Designing Social Interfaces

Chapter 13. Social Media Junkies Unite!

Some commons-based peer production efforts are less self-conscious on the part of the users, and emerge more as a function of distributed coordinate behavior, like del.icio.us or Flickr. The critical defining feature of these “enterprises” is that they rely primarily on social information flows, motivations, and relations to organize the group. Individuals self-identify, mostly, for tasks, and through a variety of peer-review mechanisms contributions get recognized by the group and incorporated into what emerges as the collaborative output.

—Yochai Benkler interview in OpenBusiness (about his book The Wealth of Networks)

Keeping Up

As with “Web 2.0” and “synergy,” the buzzphrase “social media” has taken on a life of its own, and has already spawned its own mutant bastard: “social media marketing.” As with those other terms, and much Internet jargon, “social media” means different things to different people. As noted at the beginning of this book, we prefer to use the term to refer to social production and consumption of media objects, and not merely as a lazy synonym for social networking in general. This entire chapter is devoted to the collecting, sharing, and creation of social objects. As Hugh MacLeod put it in a post on his weblog, called “Social Objects for Beginners” (http://www.gapingvoid.com/Moveable_Type/archives/004390.html):

The Social Object, in a nutshell, is the reason two people are talking to each other, as opposed to talking ...