An Enquiry into the Nature of Social Media

Okay, so I just spent the entire morning trying to figure out some way to both aggregate my various online activities as well as publish them. Basically, I wanted to lifestream. Of course, when I started looking for how to do this, I didn’t know that lifestreaming is what I wanted.

Unfortunately, after trying many, many services: tumblr, soup.io, posterous, and jaiku, I found that none of them does what I need them to do. Or, rather, that a combination of them would serve my needs but not any one service.

Tumblr: Used to be able import RSS feeds but new users cannot (if you have an older account this is fine). So this cannot be used to lifestream anymore. Sigh. The reason this is a big problem for me is that this was the only service named here that allowed you to queue posts. This is a highly desired feature because I don’t want to spam my friends with links.

Soup: Was able to import many, many feeds but no post queue. Sigh. I also found the interface clunky and was unable to do any real searching.

Posterous: No auto-importing. And the main way to post was via email. Which is a good thing, I’ll grant you. But they don’t have a queue, which is the biggest problem for me. Otherwise, I might have switched.

Jaiku: I simply found it unusable.

Basically, the affordance I was looking for from a lifestreaming service was the ability to auto-import (key ingredient) and to have control over when (and how many) posts I put up a day, which I find important since the other key thing I wanted was the ability to auto-post to other sites.

The best solution suggested was to basically set up your own website… Something I’ve been thinking about doing for a while. And it might finally be time.

I’m still not sure, exactly, what ‘affordance’ means. As noted on the course wiki and on Wikipedia it can be defined as:

An affordance is a quality of an object, or an environment, that allows an individual to perform an action.

But what does that even mean? It seems like extra fancy jargon for the utility that an object has. Of course, the extension of utility as a quality that can adhere to the environment (i.e., context of use) makes ‘affordance’ a broader term. Even more problematic is how disconnected the term is from what it is describing.

I prefer Norman’s refinement of the original idea because the original implies that affordances have some level of objective reality, which, if true, would imply that affordance does not depend on human perception. Norman’s definition, however, centres on the human agent: “action possibilities that are readily perceivable by an actor.”

This seems important to remember in the ever-shifting sands of social media. One our classmates has already pointed out the surprise they feel that blogs could be used for longer, more substantive sharing (as opposed to Twitter). Interestingly, this is exactly my perspective on blogs. Indeed, with my own blog, I’m actively considering discouraging comments and discussion. I also don’t often link to other blogs. Put in another light: blogging for me isn’t a social media at all. Its affordance lies in the ability to disseminate my thoughts about social justice.

So what would be the affordance of a social justice blog? Well, the key lies in a point in the class wiki: “Blogging can give you a sense of ownership and a platform for your opinions.” Blogging is relatively cheap and also relatively easy to do. It provides the perfect platform for people who are routinely and systematically excluded from popular media outlets. It allows for a pluralism and diversity of voices. The value is not in the social aspects (or at least not in the sense of socializing).