Passive-Blind Voyeuristic Social
Written by Russ on August 26, 2008 – 1:52 pmThat title alone makes me feel like this entire post should be written by a slew of people who are a whole heck of a lot smarter than me, so I apologize in advance if you stumbled across this and thought you were going to get something highly academic.
It seems to me that there is a perception that “being social” means that you have to actually engage other users actively.
I do not think that is true.
I think that you can be socially involved with someone by quietly watching them–lurking, if you will. In fact, “lurking” has been going on in email discussion lists, online forums and, dare I mention it, BBSes for years and years.
Lurking, I believe, is sitting back and watching the conversation–letting it all happen around you, without anyone knowing you’re even there. However, with lurking, you also begin to understand the behavioral patterns and personalities of others.
Just by watching.
Seems kind of passive, if not voyeuristic to me.
So, if someone serves you up content based upon the actions of others who share similar traits with you, or have identified similar likes and aspirations, then it would seem to me that is rather blindly doing so–you don’t know who those other people are, just that they’re like you.
It’s like seeing a bunch of nameless, faceless “you”-types running around and doing their business and getting content served to you based upon their–and your–collective actions.
So, Passive-Blind Voyeuristic Social would be sitting back and watching content as it is served to you based upon actions that others, identified as being similar to you, and then acting upon it, which in turn influences someone else’s results as they do the same.
Or, at least, so I think it is. Sure, there’s a good chance that someone else has already thought of this and has a better definition, but this kind of works for me right now, and it makes sense to me as another way in which we can interact–socially–without having to actually cross any lines of “faux friendship” and add to our ever-growing lists of contacts that we may not actually even know.
It’s a great way to provide context and direction to users without forcing them to reveal themselves to each other.
There is an unbelievable amount of power in the following statement:
People <like you> who <do something> also <do something else that you’re not doing>.
Don’t you want to know? iTunes has been doing it for us for quite awhile (and have since taken quite a few nickels from my coin purse), but that is very loosely based upon qualities of music–and not “qualities of Russ”; there’s an opportunity to go a little deeper and deliver content to our users that don’t require them to becoming visibly engaged.
I’m going to go ponder this for a bit. I’d welcome additional thoughts.
Note: Search engines have been offering up “What People Are Searching For Now” types of content since, like, forever. This is different as it is actually based upon some identifiers that you have selected, and have in common with others, without actually having to engage them.
Posted in Community, Social Networking | 7 Comments »
