Comments on: Social Media’s Second Law: it’s a Verb, Not a Noun

By: andyconnell

andyconnell — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

I’m sure there are important points made here. Unfortunately, the piece has the seemingly deliberate impenetrability of a student thesis. The abiding criterion of any kind of social media surely should be simplicity of language wherever possible. I quote:

“We’re now at our last corollary of design by social practice, and it embraces the previous one: the more open and simple the social tool, the more uses it has for more users..”

By: shytalk

shytalk — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

wow if only you could explane this in the 140 character limit, i mite understand.
But as i am a typical twitter user with the attention span of a goldfish this went right over my head.

By: Adrian

Adrian — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

I apologize for the writing — there’s no denying that the posts on the laws are too dense. They’d be better written into a paper — but then nobody would read them at all!

The blog should be about the right size for something like this, but in this case I could have used more than one post.

Thankfully, we do not yet have to say everything in 140 character strings!

The gist of this piece is that social media need to be used by people if they are to become anything useful. That we each say something or do something on social media individually. But that taken together, these sites aggregate our actions into something social. And that for designers, this is a matter of how the site’s social features are designed — but is not in his/her control.

Social practices aren’t in the hands of the individual user, or the site itself, but are emergent phenomena.

That was it, really. By understanding that social practices happen over time and around a socializing activity, we learn to think more about social interactions and less about technical features.