Tag: Social Media

TMI: Compulsion to share?

10-0121- RR Extreme - Slice rev3
photo credit: flickr user intiendes

We’re building a culture of sharing, powered by social media. Most of it is beautiful: Sharing an experience with others helps us enjoy it more, and feel we’re enjoying it together with… (with whom, that’s another question). It’s like that piece of chocolate cake that tastes so much better when shared with a loved one.

But when does the joy of sharing become compulsion to share? Do you ever feel your experience is not complete and fulfilling unless you can share it (at least a twitpic, a facebook post, a quick check-in)? There are arguments about not being able to live fully in the moment, when attention is divided between taking it in and sharing it on social media. But that’s not what this post is about. I’m thinking now about the TMI phenomenon that sometimes results from the compulsion to share.

I see people sharing too much detail, personal detail, embarrassing, even incriminating detail, detail that could get them in trouble with their bosses, or lower their credibility online. I remember seeing tweets or status updates about boobs and bras and waxing, and things I don’t really want to know or imagine about people. Why do they share? Is the behavior driven by a compulsion to share?

I’m really interested in understanding the psychology of this compulsion.

The compulsion to share is, probably, one of the reasons why many companies ban social media in the workplace. If people are compelled to share every little detail about their lives, and often make questionable decisions about the content they share, it is probable that sensitive information can be leaked this way.

Could it be true that people make more conscious, rational decisions about what to share in face-to-face conversations than in social media? Could it be that some of the sharing we do in social media is driven by impulses we find a bit hard to resist?

What is your experience? Do you feel the impulse to share on social media? Do you feel your experience is incomplete, without the sharing? And how do you deal with the impulse? Do you keep it in check? Give in? Have you ever shared information on impulse that you later regretted?

Help me understand.

Spring 2010 course: Social Media in the Workplace

Here is info about one of the courses I’m teaching in the Spring semester. The other one is Qualitative Research Methods for Technology Studies, TECH 621.

CGT 581: Social Media in the Workplace

Social media such as blogs, Twitter, Facebook, wikis, and podcasts are radically changing several aspects of contemporary culture and society. But what happens when social media is brought inside organizations?

How does it affect productivity, collaboration, organizational structure and organizational culture?

Should social media be used within organizations, and if so, what are best practices?

In this course, we examine the use of social media in the workplace and conduct original research projects in order to derive conclusions about the optimal use of social media within organizations.

Students will learn how to:

1. Identify the best Web 2.0 tool fit for any specific task
2. Implement best practices for the use of social media in the workplace
3. Coordinate large group collaboration using social media
4. Make recommendations for social media use in specific organizational situations
5. Plan, implement, and assess social media adoption in the enterprise
6. Consider the interaction of social media and organizational culture
7. Identify the skills needed of leaders in the social media workplace
8. Implement leadership 2.0 skills

How do you learn social media social norms?

[cross-posted to my teaching blog]

Most of our social interactions are governed by scripts and rules that we internalize and apply when appropriate. For example, we all have the scripts of “first date,” “job interview,” and, possibly, “the talk.”

How do we pick up the social norms for these scripts? How do we learn what type of communicative behavior is appropriate in certain situations? By observing, from movies and TV, from stories people tell, maybe even from etiquette books and columns.

Usually, it takes time for these scripts to emerge, and it takes time to learn them.

In social media, it seems to me, these social norms for appropriate communicative behavior emerge much faster, and are picked up much faster. Twitter lists have barely launched, and we already have some norms, and “best practices” about using them.

Twitter and LinkedIn just announced their integration, which means we’ll soon have social norms for appropriate behavior there, too. In fact, barely 24 hours later, there are articles with Do’s and Don’ts about it.

So, I have two questions for you:

  1. How are social media social norms created? Do they emerge organically, as we communicate with social media? Are they spelled out so quickly by “opinion leaders” that behavior is shaped by them so quickly that we don’t have time to experiment and figure them out?
    …
  2. How do you learn social media norms? From blog posts/articles? By seeing behavior be reprimanded? By watching others and doing what they do? By being exposed to rants about unacceptable behaviors?

Building relationships part 3

This is a post in a series about building relationships online. Previous posts:

1. Building relationships part 1 – bridging and bonding social capital

2. Building relationships part 2 – drawing on Dale Carnegie to build relationships on Twitter

In this post, I’d like to introduce you to one of my favorite communication theories (and if I say that about almost any communication theory, I mean it):  symbolic interactionism.

I won’t explain the entire theory here, just say that it is a theory about how meaning comes about: through social interaction (communication). One of the meanings that emerges through social interaction is the sense of self. We acquire a sense of self, of who we are and what we are like, through interacting with others. One of the ways in which this happens is that we see ourselves in others as if reflected in a mirror. We grow to believe what we see in those mirrors.

That explains why, when faced with people who believe we’re stupid, we second-guess ourselves, we become stupid. When around people who believe in us, we raise up to those expectations. It explains the influence parents have on us – they are the mirrors we see ourselves in when we’re little and fragile, and those mirrors influence who we become (reason 65,492 why I’m scared to become a parent). It explains Theory X and theory Y in management and education.

Of course, there are several factors that come into play, and we can’t entirely hold others accountable for who we are. But to a large extent, who we are depends on our history of human interaction, according to symbolic interactionism.

We seek people in whose mirrors we see images of us we like  – as we should.

So now, let me turn this around, and apply it to building relationships online. You are a mirror. You reflect others’ images back to them. How do people see themselves in your mirror?

Ask yourself – what must this person think I think about them? Who do they think I think they are? How do they see themselves in the mirror that I am?

Your attitude and beliefs about people, as manifested in your communication, form this mirror.  Do you show the best in people, or are you  the kind of mirror that emphasizes the weaknesses, the negatives?

One way of building relationships (online and off) is being the kind of mirror people seek to look into, because they like what they see, or because they’re amused, or because it helps them grow – or just because, it makes them feel good.

So, remember, how you see people is often how they come to see themselves – especially if they’re young and fragile.

Being quite a critical spirit myself, I struggle with the burden of the practical implications of this theory.

There are implications for personal relationships, but also for management, education, PR, marketing, advertising, Web usability, to name a few.

What sense do you make of this?

Building Relationships part 2

In the previous post in this series, I argued that Twitter is great for building bridging social capital – loose connections with large numbers of people who are quite different than you. Bridging social capital has several benefits, innovative thinking and new work opportunities being among them.

In this post, I draw upon Dale Carnegie to give you very simple advice about how to build relationships on Twitter. This question seems to be on my students’ minds a lot.

I fully believe that at this point in our social media world, the most precious and scarce resource is attention.

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To build relationships, give people attention.

How do you give them attention? Reply to what they said. Jump into conversations, or reply to lonely tweets. Say something nice, or interesting, or supportive, or ask a question. Be careful with humor, it may or may not come across right in writing.

I was reading a women’s magazine’s yearly mandatory article about how to have fun at holiday parties. This line from a fashion model’s mother sounded like the perfect blend of Dale Carnegie in the attention economy:

“Look everybody in the eye and make them feel special. Give them warmth and attention.”

What are some of the things you do on Twitter that make people people feel special? How do you give warm and attention on Twitter? Can you share some tips with my students?

Building Relationships part 1

This is part of a series of post about building relationships online and the relationships we build online.

The initial idea was triggered by reading in one of the books for TECH 621 about marketable relationships. Marketable relationships were defined as relationships we build for the sake of the relationship, without expecting an immediate reward. However, the rewards, often in the form of employment, speaking engagements, etc., come as a result of having these connections. Nothing new here. This is how connections work.

I don’t particularly like the term “marketable relationships,” but luckily, the concept does go by another name: social capital.

Social capital was defined by Bourdieu as one of three types of capital:

  1. economic (financial resources)
  2. cultural (knowledge resources)
  3. social (connections, acquaintances, people we know who could do us favors)

Putnam (the one who wrote Bowling Alone) further broke down the concept of social capital into 2 sub-types: bonding and bridging capital.

  1. bonding capital = close relationships  among homogeneous groups (birds of a feather, your close group of friends, family, etc).
  2. bridging capital = loose connections with diverse people. It is out of these types of connections that most benefits and innovations emerge.

So, here are some hypotheses:

  • Many people use Facebook to maintain bonding capital
  • Many people use Twitter to build and maintain bridging capital

Are these the predominant uses of Facebook vs. Twitter? To how many people do these hypotheses apply? Do they apply to you? Are the trends changing towards Facebook becoming more open to loose connections and to building bridging capital? i.e. do you “friend” people you don’t know very well?

[update 10/25: Facebook’s new News Feed vs Live feed feature makes Facebook technology more conducive to maintaining bonding capital, because the algorithm selects the updates to show you in the News Feed based on the previous level of interaction -connection depth?- with that person.]

Next posts in this series: