The Dark Arts of Antisocial Media

I was at the Chinwag event "The Dark Side of Social Media" last night, where a panel of worthies was looking at the sordid underbelly of every PR hack's darling, Social Media. Sam Michel chaired the panel, which consisted of:

Luke Razzell - Identitologist and Entrepreneur, weaverluke

Tim Ireland - Online Marketing & SEO Consultant, Bloggerheads

James Cherkoff - Director, Collaborate Marketing

Mike Barrett - Director, Compound Media

Cristiano Ventura - Business Manager, Windows Live Spaces, Microsoft

(Their blog urls are listed in the Chinwag link above)

Sadly I arrived late - combo of work and missed trains - so only got to hear a bit of the panelists' talks, but was there for the Q&A, which speaking to Sam afterwards seemed to be a longer session and with more value than any Chinwag event to date.

All the usual Dark Sides were aired - identity theft, online bullying, proliferating paedophiles and pederasts, sock puppets, astroturfing, group gaming, flogging and PR ghostbloggers - though curiously enough very few people in the room had heard of the Kathy Sierra incident on a show of hands, nor were many familar with "stream of consciousness" (aka river of irrelevance) media like Twitter (maybe no-one was prepared to admit to that in public - so not clear what the general level of familarity was (seemed bimodal almost judging by the questions - some newbies and some real veterans) - anyway, I have put links to the above if anybody wasn't familiar with them

There was, as you can imagine, quite a lot of discussion about "what to do about it all" and there were 2 overall schools of thought on this in the main, ie:

- Live and let live - it is what it is, people will learn to see though it, it will become self policing etc etc - and similar naive beliefs

- Man the barricades - raise barriers to entry (walled systems), increase identity / security requirements, monitor etc - a different sort of Dark side tendency.

Our view - based, we can tell you, on work we have done for clients ( whose Identity we may not disclose) - is that both these beliefs are incomplete - and the reason is that todays social networks are very unsubtle and are poor models of human social networks.

Compare to the nuances of our relationships in the real world, they are laughably simple - and this is where it all goes wrong. These systems do not model our real word, so we cannot easily reproduce the filters we have there.

Firstly, in real life there are very subtle variations in how we hold our friends - layers of an onion if you like - and that determines what we tell them, what they can see of us, what they can see of our other friends. How do I reproduce that on Facebook, for arguments sake - the toggles are friend / not friend and a bit of fiddling with privacy. How do I tell Skype that I am always on for family, not on for work colleagues etc..

Secondly, what we call "microbarriers" - imagine that onion, at every layer there is microbarrier to entry - pass it and we reveal a bit more of ourselves, fail and stay where you are or recede - its for this reason we disagree with Tara Hunt's call for mo' walls - its unsophisticated as an approach compared to microbarriers.

Thirdly, what we call "transactional interaction" for want of a better word - the "Tit for Tat " of a relationship that allows us to build a dynamic picture of trustworthiness of a person, ( we have no visibility - apart from on eBay - of someone's reputation) means we have to move to a transaction system - email, IM, text, chatroom if it exists - and this brings its own problem, since.....

Fourthly, bandwidth is limited - we have no body language, voice intonation etc to gauge the shades of meaning (which is why it is so easy to be misunderstood in text )

Fifthly, in general energetic minorities can always self organise better than disorganised masses, so it is probably extremely difficult to self police, especially if there are no public sanctions (again, apart from eBay's reputation approach)

Which, in our view, is why the "live and let live" crowd are being touchingly naive - humans are already evolved to lie, cheat and steal in our much more nuanced real world, so in a far cruder social net as these it is far harder - and takes longer, if it is at all possible - to spot fake identities and malicious intent.

It is also, in our view, a better approach to add nuance than to barrier / ban / monitor the heck out a a social mediaset.

The other thing which had me stunned was the naive simplicity of the "let it all hang out, cut em some slack" crew re putting huge amounts of personal data up...I just don't think people "get" that that means the silly thing you did at 20 and plastered all over MySpace is still there when you are 40 and in a different landscape, in a highly competitive world.

For example, some stuff that was "OK" when we were 18 is totally un-PC now 20 years later (like the fashions....)...but what do us old farts know....

The other great thing for me was to finally meet (in the flesh) Luke Razzell (and his charming girlfriend), a blogger and cyberfriend whose work on identity I have enjoyed for some time. Good luck with Blog Friends, Luke.