The reason behind: Waves of social interaction
Consumer Generated Media, User Generated Content, Web 2.0, citizen journalism – none of this would exist without the primordial drive of human beings to interact with each other; it is important to remember that all the technology, which is integral to the CGM phenomenon, does nothing but enable this urge.
No amount of smart technology can force people to interact if they are not interested; you can lead the horse to water, but you can’t make it drink. This is true when companies are wondering whether they should “build a community” around a new product or service: sure, given enough resources you can build any community, but unless their raison d’être is endogenous; they will always remain on life-support, only too ready to wither into oblivion the minute the plug is pulled. So, it is useful to look back at the previous waves of Internet-based social interaction.
First Step - Usenet
In the eighties someone decreed email as the killer app for the Internet; but even leaving email alone for a moment, the eighties saw the rise and establishment of the Usenet: ten of thousands of simple bulletin board-style communities where people would talk of… just about anything, from politics to public transportation to sex (would you doubt it?). The user interface was crude and not very forgiving for the casual browser. All kinds of information could be exchanged, provided it was text only. Conversation threading had to be hacked together almost by hand; many, many reasons why it could never fly, yet millions of people jumped at the opportunity.
Of course, this was the only game in town,– but thirty years later, with plenty of sexier opportunities for social interaction, Usenet and NewsGroups are still going strong. However, the platform limitations did influence the type of social exchange supported: the main limitation being the text-only nature of the tools available. One can safely say this first wave of social interaction was centred around the
SHARING OF INFORMATION. Information is anything that fits in text form: a paper, a manual, an article, minutes from a scientific seminar and of course, free-form thoughts, stories, etc.
Another very good reason to stick to bare bones text-only was that this information had to travel. In the eighties, geeks who had a 56k modem thought they owned the world, but this meant a transfer speed at least 40 times slower than today’s puniest ADSL. This is also the reason for unleashing creativity in coining bandwith-saving acronyms like LOL and BFF who remained in use and are also popular with people who at the time wore diapers. But there is no denying that the unfriendliness of the platform made it fit mostly for hardcore geeks willing to put up with technical challenges and user interface quirks.
The rise of special interest
One day in 1989 Tim Berners-Lee, a researcher working at the CERN in Geneva, invented the World Wide Web, dramatically changing the way ordinary blokes could experience the Internet. This meant new levels of interface control and sophistication and the (relative) ease with which almost anybody could put up a site dedicated to anything. It is perhaps not surprising that bikers put up sites about motorcycles, or that gadget freaks made sites about tech toys, photographers created photography sites and so on.
These special-interest sites soon made their appearance areas where site visitors could discuss their topics of interest with other visitors. Aptly, this area in the site was dubbed “discussion forum” shorthanded in “forum”. The forum of a healthy community becomes very quickly the most interesting and lively area of the site. Having the full power of HTML to play with, a forum sported a sexier interface and supported a much richer assortment of content, attracting a wider audience of people, far beyond the hardcore geeks that previously populated the Internet.
The growth of such aggregations meant new users had a place to go and ask for help. Understanding why expert users give away their knowledge for free is an essential step to understanding what makes communities tick.
Communities are essentially “gift cultures”, where the status of each member is not determined by what each member owns, but by what he/she gives away. The more knowledge you give away, the more street creeds accumulated. The giver is anointed as the “expert”, the “guru”, the “alpha male”. Peer respect is very important in gift cultures. It is also a very effective driving force – see as an example the meteoric rise of phenomena like the Open Source Software movement. So the central focus of forum-supported communities became the SHARING OF EXPERIENCE. Newbies would ask for help, more expert users would trade their secrets, recurring queries found their way in FAQs or documents for general use, which became precious resources where fellow uses told you how to do things, whether it was engine tweaking, software development, hardware tips & tricks, alerting you of pitfalls or bugs and suggesting workarounds.
In general, a lively forum is an indispensable companion to the official website and the next best thing to having a friend who happens to be an expert in just what you are attempting to do. But still, setting up a half-decent website was easy but not really idiot-proof. A forum was easy to use, but still rather difficult to set up and maintain,not to mention the underlying hardware, software and bandwidth: all in all, a rather expensive proposition. The new phase started a couple of years ago, when people started noticing the rapid growth of traffic to places such as MySpace or YouTube and other CGM properties, coupled with the ever increasing command Google demonstrated in finely targeting advertising to just about any content, turning it into a potential revenue stream.
These two circumstances created the background in which somebody started to offer free of charge idiot-proof technology platforms to consumers in return for their content.
Just think how complicated it was to share pictures on the web until things like Flickr or Zoomr came about, not to mention full motion video. Now a computer is no longer necessary; One can just shoot a pic on a cell phone and instantly upload it to a favourite photo sharing service. Setting up a site with proper discussion facilities becomes the affair of a minute and costs nothing – overnight 71 million blogs where born and, as the Technorati splash page says, some of them GOT to be good!
All of this makes sharing easy, free and quick, taking it to the next level, which is SHARING YOUR LIFE. Of course, most of our lives are rather boring and dull and featureless, and not a major motion picture; but not all the time – the secret lies in this. Nobody wants to watch the whole life of the average Joe to find the five interesting minutes worth watching, and every Joe can write a witty post in a lifetime, every Joe can take one unusual picture and claim their fifteen minutes of fame thanks to technology which gives us an array of tools (search, social tagging, XML and aggregators) making it relatively easy to spot the interesting stuff
and discard the rest.
Every one of us has the potential to be the next Matt Harding, so it is not Joe individually; it’s the collection of those interesting bits from the 71 million Joes that makes CGM interesting.
Where wave One traded in Information, wave Two traded in Support and wave Three trades in Attention; these are the only accepted currencies on CGM, and anyone wishing to participate must accept this rule.
Author: Gianni Catalfamo