Tom Foremski poses an interesting question on the Silicon Valley Watcher, a site that tracks and analyzes business and business culture in Silicon Valley:
…how large of a population is needed before a community starts exhibiting spontaneous, unpredictable, aggregate behaviors. Is it 500 people, 15,000?
The question springs from the strange and emergent behavior that often shows up on social software platforms like Friendster or Flickr or Del.icio.us (all sites that allow individual users to post, share, and express their on-line personalities and social networks on the web).
As an example, Friendster has already had several splinter groups using the system for unintended purposes, and knocking off strange alternative versions of the social network idea. Among them were ‘fakesters‘ or ‘pretendsters,’ groups of people who posted fake identities on the system, or even posted profiles of their pets instead of themselves.
Another knock-off is Dogster which takes pet anthropomorphizing to a whole new place.
So, as I often ask, why is this relevant to arts and cultural managers? These systems are about social networks, personal identity, expressive behavior, group behavior, and the explicit representation of so many elements of our world that have long lived below the surface. Just read this excerpt from a SF Weekly article on the fakester trend:
Emboldened by their masks and often preferring the weird over the normal, fakesters are turning Friendster on its ear. They link to other users they’ve never met in real life, flouting the site’s original intent of connecting people through verifiable personal relationships. Many compete to link to as many other users as possible, so that their fictional characters function as social hubs in the Friendster network.
Though they are some of Friendster’s most ardent fans — many spend several hours a day on the site — fakesters do everything they can to create anarchy in the system. They are not interested in finding friends through prosaic personal ads, but through a big, surreal party where Jesus, Chewbacca, and Nitrous are all on the guest list. To fakesters, phony identities don’t destroy the social experience of Friendster; they enrich it.
This is social interaction as cultural expression. Tell me that’s not relevant to managers in the business of social interaction and cultural expression!
And how many users does it take before spontaneous social behavior emerges? Foremski’s best guess is 10,000 to 15,000. So, now may be a good time to pare down your mailing list.
