The Revolution Will Not Be Socialized -- The Homogenization of Social Media

You are all individuals

Photo by Phil Hart. (License: Creative Commons Attribution)

Almost since the first web-page was displayed upon the first browser over the tiny and fragile networks that would eventually become the Internet, technophiles have been trying to figure out what the World Wide Web really is. In the early 1990s we thought it was a library. The dot-com bubble of the late 1990s and the early 2000s portrayed the Web as a store-front, and in the days after the bubble burst we saw the web as perhaps a boondoggle and perhaps a global printing press. With the rise of social media and social networking our hopes were raised that the Web might turn out to be a globe-spanning marketplace of information and communication.

If the Internet, and the World Wide Web by extension, has consistently been anything it has been a promise of revolution. I say "promise" because, like many other entities in the field of consumer technology, much more is forecast than ever eventually arrives. I am still waiting for the ubiquitous computing technology I was promised in my youth. My parents are still waiting for their flying cars, and their parents are still waiting for the massively centralized "city of the future" that is now almost 100 years in coming.

As we are already beginning to see, the promises of revolution - in media, news, and entertainment - are very likely just that: promises, and nothing more. Even as pundits and analysts laud the profundity of social media - blogs, the blogosphere, and the various and sundry social networks - the high hopes and piteously low return of these systems is becoming increasingly evident. In what was hyped as an informational bazaar of ideas and thought, we have seen the homogenization of information and the capricious and vapid rule of a simple-minded mob. Billions of dollars invested in sophisticated data-transport systems, networks, and databases alongside thousands of man-hours poured into algorithms, data-miners, and neural networks have yielded the most advanced and automated method of content sorting the world has ever seen.

And it has determined that, more than anything else, you need to see a photo of a military transport with smoke-trails that resemble the Flying Spaghetti Monster, or a video of a mobile phone salesman singing opera.

Which is not to disparage the "Internet as Huge Social Photo-album" paradigm. In the vast marketplace of ideas certainly there is a place for comedic images and videos alike. As users flock between social bookmarking websites, however, a systemic homogenization is occurring across the niche cultures of the Internet. From Slashdot to Digg, from Digg to Reddit, and from Reddit to Newsvine - users migrate and, as they do so, they bring their acclimated cultures with them.

The result is rapidly becoming apparent: social networks, from del.icio.us to Digg and from netvouz to Newsvine are becoming perilously alike. A quick shuffle through the "popular content" of the dozens of developing networks, each claiming a unique and specialized area of content and function, reveals an almost identical list of links and topics. In a short-sighted attempt to be "everything to everyone" the individual posters to these networks, in disparate competition for eyeballs and attention, are cannibalizing the content from other sites. The result is an echo-chamber not unlike the Main Stream Media that Social Media once aspired to replace.

But how did Social Media get this way? Dozens of sites launched with niche content in mind, yet have become little more than mirrors of each other. In a sense, this homogenization is a simple enactment of the prisoners' dilemma played out across the digital realm. Posters, encountering "sure-fire" content that is not appropriate to the particular niche of a social network, face a classic choice: co-operate and refrain from posting the material or defect and post. Problematically, for each individual choice, the option with the highest expected payout is "defect," and thus the kitten pictures or the daily link to the same tired web-comic becomes "news," at least in the social sense. Each poster seeks visibility and attention, and in doing so aspires to irrelevancy, along with the community as a whole.

Sadly, the prisoners' dilemma may well be inescapable in this case. In a one-on-one situation, game theorists have long held that a tit-for-tat stratagem consistently produces optimal results in prisoners' dilemma simulations. Unfortunately, given the vast size of social networks and the highly anonymous nature of Internet communities even this technique offers little promise. In seeking to be truly democratic, these networks relegate themselves to a perpetuity of side-line status, never serious or significant enough to eclipse edited, moderated, and regimented media for more than a fleeting moment.

The Revolution, it seems, will not be socialized.

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