More than once I heard someone say that to really understand social media is enough to have a profile on Facebook, on Twitter, YouTube, and so on. Nothing more wrong. Social media are changing culture, society and knowledge sharing. In this change, technology is certainly something important but not decisive.
So, understanding social media means go deep in some books that marked the origin and development of cyber-culture. In this post I would like to mention three books written before the rise of Web 2.0 and social media. In these books, written in different years by different authors, you can find crucial dynamics which are now central in the so called “social media era”.
The Strength of Weak Ties (Mark S. Granovetter, 1973)
Analysis of social network is suggested as a tool for linking micro and macro levels of sociological theory. The procedure is illustrated by elaboration of the macro implications of one aspect of small-scale interaction: the strength of dyadic ties. It is argued that the degree of overlap of two individuals’ friendship networks varies directly with the strength of their tie to one another.
The impact of this principle on diffusion of influence and information, mobility opportunity, and community organization is explored. Stress is laid on the cohesive power of weak ties. Most network models deal, implicitly, with strong ties, thus confining their applicability to small, well-defined groups. Emphasis on weak ties lends itself to discussion of relations between groups and to analysis of segments of social structure not easily defined in terms of primary groups.
Mark S. Granovetter
The Strength of Weak Ties
The Virtual Community (Howard Rheingold, 1994)
People in virtual communities use words on screens to exchange pleasantries and argue, engage in intellectual discourse, conduct, commerce, exchange knowledge, share emotional support, make plans, brainstorm, gossip, feud, fall in love, find friends and lose them, play games, flirt, create a little high art and a lot of idle talk. People in virtual communities do just about everything people do in real life, but we leave our bodies behind.
You can’t kiss anybody and nobody can punch you in the nose, but a lot can happen within those boundaries. To the millions who have been drawn into it, the richness and vitality of computer-linked cultures is attractive, even addictive.
Howard Rheingold
The Virtual Community
Life on the Screen (Sherry Turkle, 1995)
Why is it so hard for me to turn away from the screen? The windows on my computer desktop offer me layers of material to which I have simultaneous access: field notes, previous drafts of this book; a list of ideas not yet elaborated but which I want to include; transcripts of interviews with computer users; and verbatim logs of sessions on computer networks, on bulletin boards, and in virtual communities. When I write at the computer, all of these are present and my thinking space seems somehow enlarged.
The dynamic, layered display gives me the comforting sense that I write in conversation with my computer. After Years of such encounters, a blank piece of paper can make me feel strangely alone.
Sherry Turkle
Life on the Screen
In addition to these mentioned here, I highly recommend the reading of Marshall McLuhan (Understanding Media) or Pierre Lévy (Collective Intelligence). Maybe we could define, together, a more complete list of cyber-culture must read books. This is just the first step!
