans to upload videos of themselves singing the song Freeway from her new album @#%&*! Smilers. The winner gets to perform the song with Aimee live.

The teaser shows Aimee playing her brilliant anthem Save Me and after a moment, a cross-fade reveals another musician playing the song, and another, and so on… Beyond the fact that the song itself is absolutely stunningly beautiful, this treatment is itself simple and open – raw and vulnerable. Direct participation is one step beyond the spate of mix-your-own multi-track Internet releases. Aimee actually elevates her fans into a position of equality. And the result is an amazing expression of the power of music and how much it connects us – a glimmer of hope, and an acknowledgment of our interdependence. Step aside music business, Aimee Mann is in the house, and she’s bringing her fans with her.

This project also underscores the transformative power of interactive media when used to foster a conversation rather than to sell a product. It is a true expression of human interconnectedness, not a transaction. Sing it, brothers and sisters! Thanks Aimee.

Fake Friends

Remember that Joan Jett and the Blackhearts song, Fake Friends? Ok, I’m dating myself here. The refrain went something like this: “You got nothin’ to lose, you don’t lose when you lose fake friends.” Add your punk rock growl and slabs of saturated bar chords for full effect.

I had the pleasure of seeing Joseph Jaffe speak at a MIMA event yesterday evening here in Minneapolis. He talked about how his daughter was better at vetting her friends online than he was; an interesting topic to me – as both a user experience designer and as a parent who has watched his seven-year-old son spend more than his share of time in Webkinz world. Jaffe addressed the question of quantity versus quality when it comes to online relationships. What makes a relationship real? Whether between two people, a group of people, an individual and a product, an individual and a brand?

While this was rattling around in my sleep-deprived brain, my wife sent me this article about the reaction of some young fans to the announcement that the promotional Disney VMK gaming site was going to never-never land. The fans have created their own campaign to save the game, mainly because the friendships that have formed in the game are important to the young players.

Frank Lloyd Wright once said “buildings, too, are children of Earth and Sun.” We have internalized the network medium as a culture, and the experiences we have online are very real in a cognitive sense. This is precisely why as designers we must recognize that we are creating experiences, not products. Or as Peter Merholz said, “the experience IS the product.”