Has Too Much Sharing Become Social Networks' Greatest Weakness?

TMI. Are we approaching the point where too much information sharing has become counterproductive?

There is, of course, some concern about people forcibly taking information we are not sure we want them to have. But it may also be the case that even the voluntary sharing of just about anything is beginning to feel a tad creepy.

Aside from the relentless self-promotion on Twitter, Facebook, et al - dont miss me on so-and-so's TV show; aren't my grandchildren adorable? watch me totally wreck this half pipe! - there is a growing sense, as the following article explains, that the pathological outpouring of personal information with a network of people who may only remotely be friends or family is creating a counter-influence. That just as overexposure in any market can lead to a drop in credibility or interest, so it may be doing so in the online social realm.

Twitter's much-anticipated IPO, which follows the announcement of Ali Baba's and the fact of Facebook's - may be coming at the peak, rather than the launch point for future growth. Lot's of people have lost money betting against trends in digital commerce. But at the tenth anniversary of the birth of social networks, it is not too soon to ask whether this is the beginning of the end or the end of the beginning. JL

John Gapper comments in the Financial Times:

There is a flaw in any business that relies on pushing users into addictive but unsettling activity

As the social networking industry hits its 10th anniversary, those at the top are doing well. Twitter will soon undergo an initial public offering that may value it at $15bn and Facebook has recovered from its rocky IPO last year so swiftly that the 20 per cent stake owned by Mark Zuckerberg, its founder, is now worth $24bn.

Their rude financial health is offset by a wave of disillusionment over what Jonathan Franzen, the novelist, calls the age of “yakking, tweeting and bragging”. In his collection of work by the 19th-century Viennese satirist Karl Kraus, published this week, Franzen rails against “the infernal machine of techno-consumerism” represented by Amazon and Facebook.

The Circle, a new novel by Dave Eggers, portrays Silicon Valley as a dystopian world in which the employees of a cult-like company – a cross between the Scientologists, Facebook and Google – are pushed by its founders into becoming fully “transparent” by showing everything of themselves to everyone else. Its mottos are “Secrets are Lies” and “Privacy is Theft”.

It is foolish to dismiss these, as many have done on Twitter, as the jeremiads of middle-aged men. Many others feel similarly oppressed, from Louis CK, the comedian, who called smartphones “toxic, especially for kids”, to Marina Shifrin, a 25-year-old producer who resigned from her Taiwanese animation company in protest at her boss’s alleged focus on “how many views each video gets” (her exit dance to Kanye West has been seen 8.5m times on YouTube).

The feeling is natural when we are trained, like Mae Holland, heroine of The Circle, to amass friends and followers and only to feel satisfied when, like her, our “seventh zing caught fire and was rezinged 2,900 times”. Social networking is an endless, exhausting parade.
But, while Franzen and Eggers regard this frenetic activity as evidence of the Big Brother-like power of social networks, I see it as the opposite. Their dependence on exponential expansion and the mass sharing of information is a weakness rather than a strength.
There is a flaw in any business that relies on pushing users into social activity that is addictive but unsettling. Ultimately, if they do not enjoy it, they are not trapped on the campus of The Circle, like Mae. They can leave, as did the users of Friendster and MySpace.
Things are different in The Circle, where the three co-chief executives create a world filled with miniature cameras that observe all life and where “All That Happens Must be Known”. They read privacy as self-indulgence, a betrayal of the people as severe as Winston Smith hiding from the telescreen in Nineteen Eighty-Four.
Silicon Valley lays itself open to satire with its high-blown claims that its self-interest coincides with the public interest. Its companies are not content simply to make personal computers or build social networks. They portray them as the means for individuals to liberate themselves from mainframes, or fulfil their natural desire to share.

Mr Zuckerberg, who told Wired approvingly this year that “people are going to be sharing eight to 10 times as much stuff” by 2016, is part of a tradition of Valley rhetoric. “As long as information is produced and processed efficiently, the legacy of the Enlightenment is presumed to be in good hands,” writes Evgeny Morozov, the technology critic, in To Save Everything, Click Here.

Franzen is equally dismissive. “With techno-consumerism, a humanist rhetoric of ‘empowerment’ and ‘creativity’ and ‘freedom’ and ‘connection’ and ‘democracy’ abets the frank monopolism of the techno-titans. The new infernal machine seems increasingly to obey nothing but its own logic,” he writes.

Well, yes. And the logic of social networks is that, if they are big enough, they can burn cash and still be valuable. “There are many profitable businesses out there. There are only so many very large networks,” David Karp, the founder of Tumblr, the blog network bought by Yahoo in May for $1bn, told New York magazine this week.

But large networks can get small. The Circle is so dominant that it manufactures its own tablets, holds the details of millions of users and stores all data in the cloud. It is impregnable, in a way that real-life social networks are not.

Their extraordinary impact over the past decade makes it easy to forget the industry’s relative youth. Friendster and LinkedIn were only founded in 2002, MySpace in 2003 and Facebook in 2004. Twitter, which now enjoys the strongest momentum of them all, followed two years later.

We know one thing from this brief history – that network dominance is lost remarkably easily. One minute a network such as MySpace looked as big and entrenched as The Circle, and the next minute its growth had tailed off and its users were leaving. Facebook has shown some staying power, but there is no guarantee that it will endure.
It is quite possible that others will have taken the place of Twitter and Facebook in another decade’s time. People might use them differently, with more or less intensity. Mr Zuckerberg’s vision of exponential sharing growth could come true, or people might tire of the wearying craze and pull back.
Ms Shifrin’s reaction to being on the Like button assembly line was instructive. She insisted, Franzen-like, that “I believe it’s more important to focus on the quality of the content [than the views]”. Then she made it go viral. That is one way to square the circle.