At this point a sizable percentage of the world’s population is familiar with social networks. After the uprising of social networks our lives have become a little bit easier as we now enjoy greater connectivity and have an easier time networking with the people we care about. However that is both the curse and blessing of social networks: they keep us confined to our natural and social silos.
When Twitter came out, one of my biggest expectations was to see it morph into the first “civic network”. You know, a place in which we get to meet new people and interact with strangers on the basis of “imagined community“. But Twitter didn’t evolve past the hash-tag concept and felt short of creating the ubiquitous civic network we all need. Then came Google Plus and, instead of pursuing the goal of becoming something bigger than Facebook, it ended up copying it.
Allow me to make the case for a civic network. What Facebook is to a club, this next property needs to be to the “open society”. An open collaboration place that’s let’s intimate than your social network, but still manages to embed intelligence, security and structure into our daily interactions. If you think of society and civility as the protocols that make us productive offline, then the idea of a civic network emerges as the tools that will make us productive as a “hive” or significant group of people. Indeed, this is a big idea, but one that could change our world for the better and have a disruptive impact on the Internet.
The Web, as we use it today is very inefficient. We have to login to multiple systems just to collaborate with a handful of people that happen to share some of our interests. The walled nature of Facebook means that eventually, half of the social Web will be un-indexable by search engines. What a wasted opportunity. We can do so much better. Yet every new social network emerges as a closed ecosystem and keeps missing the big picture: a civic network is 50% technology development and 50% federation management.
Facebook will succeed in becoming a civic network only when it reaches critical mass as a federation system (a connective tissue that binds websites), not as a “Like-producing machine”. By redirecting the traffic to their walled gardens, the social network of today misses the larger opportunity of getting all the people on the planet that wish to perform the same action or get to that particular piece of content. Ergo, the personalization of the social networking experience has claimed among its casualties the civic experience, the possibility of many of us going to many places at the same time.
Instead of promoting equality, the social network thrives on the exercise of elitism. Privacy and anonymity are discourage and, instead, every digital citizen is forced to constantly wear a name tag, and disclose their likes, wants, needs and social circle. An thus, I simply wonder: how impactful, relevant and disrupting would a true civic network be?
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