Social Media Week 2011 kicked off in New York City with an event yesterday morning — at the Google building, no less — that questioned how social networks have altered our behavior and our definitions of online versus offline activity. Additionally, the panelists made predictions about the future of social media in terms of use and reach. The panel members' experience spanned from neuroscience to sociology:
Social networking presents its users as their "super selves;" with friends and acquaintances tallied up, these personas seem more well-liked and privy to greater access than our analog selves. Thiel-Stern describes teens on Facebook, especially, as being keen to put "your best foot forward" with "intentionally chosen pop culture artifacts" like song lyrics — not all of which they actually like, as is the case with kids trying out hip-hop lyrics in their Facebook statuses. Yet, this behavior isn't limited to the 12-to-16-year-old set. "We're all teenage girls at heart," Thiel-Stern laughed.
Facebook's impact on our social selves is centered in the visuals, she said, especially for young women with the validation they get from their male peers. She mentioned a fascinating bit of irony: Teen girls alter photos of themselves to look older, yet their audience — their Facebook friends — already know what they look like.
"It's really difficult to make comparisons between when we do online now with what we would have done offline," Watts ventured. But when it comes to our social media lives, sorting ourselves into communities linked by common interests isn't useful; it keeps us stuck in like-minded groups that are pitted against each other.
Barth included a diagram of neurons in the cerebral cortex — the part of our brain dedicated to higher thinking — and pointed out that when all neurons are equally activated in thought, information is actually lost. It's better when different subsets are activated, each with a varying threshold for data.
Interestingly, people actually overestimate others' likes and dislikes; Watts said that there is a less than 50 percent chance that even spouses completely know their significant others' preferences.
Wahl cited SCVNGR as a platform that demonstrates how our behavior changes with developments in social media. Users are not just participants, but actually "authors" of games — games that layer over locations, grounding this social network in different places. Gameplay invites our thoughts and ideas, which we yearn to broadcast to friends and potential players. "In a virtual world," Wahl said, "the real world still counts."
Speaking of that real world ... Watts explained how scientists recreated Stanley Milgram's "small world" experiment, in which researchers relied on existing social networks — in-person ones, long before Facebook — to see if information could be passed between two people using their shared contacts. This experiment yielded the concept of "six degrees of separation." When repeated using e-mail instead of letters and a much larger pool (at least 20,000), researchers found that the average number of links between people was seven. Why was there so little change? Because, Watts said, once you make the world small, it's difficult to make it any smaller.
Small worlds ... and small minds? Thiel-Stern pointed out that moral panic, now cyberpanic, is rooted in history, especially with relation to virginal, victimized teenage girls. The fears that newspapers publicized about dance halls in 1908, she said, is exactly what people are saying about Facebook today.
The panelists were divided on the question of whether loyalty to brands, and even different networks, is dead. Citing SCVNGR, Wahl pointed out that when people create media for others to play, it encourages both parties to return to the site time and time again. But Watts had a different anecdote: Of the 100 million people on Twitter, he said, fewer than a million people tweet more than once a week.
The Q&A portion brought up the burning question: "What is the future of social networking?" Watts saw social media evolving to account for the facets of our personalities. Right now we have one online persona that we must share indiscriminately with others across the board, whether it's through Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, etc. However, that's obviously not the case in real life, when we can segregate our personal connections and make sure that the various groups — co-workers, family, romantic partners — never meet. The future, he said, is "permissioning," controlling or allowing information to pass between our friends and acquaintances.
A great question was what "givens" — assumptions with no research to back them up — the panelists had come across. Thiel-Stern stressed that researchers should not overlook race, gender, and class when discussing social media; by discounting that a population is not homogenous, they draw conclusions attributing access and power to groups who actually lack that ability.
Watts pointed out that a common assumption is that by having more friends thanks to Facebook's tallies, those friends are of lower quality — untrue. Studies in the 1990s show that people back then also had a couple hundred acquaintances, but that people didn't consider every sort of person with whom they'd interacted. In that sense, Facebook is simply a calculator counting up our friends, acquaintances, and brief encounters, showing us that people's social statuses really haven't changed.
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Stay tuned for our upcoming SMW coverage over the next few days. In the meantime, if you're in the NYC area and want to attend a few events for yourself, see what's left on the SMW NYC schedule page. Those of you outside of the city can still be part of the action by following @smwnyc and any posts tagged #smwnyc. And of course, follow my tweets @nataliezutter.
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