Synthetic Social Experience
An experience doesn’t have to be tangible. Movies are acquired through a ticket booth but the experience is visual. Music is downloaded or acquired at a music store but the experience is acoustic. Video games are bought in store or through downloads but the experience is designed for multi-sensory experience. With the explosion of social network sites, experiences many times exist in the synthetic world, the online space.
However the synthetic social experience is defined by a variety of factors. The synthetic social experience involves social interaction on top of the visual experiences that come with the other mediums. But how does this differ and what makes this unique? Certainly the social interaction has its benefits and repercussions. What other effects do the means of communication embedded in a synthetic social experience have on users? Social behavior has certainly changed since the popularization of social networking sites.
US Senators are now using Twitter, former vice-presidential candidate is now using Facebook. With over three hundred million users world-wide and a growing number of games, Facebook has become a platform for the synthetic social experience. There are areas of this synthetic social experience to explore and I will attempt to find how reputation, culture and social behavior is changing
Reputation
In a social environment, one interacts with other people. The actions conducted by someone will undoubtedly create a certain influence, esteem, stature or notoriety. In the digital realm “the latent connection can be digitally reconstituted at any time, should the need or desire arise”. (Social Network Sites and Society: Current Trends and Future Possibilities, 2009 ACM, Ellison/Lampe/Steinfield) Connections can be reconstructed and reputations can be recalled.
As people begin to congregate in synthetic spaces, users being to find common interests or develop relationships. As strands of relationships growing and begin to interconnect with each other, people’s reputations are taken into account because the social behavior of the community will depend on it. Looking at MMORPG( Massively Multi-Online Role Play Game) users in the game have to maintain a reputation. If a user carries a reputation of notoriety and disdain among other users, the social aspect of the game will take a step back when goals and tasks require players to work in a social environment.
Many similar aspects found in MMORPGs can also be found in social networking sites. People have been able to create reputations through social networking sites, one of the best examples is Tila Tequila, who is now a reality tv star but first became renown through Myspace. This reputation has been documented in Chris Anderson’s “The Long Tail” and now people are learning to profit through reputation gained through online communication tools.
However people are still learning to the side effects of a public reputation that is retained digitally. As evidenced by sites such as www.lamebook.com a site where users post embarrassing moments on the site Facebook. people are still learning the effects of publicity. Now there are also a growing number of cases of cyber-bullying. It has become a strong enough movement that people have organized help groups such as www.stopcyberbullying.org. In the coming years we will begin to learn more about the evolution of online reputation and how society will learn to cope with its effects.
Emerging Culture
Participatory media and the reduce cost of communicating has created viral movements and memes. Within this movement, culture begins to form. An examples is lolcats, pictures of cats with arbitrary captions using a sans-serif. As Clay Shirky says about lolcats, as long as you have a sans-serif font and a picture of a cat you can be part of the conversation.
But even among the emerging culture, there are rules the community and society decides on. A community may set rules for how the network engages each other. Sometimes these rules are set by someone, in the case of “Linux”, Linus Torvald owns the ultimate authority on what will be included. He also owns the trademark to “Linux”. However the software is created by the community who supports this project.
In viral memes that spread across the web, the rules can be simple. Such as one of the recent memes that have been going across the web, “Angers Hitler”. The rules are simple, find something deserving of a rant and create subtitles matching the movie “Downfall”, a biopic about the final days of Hitler. Some of these will include rants about the US Health Care system, the delayed release of Starcraft II or Lamar Odom, Los Angeles Lakers player. They all follow the same method and rule. In an age when participation and communication is easy and affordable, rules can arise from the community participation.
However, from a legal standpoint, online participation is beginning to lose its immunity and special legal privilege. In many states across the US, cyber bullying laws are already being implemented. And in the UK, there are laws and initiatives to prevent cyberbullying. As social find to see certain social behavior as a commodity, they begin to lose it’s special legal privileges, a point argued by Jack Balkin of Director of the Information Society Project at Yale Law School.
In the end, the synthetic social experience affects our lives inside the world and outside of it. But as far as the user, what equations will satisfy a user? If a user spends time experiencing this synthetic social experience what compensation will they be looking for? Is the user looking for reputation growth? Are they looking for a network growth/maintenance? Or are they looking for both? If we were to formulate this, maybe this is the formula for the synthetic social experience, user compensation = reputation growth + “network growth/maintenance”.