Social Me(dia) Rivers

It took me a while to catch onto what Tama was on about with this topic with the cute name. Having heard the iLecture, read the Course Work and the readings, done the activities and done some of the Discussion Board questions, I may have a better handle on it now. Maybe. There seem to be two main threads, firstly the concept of continuous partial presence (in miniblogs) and secondly the integration of the different components ("contexts") of our internet footprints.

Ross Mayfield coined the term continuous partial presence and applied it how "a never-ending steam of presence messages prompts you to update your own". This mysterious impetus causes us to become a frequent microblogger, with individual posts not meaning much, but collectively they allow a nuanced profile of our style, behaviour and interests. We saw this in action in an activity by studying the tweets of a prolific twitterer. Microblogs such as Twitter with their strict character limits require much less effort and commitment than other forms of online communication such as email or blogs, and so participants are more inclined to use them frequently. This argument must surely apply to SMS messages on mobile phones.

Elizabeth Lawley clarifies this mystery somewhat in language easy to digest. "But asking 'who really cares about that kind of mindless trivia about your day' misses the whole point of presence. This isn't about conveying complex theory--it's about letting the people in your distributed network of family and friends have some sense of where you are and what you're doing. And we crave this, I think. When I travel, the first thing I ask the kids on the phone when I call home is 'what are you doing?' Not because I really care that much about the show on TV, or the homework they're working on, but because I care about the rhythms and activities of their days. No, most people don't care that I'm sitting in the airport at DCA, or watching a TV show with my husband. But the people who miss being able to share in day-to-day activity with me--family and close friends--do care." This makes a lot of sense to me, and goes a long way to explaining the phenomenon of serial-twittering at least amongst family and real-life friends. And her definition of presence is also very illuminating: "The big 'P' word in technology these days is 'participatory'. But I'm increasingly convinced that a more important 'P' word is 'presence'. In a world where we're seldom able to spend significant amounts of time with the people we care about (due not only to geographic dispersion, but also the realities of daily work and school commitments), having a mobile, lightweight method for both keeping people updated on what you're doing and staying aware of what others are doing is powerful. I don't have to add anything to this!

Tama introduced us to FriendFeed, and as an activity, we were asked to open an account and link it to the accounts in Web 2.0 platforms that we created in previous activities. This consolidation of individual threads creates the social me(dia) river of the title. The outcome reminds me of a primitive form of personal web presence, which is maybe what Tama intended. It doesn't have the flexibility of a PWP, or its ability to customise in a style which represents our persona, but FriendFeed's collection of posts from different contexts is just what our PWP assignment requires. It's quite easy to see that studying anyone's FriendFeed site (if they have one, and if they link their other platforms in) will quickly reveal a lot about the person's identity and interests. This picture may be deliberately crafted of course, but one way or another, it will add up to a pretty complete profile, be it real or fictitious.