Last week I was lucky enough to attend a Digital Surrey event in Farnham. Ade Oshineye talked about ‘What happens after social networking?’. The talk explored areas that I believe most of us have already been aware of albeit not specifically identified and labelled. However, Ade’s opening question of the presentation ‘What is Social Networking’ really intrigued me and one I have thought about quite a bit since.
I have not reached any specific conclusions but it has made me widen my previous definition of the phrase. My vague answer to the question was loosely based on the term being a band to wrap tidily around the usage of Social Network sites and applications. Defining what makes a site or application part of the ‘Social Network’ is a lot of harder, the key characteristics would be ‘membership’, ‘contribution’ and ultimately the linking up with other ‘members’ to make a ‘Network’. Each individuals contribution leads to a shared experience. I was not entirely happy with that definition and preferred one of the audiences definition of ‘What is Social Networking?’ being ‘Knackering’ as much more accurate.
Having mulled, cogitated, ummed and erred the reason why I wasn’t happy with any previous definition is that there is no way that I think Social Networking should be restricted to be a wholly online experience. I was standing in a room before the talk enjoying a glass of wine talking to a few colleagues and clients, which I now consider to be both social and networking. Why is the buzzword surrounding a breed of technology tools specific to the web given such a generic term. ‘Email’ was a great term and works well, everyone knew that it was strongly related to what we were already doing with ‘mail’ but with the electronic bit stuck on the front and then shortened to ‘e’ for that user friendly touch, nice. ‘Texting’, works perfectly too. No room for confusion as the verb to ‘text’ was descriptive and did not leave any room for confusion.
Surely social networking is nothing more than what we and the rest of the animal kingdom have been doing since the beginning of time. Hanging out, chatting, learning stuff, sharing stuff, bitching about stuff, flirting and generally interacting.