What is Facebook to most people over the age of 25? It’s a never-ending class reunion mixed with an eternal late-night dorm room gossip session mixed with a nightly check-in on what coworkers are doing after leaving the office. In other words, it’s a place where you go to keep tabs on your friends and acquaintances.

— Cliff Watson

Are we on these services to communicate, or are we on these services to show off? This post has me thinking a lot about how I use social networking. Hopefully, it’ll have you thinking too.

Whenever we interact online, particularly in text, a lot gets lost. No emoticon, Markdown syntax, mock HTML, or simple caging can truly capture the tonalities of actual speech. Body language is completely out. We’re left with a mode of communication where intent needs, even begs to be defined early on. I suspect that this is the reason why a lot of online communication tools can become method of broadcasting cruelty. Part of how we come to know people, in the real world, is through knowing their face, the tone of their voice, their mannerisms. We are able to personify someone, even if we don’t know their name. So much communication on the Internet, even in the age of Social Media, is de-personified, and that’s where the trouble starts.

De-personification of the people we deal with on our communication mediums allows us to forget ourselves. When we see the person on the other end as a non-person, I suspect this triggers a change in how we choose to act. We’re freed of the traditional expectations of interpersonal communication and the concepts of basic civility. So, we’re less judicious with our choice of words, we’re more aggressive in our stances, and we’re less willing to consider anything that differs with our point of view. De-personalization is also a stepping stone to outright dehumanization, and the lifting of all boundaries on behavior. Once a person is seen as something other than human, history has shown us time and time again what happens.

Anonymity is merely an additional layer of armor in a dangerous world of de-personalized communication. This may have been part of the reason Google insisted on real names and images for profiles on Google Plus. [1] It’s a way to keep people slightly more civil and honest. I don’t know how effective it is, however, because of the point I made at the start of this essay. Online communication is still, largely, textual, and strips out the very things that help us define a person in a human space.

It takes a conscious act of will to see the people we interact with online as more than just pixels on a screen. Somewhere, on the other side of all those cables and boxes, sitting at a keyboard, is another person just like you and I. They think, they feel, they sense, and they communicate just like us, because they are us. Empathy may be innate, but I think only to a degree. Empathy is a skill we develop and learn through interacting with people, and especially in a space where we can get the full range of interaction. When someone lives in a space into which interaction is filtered down to words on a screen, unless a sense of empathy has been built ahead of time, it’s hard to view them as anything more than words.

Online, we all live in a social bubble. Our bubble is permeable, but only to a certain extent. We allow in those things that please us, in one form or another. [1] Whatever it is you don’t want to see, there’s a tool to keep it out of your bubble, from keyword filters for your Twitter client, to ad blocking extensions for your browser. All it takes is a few minutes, and a few clicks, and your bubble is complete. I’ve written before about how easy it is to get trapped in an echo chamber of social media and news. When everything is on demand, there’s no incentive for us to demand the things that we don’t like. Our bubble is the echo chamber.

Amplifying this problem are the tools and algorithms that many services use to provide “custom” and “curated” content. Every social network scours the connections of you and your friends so that it suggests you follow people who are similar to what and who you follow already. Amazon.com knows the movies, music, and books you like, and will suggest other media that covers those same areas. These algorithms are constantly being honed and improved to provide you with stuff you’re more likely to want, which makes it all the more unlikely it will offer you something that exists outside of the bubble of your tastes and preferences. Statistically, you’re less likely to consume something that isn’t like something you’re already into, so there’s no incentive to provide anything else.

If you’re viewing this from a supply side perspective, wherein it’s your job to exchange goods for money, there’s no problem here. You’re merely filling demand, faster and more effectively than you would have otherwise. Reducing a person’s interests and tastes down to a few keywords that can be cross-referenced in a database search is just good business. If you’re viewing this from a demand perspective, it’s easy to see this as a boon as well. “Amazon, or Netflix knows me so well, that it knows I’ll be interested in Japanese Kaiju movies, stoner comedies, and albums by 90s alt-rock bands. [2] It’s so much easier for me to find something now.” It’s a system by which our own laziness causes us to be denied opportunity to explore something outside of our comfort zone, because of our reliance on algorithms that decide for us. It’s not the algorithm’s fault. It can only work with the data we give it.

Fortunately, we’re not locked into what the algorithms supply us. As long as we’re interacting with other people, whether face-to-face or from behind keyboards, there’s the possibility of being exposed to something outside of that comfort zone. We’ll always have friends, family, co-workers, and casual acquaintances with their own tastes and preferences that differ from our own. Loathe as I am to use “organic” to describe it, as it’s become a buzzword, it’s an accurate way of describing how we get exposed to new ideas. We allow these into our bubble because they come from a trusted source, someone we’ve connected with despite our own bubbles–a new voice to break up the echo chamber. We’ll always be more than keywords in a database.

Within a few years, a self-identifying group of people called webloggers realized the power of that “What’s New” page, especially through the lens of a personal POV… Those weblogs were idiosyncratic, about a little bit of everything, and sent people away to keep them coming back — a stark contrast to the late-’90s portal strategy of “stickiness.”

Jason Kottke on the Nature of Blogs and Writing Your Own World Book Encyclopedia

My first exposure to blogging as a concept came around in the days of what were termed “E/N sites,” which was an abbreviation for “Everything / Nothing”—an apt description of the content. It’s a concept that lives on, most prominently on Tumblr, but it’s moved into the social network space. The blog, as I came to know it in the late 90s and early 2000s was a public journal, a place to put your thoughts in front of what you hoped would be a sympathetic audience. Nothing exemplified this more than LiveJournal. A microcosmic Internet in its prime, LiveJournal made its bones as being a place where you could write your deepest, darkest thoughts and share them with either the world, or just a small circle of friends. [1]

It may be a function of the innate writer in me, but I rarely shared links in the way a lot of the early bloggers did (and still do). I’d rather sit and bang out five hundred words or more about how I’m feeling and what I’m thinking than just link to something. [2] And I rarely can think about one thing for very long. Neither, it seems, can Jason. “Funny to say that about new media, but if you look at other blogs… they cover narrow beats… By contrast, kottke.org is still written mostly in first person by me and ranges from essays on human extinction to videos of competitive wood planing in Japan.” When I registered this domain over a decade ago, the name was chosen with the mindset that I wouldn’t have a narrow focus. [3]

Kottke notes that the blogs that cover narrow beats “are amenable to advertising,” which may explain the proliferation thereof. Still, when I think of blogging with more focus, my mind goes towards John Gruber and Merlin Mann’s famous SXSW talk on blogging. Four years later, Obsession + Topic + Voice is still a winning formula—in as much as succeeding at anything can be reduced to a formula—for creating a successful blog. Though this, of course, depends on your definition of success. There’s never a one-size-fits-all strategy for doing anything, anywhere. I hope I’m not putting words in Kottke’s mouth when I say that I doubt he blogs for money. He blogs to share his obsessions. I do too, just opting to share a smaller subset thereof.

We share cool stuff with our friends, and we share banal stuff with our friends. For most people, however, that sharing has moved from personal blogs to a space that is both more and less public. These are spaces like Tumblr, Facebook, and Twitter where, with the default settings, anyone can see what you’re sharing, but you know there’s a built-in, and defined audience of people you know and care about. It’s a space where feedback is immediate, if a bit less shallow than back in the old, golden days. What works for us may not work for them. Certainly, the barrier to entry is a lot lower now.

There’s always going to be a place for people who want to write and share their voice. There’s always going to be a place for people who want to create, as Jason says, “their own World Book Encyclopedia.” These places will overlap, though maybe not quite as much as they used to when this whole thing was getting started. Everyone has a voice, and everyone wants to be heard by someone. Now, they can, and we’re all the better for it.

I recently had the chance to talk with Dalton Caldwell, founder of App.Net. He was in New York, and came to join a few App.Net users for a brunch meet-up at Pershing Square Café. [1] While meeting him was great on its own, talking up the future of his service made my all the happier that I took the plunge and joined up. It’s clear that App.Net is trying to be a service that exists for the benefit of its users. This is why they’re charging people to join the service [2] Having a stream of income from the people who use the service allows them to not be beholden to outside forces, be they venture capital firms who want to run up the value for an IPO, or advertisers who want to exploit the audience for their own gain.

There’s two types of businesses on the Internet: those who put users first, and those who put advertisers first. There’s no mutual exclusivity between free services and services that put users first, but one should be suspicious of any free service unless they have a clear way to keep the service running that won’t require them to capitulate to the demands of people who offer large sums to money for access to its users. To put it another way, you’re either the customer or you’re the product.

Freemium services survive because enough people are paying for the product that the free users get subsidized. Dropbox is the canonical example of this: as a free user you get 2GB of space, while the smallest paid tier gives you 100GB. Dropbox is, hopefully, making enough from paying customers to provide their service with enough overhead to pay for the free users, cover their rent, the cost of the Internet connection, salaries, power, cooling for the servers, and have enough left over for growth. [3] App.Net is hopefully making enough money on the early adopters, paid-tier members, and developers who bought early API access that they can provide 10GB of storage, allow and encourage third-party apps, and build up the technology behind their service. Both of these companies are putting the users first.

Compare this to Twitter, Facebook, Google, or any of a huge number of companies that make the bulk of their profits from collecting and selling a user’s personal information to the highest bidder. Not all of them make it public, but it’s important to ask yourself that, if a company is giving something away, what will allow them to keep it going for the long haul. Mailbox for the iPhone was created, from the start, to be sold.. If not, they would have, or at least should have charged to use it. Thankfully, they sold to a company that puts users first. Meanwhile, Vine sells itself to Twitter, a company that knows it can take what people are doing on this new service and make money from it in a far less ethical way.

Few people put this amount of thought into the services they use, free or otherwise. The power of “free” is enough to short-circuit more rational parts of our brain that recognize that there is a cost to something. We just might not be paying it in cash, or a recurring charge on our credit card. More importantly, fewer people ever will put this amount of thought into the services they use, until something happens to one of them that will knock them out of the complacent malaise dominant, free services engender. Discussions like this have happened on the web with each free service that gets bought out or shut down, be it Instagram or Google Reader, but they’re becoming more frequent now. I feel the tipping point will be reached soon, and when it does, the way we, as a society, look at the Internet will change, dramatically.