Social Life of Information

Social media is a pretty hot topic of late. In addition to the popular press and blogosphere take on the phenomenon, there’s a whole MSI degree specialization in social computing over at SI, so it seems that social media has already become something of an institution in a rather short time.

I’m not sure where I stand on social media these days (as I write this in a blog post…) I didn’t adopt the first social media apps and sites particularly early, but I signed on to quite a few during my stint at SI. Since then, my attention has become even more precious, and I’m much slower to join one more SNS unless there’s a really good reason. For my personal use, a social media service has to be directly useful to me in some fashion, and that’s in addition to whatever social network functionality it might offer. LinkedIn and Facebook (ever more similar these days) provide informal contact management, Walker Tracker lets me track daily step counts, del.icio.us helps me ‘remember’ web sites, Twitter allows me to chatter with some friends, MyExperiment lets me share research workflows much like SlideShare allows sharing of presentation slides, Ravelry assists with organizing and documenting my knitting, and Flickr - well, I shouldn’t have to explain that.

Maintaining a presence in all these spaces takes some time and effort. Lately, the time and effort that I can invest is generally pretty minimal. I still spend most of my social media “face time” with Twitter and Flickr, but I just don’t have much energy or inclination to invest a lot of effort in Facebook, for example. What I’ve noticed over the last year is that most of my online social networks mirrored my offline social networks - until I moved away from Michigan.

Since leaving my home state, I’ve found that a lot more of my socializing is both provided and constrained by online social media. I think there are two underlying reasons for this; Ann Arbor is a hotbed of social media adopters (true story!) and I just don’t have much of an offline social network in Syracuse. Maintaining contact with friends through social media certainly eased the transition to a new community, as I was never completely socially isolated. After a year here, I’m just starting to have a few local contacts unrelated to the iSchool, and they are mostly people I’ve met through Ravelry. It’s somewhat embarrassing to admit that outside of school, most of my social contact occurs through the Internet, but as a PhD student, I just don’t have a lot of time to go out and build my local social network. The motivation is also missing; while I’ll be in Syracuse for another 3 or 4 years, there is a definite plan for departure, which amounts to disincentive to developing roots here.

I’m glad to have social media as a way to maintain contact with distant friends and relatives, but it doesn’t really replace face-to-face interaction. Being far away from most of the people I love makes that all the more apparent, and yet we keep in far better contact through the social media than we ever would have through other means. The role that social media plays in my life has shifted over the last three years, since I first started using del.icio.us; I find that today I am slower to adopt new social media, but a steadfast user of those which meet my needs, social or otherwise.