I & K Social Net

Last week I got through the EDGE newsletter to know about the talk given by Clay Shirky at the Web 2.0 Expo held in San Francisco (CA) last April 2008. In his talk titled: GIN, TELEVISION, AND COGNITIVE SURPLUS Clay explains what he believes is the ooportunity wwe have to take advantage of the existingf Cognitive Surplus, we’ve realized it exists afteer decades of beeing passive in front of our TV sets.

The opportunity he talks about is exemplified by a girls who was watching a video on TV and after a while she jumpred in to the TV set and looked after something behind the screen, and finally she asked her dad “Where’s the mouse?”. Thus, interaction is the new paradigm of using the media.

Clay Shisrky referes all the time during his speech to the sceptical view of a journalist who still believes that the 20th century paradigm of the media will continue, and doesn’t trust clay when he states that we are facing a revolution as important as the industrial revolution.

It is worth to see Clay’s video here: http://blip.tv/play/AbTSFIa8DQ or to read the text in here: http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge255.html.

His final statement is something that all the people who are working and studying in the Network Society or the Information Society would probably support:

We’re going to look at every place that a reader or a listener or a viewer or a user has been locked out, has been served up passive or a fixed or a canned experience, and ask ourselves, “If we carve out a little bit of the cognitive surplus and deploy it here, could we make a good thing happen?” And I’m betting the answer is yes.

It often appears in some posts or messages on the net claiming about how we are assuming the wrong use of some terminology with much tolerance while scientist and academics have difficulty to spread out and convince to the public that the fair use of terminology is essential to build knowledge.

Social networks are now very attractive and everyone of us is realizing how many of our friends are subscribed to a “social network” in the Internet, while very few of them know exactly what it all is about social networks. It seems logical to differentiate between social networks, as a discipline that is used to study the relations in our society and “social networking platforms” or “social networking media” which are instruments to support social relations between people.

I plan to study the social network inside one of these platforms, but this does not mean that I will study the platform itself, but the relations and communication among the members of the platform, that can be seen as a coherent group, even as an organization, as it is in my case.

To help people to understand what SOCIAL NETWORK SITES are I strongly recommend to read the following post: http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol13/issue1/boyd.ellison.html

Forrester Research has published recently a study on the “What’s the Social Technographics Profile of your Customer”. The results should discorage those who thaught that social networks and web 2.0 where really “fashion”. It looks like most people don’t feel like to participate and very few have interest in beein active.

What seems more important to know now is if active web 2.o ers are satisfied with their activity and feel compensated with their efforts. If Return on Effort (RoE) is high, the mass of active webers 2.0 will increase. Experts on Social Capital have no doubt on the advantage of belonging to social networks (they did not refer to virtual social networks on the Internet), but if it works outside the net, it should work also inside.

I guessm there is a direct relation between topic and satisfaction. If you belong to a network that deals with something important to you and other members feel like to share their efforts, thoughts and relations with the members, then, satisfaction should be higher. That is, cohesion and bridging around a common topic.

Here you have a video from Forrester Research:

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