Marriage counselling? Not if Twitter’s new “similar to you” feature’s algorithm is accurate!

In keeping with their respective brands, while Facebook gets all up in your business for not talking to your spouse “enough”, Twitter says “Hey. Mathematically you’re totally compatible. Similar, even. So don’t worry about it”. Look, even my husband’s company is similar to me. So eat it, Facebook.

The social media tribe

There’s a practice among foraging cultures called “social sharing“: when somebody scores big with the hunting & the gathering, they share all of it with the group.

Nomads don’t have a way to store or transport food, so it would just go to waste if it wasn’t eaten. This reciprocity then covers their asses later when they’re not having any luck and another member of the tribe makes a kill.

Social media communities like the interactive marketing professionals I follow on Twitter also have a formally informal sharing ethos, similarly crucial to network coherence & growth. We take what’s no use if stored—goodwill, news, how-to’s on the latest Facebook changes, inspiring marketing, artwork you can use in blog posts—and feed it to the whole tribe, so that they may be sustained and we will be included when they’ve got rare winter berries.

We have the same reciprocal obligation and the same enculturation of generosity. We get together annually (SXSWi, anyone?) in what are called among foragers bilevel organizations, which dissolve back into small, far flung units before all the local resources are used up (Austin’s beer supply).

It’s nice to be part of a tribe

Facebook’s “not now”: when no means maybe.

Facebook’s ‘not now’ feature—a limbo you can assign friend requests to that still puts your public updates in the denied requester’s news stream—has people asking why Facebook is making it harder to sidestep unwanted friend requests.

It’s not interface design ineptitude or an attempt to be Twitter-like (the limbo creates a sort of  unwanted ‘follow’ situation). It’s survival.

Facebook is up against the natural friend limit of our species. We only have so many ex-coworkers, elementary school pals, and yoga class acquaintances. A lot of us are disinclined to accept friend requests from people we haven’t met IRL or don’t really know.

Facebook makes money based on how many friends you have (the reach of your social graph) and how much information you make public (preferences for advertisers to target).

They need ways to combat the end of your friend cycle. You must keep adding friends to grow their profits.

Continued friending serves another purpose: keeping content fresh. There’s a buzz to the social acceptance of agreeing to be friends—remember when you first signed up and it was new friend town? Bzzz!

I’m sure you have a few outgoing, probably hilarious friends who are frequent posters, sharing links and performing their stand-up routine to a captive audience. Your feed is probably 80/20, with 20% of your friends hogging 80% of the news feed. Some fresh content from new friends is critical to keeping your attention.

We all know what happens when the same old people show up at the bar weekend after weekend. We can only admire their new outfit so often. Then we hear about the new bar up the street, and decide to check it out.

Facebook is trying to block the emergency exits.

Clicking ‘like’ is basically the same as picking and eating someone’s fleas.

Alrighty, here’s a drinking game: let’s try to map the major schools of Cultural Anthropology to social media. Every time we’re able to draw a plausible comparison, we do a shot of MGD and Jägermeister. Please note that I’ve been studying* this subject for 8 days now, and am 100% talking out of my derière.

Historical Particularism
Boas’ view that cultures can’t be compared, must be viewed as products of unique historical conditions, & culture traits understood as articulated to an integrated meaning system.
See: iPhone vs. Blackberry/Android/whatever isn’t an iPhone wars. No phone is intrinsically better than the others, except the iPhone.

Structural Functionalism
Emile Durkheim’s theory that people’s values and behaviours are determined by their role in society.
See: ass kissing on Twitter by those who fall on the wrong side of the followers-to-following ratio.
See: Twitter Charity auction for the honour of having a Kardashian retweet you.
See: the existence of Empire Avenue, the Whuffie Bank, and everywhere else you’re told you can trade on your “influence”.

Interpretive Anthropology
The idea that culture is a symbolic system, and people’s behaviour acts out those meanings, communicating them to each other.
See: The Facebook ‘like’ (content liking, not Page). A pictogram of a thumb, singled out for its connotations of approval, transmits social acceptance and stands in for phatic and grooming behaviours.

Ethnosemantics
The notion that language serves to classify experience into universal categories, denoting cultural meaning.
See: “retweet” (social acceptance), “fail whale” (a frustrating act of god), “pwnage” (loss of social status due to naivete or mental insufficiency)

Cultural Evolution
The classification of cultures on the basis of technologies, especially in regards to vital resource production.
See: 24 hours of video uploaded to YouTube every minute, 90 million tweets per day (srsly), and 30 billion pieces of content shared on Facebook monthly. Social media content is the new food.

Cultural Ecology
The theory that culture is an adaptation to the local environment.
See: half of Canadians prefer meeting online to meeting in the frigid outdoors.

Processual Approaches
The feeling that people manipulate the dictates of culture to achieve their own ends. Individual people have agency to change culture.
See: Mark Zuckerberg.

Marxism
The idea that culture is controlled by the people who have the means to produce wealth, and that they use this position to maintain their elite status.
See: Steve Jobs.

*Real Anthropologists: I apologize for mangling your discipline. If you note anywhere that I’ve grossly misunderstood the above theoretical frameworks, please educate me in the comments.

I’d feel really good about myself if you’d subscribe to my blog.

Me vs. the ego-munching stat-checking RSS Monster

I like to know what’s happening*. A couple weeks ago I got this app called Ego (I choose not to analyze that) so I could check my Google Analytics on my phone.

It has a spot to monitor your RSS, so I merrily signed up for Feedburner—prior to that I was using whatever (totally untrackable?) RSS my blog template came with. I’m dumb about RSS. But if I’ve learned anything from Copyblogger, it’s that subscriptions are really important and people need to spend over 2 minutes on your site or you’re a bloggy failure.So now I can count how many people do and don’t like me on a moment-by-moment basis. Um, fantastic?

It’s a serious roller coaster of the self esteem to post an article you believe in and gain subscribers…and post one you know is self-serving and see people delete you. It’s hard not to equate these invisible people to friends, and hard not to mold your content according to what you imagine they want.

It depends why you have a blog. I’m just going to keep being myse…OH YEAH! 3 MORE SUBSCRIBERS WHILE I WROTE THIS!

Thanks for the concern about my marriage, Facebook.

I kinda like the “hey, you haven’t talked to this guy in a while, why don’t you give him a shout?” feature on Facebook.

It alerts you to potential communication issues in your marriage. Note to self: say hello to husband.

Race and the social web: a bit of a moment right now

Do racial divisions exist on a web where everyone’s whatever colour they choose to be, avatar-wise, at least? I’m picking up a bit of a racial thing in the social media zeitgeist:

● Microsoft social researcher Danah Boyd gets frustrated that racism and classism, while as evident on the social web as they are IRL, are a taboo subject. MySpace and Facebook: How Racist Language Frames Social Media (and Why You Should Care)

● Slate digs into the culture phenomenon around How Black People Use Twitter, wherein I learned about the dozens, an important piece of African American history.

● Ad Age isn’t sure about the Slate piece, “cringing” about the “awkwardness” of making observational generalizations. Ad Age themselves have an entire section devoted to Hispanic marketing.

● I discover McDonald’s bizarre 365Black, a website where McDonald’s compares itself to the African baobab tree, nourishing African Americans with “opportunities”, basketball and “fresh” music.

● And the good folks at Pew Internet & American Life Project note that while broadband access has barely increased from last year among the general population, not so for African Americans, whose home access increased a dramatic 22% from 2009 to now, closing the high speed gap by 8 points to 67% of whites and 56% of African-Americans.