Adrian Chan Archive

The first law of social interaction design is the law of user centric design. The user centricity of social media is obvious. Social media are voluntary, and they mean to their users what their users put in and take out of them. Users are interested users, not needy or obliged users. Even users who can claim to have goals and objectives are motivated to participate, contribute, even just read and lurk, because they want to. Compelling social media do not compel users — users become compelled, for whatever short or long-term interest it is that compels them.

That said, we recognize that social media are highly psychological. The reasons that motivate any given user may be rational, or not, may be task or goal-oriented, or may be a reflection of distraction, compulsion, or even "addiction." The fact that social media use involves psychological interests has a couple implications for designers, builders, and users. First, it means that we cannot know the reasons for a user’s use, or by extension, the reasons that an application is used. Second, we cannot even assume that a user knows those reasons. I like to say that to know what a social media application does, turn it off. We will soon know why and how we use an application by what we miss.

This leads us to a corollary of the first law: the value of social media is specific to the user. Ask any user why he or she uses it and you will get an answer specific to that individual. Reasons for use are not generic, and are not generalizable. The social media application is individuated by its users — that is, it accrues uses and reasons for use as it accrues users. Furthermore, ask any user what he or she uses it for, and you will get uses specific to that user. The value of social media is a combination of how a user uses it, and what reasons s/he can provide for using it. Value is in the eyes of the beholder. It is subjective, individual, and non-generalizable. We cannot ascribe one value to a social media application, and should approach any claims about an application’s value with caution. (They are likely to reflect the value perceived by that person, given the context and interests of his or her use of it.)

A second corollary obtains from the first law: users use social media based on existing and past experiences with other media. Users do not invent uses for social media wholesale, but rather use new applications to extend their current habits and uses of other media. A user who chats will likely use Twitter differently from a user who blogs. A user who uses IM will likely use Twitter differently than a user who is a Facebook addict. And so on. Research is not required to prove the claim that we blog, update, comment, post, upload, review, rate, recommend, IM, chat, email, and tweet very differently. I’m not likely to suddenly start commenting in all caps on Youtube tomorrow, any more than a heavy chatter is to suddenly switch to Twitter for conversation. Each of us is a bundle of habits and repetitions. And we use social media according to how we can each see them fitting into what we tend to do.

A third corollary follows, and it is that we cannot know what the user is doing and experiencing. The web as biased in favor of the affirmative, meaning, it captures action but not inaction. Clicks are recorded, but not reading. We know only when a user does something, and that something is captured as an affirmation. There are no "contradictory" or "negative" acts counted online. An act of opposition would look the same to the web server as a an act of affirmation. All actions are, in communication theory terms, a "yes." The inability to know what user’s experience confounds all media, but it is complicated online by the fact that we can track and measure some things. And we focus mightily on them. In the case of Twitter and in the culture of status updating, however, we have no means by which to know what and how much is being read. It takes a retweet, a comment, or a reply to publicize and manifest the reader’s attention to a message. This is, of course, why we count our followers. Their number is a substitute for attention and visibility, meaning relevance and acknowledgment. Each and every tweet solicits a response, and in its loneliness is one of the small moments of irrelevance we suffer through daily in our contract with social media. There is no way of showing others that we are paying attention without making it obvious — by saying so.

A fourth corollary follows, and we have suggested it already: to show that s/he is paying attention, the user must act. Communication is not just the performance of a statement; that would just be expression. Communication occurs when that statement is accepted or rejected. This "yes or no" response is what transforms expression into communication, what makes of it an action system. Designers know of actions. But in communication, the action is on either the message or its author. It is this possibility, that we can respond to what is said or to who said it, that implicates relationships in social media. And the ambiguity of which was intended that can often subsist in social media use fuels the engine for further participation.

Social media professionals can do no better than to keep the first law in mind. And to bear in mind, also, that users are different. For designers, this should mean occasionally forgoing standards or conventions for something else. Tools designed for writing and publishing online, for example, need not be the basis for fast messaging and lifestreaming. Page layouts common to text-oriented applications will miss out on users who watch and see (some desktop Twitter apps now emphasize visualizing the stream of users over and instead of their posts). For marketers, it is unlikely that top influencers are the ones to reach on Twitter — other kinds of users are more motivated to retweet and promote. And for inventors, solving some of the big problems, such as awareness and attention, or addressing use cases that involve under-served user types, can offer compelling opportunities.

The law of user centricity tells us that we cannot know what we might do, nor can we know what can be done. But that in all cases we should ask, what is it capable of? We will address this in the second law.

Adrian Chan is a social media experience expert and analyst. You can follow him on twitter at gravity7.

While it may be tough times for many social media startups, there could be a silver lining in the industry’s future. Interest in social media doesn’t appear to be waning, and in fact this week there’s been a growing realization in the mainstream media that social media played a significant role in Barack Obama’s campaign success. If the history of technology innovation is any guide, the next phase of industry growth will come from the markets and industries that adopt social media for their own purposes. And the same can probably said of the media’s evolutionary path, too. In fact mass media, which is an industry that observes events, news, and by necessity, itself, is practically destined to assimilate social media.

But added to historical tradition is another obvious but rarely noted reason for social media’s ongoing durability. It’s in social media’s DNA: that social media collapse the distance between production and consumption.

Unlike traditional (mass) media and in contrast to past modes of production and manufacture, including information production, social media co-locate the means of production with means of consumption. Video is recorded, edited, posted, and viewed on the same platform. Opinions, news, and stories are told, shared, commented on the same platform. Music is made, distributed, branded, and listened to, on the same platform. This conflation of means of production with means of consumption not only presents a threat to mass media (and one which mass media will respond to by co-opting the social), it promises opportunities for those who can see them.

All commerce involves some amount of marketing, whether it’s based on brand identity, "real" utility and value, pricing, or whatever else comprises a marketing message and campaign. Social media disrupt marketing by eliminating much of the distance between the marketing/sales/branding medium and its audience. In social media they are one and the same: the audience does the branding and marketing, through communication, and often without the brand’s direct intervention or participation. Distribution by means of communication among friends and colleagues (social media users) is not only natural and organic (non-commercial), it reproduces itself without any help from commerce required. In other words, it’s self-referential and non-commercial.

This might cause palpitations for those who make a living by imagining, imaging, wrapping, crafting, and distributing brand and marketing campaigns, but it shouldn’t. Conventional branding requires that value be created away from an audience, to then be introduced to an audience, resulting in (hopefully) consumer interest, desire, and spending. The distance between the brand and audience not only allows those on the brand side to finesse their presentation, it allows them to control its release. Traditional means of course are print, television, radio, and outdoors advertising. Lifestyle, affiliative, demographic and other types of market segmentation and targeting serve the purposes of campaign management. The whole process relies on a separation of brand from its audience, and time during which to conduct, refine, and steer the campaign.

Social media disrupts all of this with the sheer immediacy and proximity provided by its tools — tools that serve the needs of talking and communing. "Word of mouth marketing" is a fancy way of saying "we let it go and our fingers are crossed." Control over the marketing or brand message is but a residual inclination to stay one step ahead of the market, to use the distance between traditional media and their audiences to steer outcomes in a company’s favor. But control is precisely what is sacrificed in a medium that conflates means of production and consumption; a medium we sometimes call an "echo chamber" because there’s no telling where the noise is coming from.

Future and successful marketing campaigns that leverage social media will benefit the startup and social technology space by extending what’s been designed for daily use into soft commercial use. The budgets, while trimmed, are there. It would behoove social media companies to consider the ways in which soft commerce may play along. Just as mass media should entertain new forms of conversational and social marketing, from new types of creative, to compelling serial "talkies": brand stories, interactives, games, and other new forms of what I’ll call "participatory branding."

Social media are notorious for giving rise to unintended social practices, and those of us who design and build social applications should not for a minute think that we know everything that can be done with them. Any more than television manufacturers would be expected to develop the TV programs shown on them. Current market conditions make this a perfect time for creatives to get inventive, and for social media companies to reflect on where they will fit in.

Adrian Chan is a social media experience expert and analyst. You can follow him on twitter at gravity7.

I thoroughly enjoyed the presentation by UPS’s Debbie Curtis-Magley at Tuesday’s Blogwell in San Jose. Her topic was social media monitoring, and her team’s experiences watching conversational media for UPS-related traffic. Keen to learn what tools they used, and with what success, we were somewhat disappointed to learn that social media tracking is still a matter best left to humans — tools not yet being able to capture conversations accurately and automatically. What eavesdropping tool would know, as she cited to pointed laughter, that push ups and sit ups bear no relation to pick UPS, the company’s tagline?!

While UPS seemed to be tracking conversations as well as we consumers track UPS, conversational marketing and monitoring is still in its infancy. The great difficulty of tuning your tools to the tone of conversation (I like Radian6 and Visible Technologies), the challenge of reading the sentiment and gist from between lines kerned 140 characters wide (Twitter), not to mention spotting influencers and mapping their networks, all suggest that this is a job for specialists. Thankfully, the particular skill involved comes naturally to all of us: it’s conversation.

According to Debbie, UPS tracks about four topics over time, with other short-term issues identified as they come up. Her company has established goals and objectives that include an interest in learning from its customers, identifying pain points, and reputation topics, all with the interest of refining corporate and brand messaging. Writ large, they are "using monitoring to learn about the topics that matter to the brand," and are tracking how their brand is being talked about, to "learn how to better provide information to customers."

Several things struck me about UPS. Clearly, the team gets the importance of listening. And in fact Debbie’s collaboration with customer service resources was testament to that (all important) insight. UPS, too, is making creative use of internal "driver" blogs, and extending the relationship between its truck drivers and auto-racing drivers (UPS is a NASCAR sponsor, though I suspect their track vehicle of choice is not a van, and operates with its doors closed) with racy first-person narratives. So it has both an internal and public commitment to the medium. It clearly gets the value of watching conversations for customer complaints, and is engaged in ways of addressing and redressing, dare I say re-packaging, customer dissatisfaction.

What I liked the most about the UPS approach was that it emphasized the importance of listening. So much social media marketing still emphasizes the talking. Brands are used to packaging their messages, and deliver them to audiences at great expense. So no, it’s not surprising that in social media monitoring they hope to track results. But by viewing the medium as yet another distribution network, they risk missing its greatest strengths.

Which is in part why I still firmly believe that this whole social media marketing thing is still in its infancy. Taking UPS as a springboard for some creative whiteboarding (!), then, here’s what I would do if I were the guy with the marker.

Start from the customer’s perspective — it’s his/her conversation, after all, and his/her social medium. Advertisers are not as of yet welcome at the table.

Listen to the customer — what is s/he saying, about what, to whom, and why. Read between the lines, and stick with it. Tools cannot do this, but they can be essential to narrowing down the conversation space, identifying influencers, and mapping the terms and keywords, plus gestures, of the conversation itself.

Join the conversation — it may be that there is a best person for this within a company, for in fact tone, style, personality and delivery rule here. Conversational talk is not at all like branding, brand messaging, or brand presentation.

Join the conversation, really — many examples of social media marketing today more closely resemble "adjoining conversations," not joined conversations. That could be a catchphrase, in fact, if it weren’t negative: "ad-joining conversational marketing." Be with, not alongside, your customers; let monitoring be a means of eavesdropping that serves the purpose of getting aligned, but don’t stay on the sidelines.

Contribute — social media marketing should be designed around talking, not marketing: talk addressed to people who are talking (new school), not messaging in front of audiences that are looking (old school).

Structure the conversation — here’s where it gets interesting, and where we’re going to do some of that whiteboarding. Online conversations are highly unstructured, even informal. The media used tend to flatten out the tonality, sentiment, and delivery of messaging, and outside of social networking sites, the forms of speech users adopt are, well, relatively formless.

What do I mean by this? Well, there are many different kinds of linguistic claims, or statements. Questions, requests, instructions, promises, and so on — we can recognize them without having to think about it. Social media help users reach audiences of unknown members, and thus users will flatten out statements to appeal to greater numbers of people, while upsetting the fewest number of people. The conversations are generally informal and unstructured: not easily used.

So how about this: design a conversational marketing program around themes, topics, and formats that are natural and familiar, but which you can use and extend. These become brand conversation containers. They will contain messaging points, marketing claims, calls to action (interaction too!), and so on. They can use familiar social media genres, or adapted mass media and cultural forms (invitations, birthdays, top tens, gifts, quizzes, etc).

Let’s whiteboard an idea for UPS:

Care packages. The idea here leverages the brand messenger par excellance for UPS: quite literally, the brand driver. The goal is to get conversation going around the brand. The vehicle: use social media to solicit donations to Thanksgiving care packages. Use twitter to solicit Thanksgiving greetings and wishes. Users (customers) donate stuff, or sponsor stuff, to be delivered, with messages, to the elderly at the driver’s discretion.

UPS demonstrates that it cares, and gets its customers involved by packaging *their* care. (Why not have customers vote on care package designs contributed by the public, and composed of the tweeted messages. Maybe even localize the messaging…) The brand shows that it cares that its customers care, and wants to be the vehicle of appreciation and concern. Drivers post gratitudes to a company blog. Comments are collected. Branding and service become a mutual win-win.

Gas Think Tank. This is totally off the top of my head, so here goes tapping the thinking cap for a gas tank meter. UPS gets transparent with its customers about the high cost of gas, and the company’s role in climate change, by sharing gross gas expenditures and carbon output on a blog, let’s call it "the UPS think tank." There, it solicits ideas and contributions from customers about how to reduce its carbon "tire mark," offering to fund investment in ways to green the brown van. These might include sponsored online causes, use of twitter hashtags, perhaps even sponsorship of a commuter or car-sharing site where UPS drivers offer to carshare to work if customers do the same.

Conversational marketing can be much more interesting than just watching the brief and fleeting messages posted to social media that directly reference your brand. We’re really just at the tip of the iceberg. The brands that show success will be those that can shift from talking about themselves to talking to their customers. I honestly believe that if brands structure their efforts to create conversational brand extensions, there will be a flourishing of new and compelling creativity in social media campaigns. These can be cost-effective, engaging, and learning moments.

During times like these, we should all consider how to step up, save money, and do some good.

Adrian Chan is a social media experience expert and analyst. You can follow him on twitter at gravity7.

Financial news of the world this week may now be sinking in amongst the hereto protected economy of the startup world. Many of us will now hold more tightly onto the purse strings in the hopes of stretching out what might be a finite runway to success. I went through this, like many, eight years ago, and the quiet that followed wasn’t much fun.

But there’s still time for many to make it work. If I were at a VC firm, or heading up a startup today, I’d look more closely now than ever at product and service differentiation. If you have now built the application, done the engineering, and established a user base, now is time to focus on social interaction design. Don’t stop at technology design. And while you might be compelled to integrate the features that are quickly becoming standard among social web applications, don’t stop there either. Think further and harder about your designing your social interactions. Your equity is in your users and how they use your product - that’s the utility, personal and social, that you should leverage to distinguish yourself and capitalize on success.

Here are just a few thoughts and tips that I’ve gleaned from working with startups and from analyzing the sites I’ve used:

Users have Personalities
All users are not alike. And this is more important among social media users than in any other kind of designed product. Those users that get the most out of your site or application are the ones that will attract further growth.

In social media, for example, users have different ways of talking and communicating. They have different relationships to other users, and to audiences in general. Different ways of using and consuming information. And different perceptions of social trends. (I’m oversimplifying to keep this short.)

Personality types
Here are some personality types — you will recognize which would use your site, and for what:

Self-talkers: these are users who are comfortable talking about themselves in front of an online audience (including but not limited to friends). Posting, tweeting, and sharing are simple and straightforward ways of using social media. (Note that the vast majority of people find social media use to be somewhat narcissistic, or juvenile, and don’t connect with the self-promotion prevalent in social networking and conversation media. But they’re not our users.) These users are important content creators and activity contributors.

EmCees: these are users who get people together, who link, distribute, circulate posts and comments. They are on stage, but not to speak their own minds. Rather, they participate by acknowledging and recognizing those they respect (and often, want to be associated with). These users are important connectors and facilitators.

Mediators: these are users who are aware of "where people are at" and who attend to relationships, both their own and those of others. These users are not on stage but are active in the audience. They are important care-takers.

Critics: these users deepen conversation and forward the ideas suggested by many of the self-talkers. They explore, research, and often read more than self-talkers. Their contributions are important for the richness and discovery of social media content.

Experts: these users, like critics, go deep, but they enjoy being known as experts and protect and serve their reputations. Where a critic may be committed to truth or integrity, and to the content itself, the expert draws that content expertise around him or herself. Expert contributions are important because so many of us follow experts and their recommendations.

Inviters: Inviters use social media to maintain a family or network of people they care about enough to invite (to stuff). They mine the web for events, activities, and news and are happy to share it because it keeps them and their networks active — without drawing attention to what they themselves have to contribute. Inviters gain from distribution and are critical to the medium’s service to events.

there are more, such as jokers, seducers, organizers, and lurkers, but in the interest of time….

Use Cases
Use cases for your service fall into two categories: individual user use case and social use cases. Each is important. You probably know your individual use cases — and in fact were probably building with those in mind. They have to do with conventional uses and utility, but also include psychological payoff and reward (see above for what hooks different kinds of users).

Social use cases are more complex. Most social media promise utility in use — that is in the act of using the tool. But many also promise utility and value in what’s left behind for later consumption, e.g. by non-participants. Yelpers may enjoy reviewing and networking, but the majority of Yelp’s pageviews come from non-users. So if you have a service that leverages user participation to create content (niche vertical, topic, theme, community of practice) make sure that your social features lend themselves to high-value content for those non participants also.

Social Practices
Social practices are what come out of individual use when individual user activity is aggregated. You can offer the individual user an experience but have little control over the emergent social practices. Stories of social media engendering unintended practices abound, and if the practice you facilitate is against your business objectives, you’re in trouble. Dating or "hooking up" can kill a service that’s intended for serious use. As a lack of flirting may kill a site that is supposed to be high in emotion.

Those are just a few tips. I think social interaction design is a vastly under-stated aspect of social media — and is as important as technology on which it rests.

Related:  My slide shows on social interaction design, psychology of the user experience, and social media user competencies.

Adrian Chan is a social media experience expert and analyst. You can follow him on twitter at gravity7.

Feeling overfed lately? Sidle up to the trough, there’s company here. Yes, subscribing to feed-based applications can be like drinking from a firehose, especially during times like these. When the daily news is itself the topic of presidential campaigns, late-night talk show hosts, politicians (relevant or not, incoming or outgoing), and the news media in general, being on a site like Friendfeed is a bit like Hussein Bolt gesturing for the Jumbotron at the Beijing Olympics.

The echo chamber is also a hall of mirrors.

All social media play some part in mirroring us, reflecting us, whether to ourselves or in front of others. And this doesn’t make every social media user a narcissist. It simply admits to the shiny and reflective surface of the social media screen and to the facts that we like to see ourselves reflected in this screen, and like to be seen by others. It’s a particular kind of vanity, of self-image and self-promotion.

I’ve written about self-image and profile-based social networking, but haven’t really applied it to lifestreaming. Of course lifestreaming apps like Twitter also mirror us back to ourselves — indeed, it would be strange if we didn’t see our own tweets alongside others. The production of a self-image online is essential to how lifestreaming works, and why. But oddly enough, original activity feeds weren’t posted by users at all.

Facebook can be given credit for having popularized the feed: activity, news, status. Activity and news most of all (Yahoo and Friendster each had shout outs, as did many social networks have a mood option (even blogs have had mood options for inclusion with posting). But Facebook was feeding us system messages (still does). It’s Facebook’s inspired way of making the site seem more active than it is. Everything a user does is captured, recorded, and considered for re-telling. So in Facebook’s case, it often is not the user doing the talking, but the system doing the talking: Facebook was the chamber, and Facebook was the echo.

It is easy to bundle applications together because they use the same forms, or contents. All feeds are not the same, and all lifestreaming services are not the same. Their use of activity streams, status updates, commenting, and variations on posting, etc., suggest common design and architecture in many cases, yes, but these commonalities may conceal substantial differences. A system message that reports on my activity, as in Facebook, doesn’t appear to me as something I’ve said and I won’t relate to it as if it were speech. Nor is it addressed to anyone in particular, either. But as it’s produced by the system, it may have meta data, and embedded media types, that are better structured than what I may have used in writing/tweeting.

The matter of who’s talking might read like a matter of small print and footnotes, but consider the fact that in lifestreaming apps all content is posted by users, and all content is intended by users. In lifestreaming apps users can talk by writing, recording, sharing, and so on — the applications increase our ways of talking. But in all cases they are still about talk. Facebook, by contrast, is about the aggregating content around an audience (call it graph or network). User activity is documented in feeds — it’s not conversational but is informational (informative).

On a site like Facebook, as commanding a lead it has in the market, members need not be encouraged to lifestream. Facebook provides social utility even to low-participation users. It offers a broad number of application types as well as pages, groups, and of course profile-centric activity. But lifestreaming services, on the other hand, do have to encourage participation. Talk needs to be sustained, as well as user attention. Hence Friendfeed’s integrated commenting, and close attention to supporting commenting.

Friendfeed are on opposing ends of the spectrum of talk tools– Friendfeed at the conversational end of talk, Facebook at the profile end of talk. However, Friendfeed could build up profiles around conversation and talk. Being page-based, though, Friendfeed can do what Twitter likely won’t: build up social navigation and content organization around page-based social media conventions. Friendfeed can build up social practices that sequentially extend value to those users who prefer lifestreaming to profile-based networking.

Adrian Chan is a social media experience expert and analyst. You can follow him on twitter at gravity7.

Jeremiah Owyang has posted his thoughts on what may come in the long-term for the social web, beginning with the increasing relevance of activities like friending: Why ‘Friending’ Will Be Obsolete. He writes that as the system learns about our behaviors, preferences, and relationships that it will be able to automate and supply information we normally have to declare explicitly today. I couldn’t agree more.

Jeremiah summarizes his model like this:

"The System: The system is the combination of all websites combined, it’s a massive data base of content, clicks, search terms, time on site, shared posts, wall posts, links, and tweets.

Teaching the System: Humans are constantly speaking in machine language, from use of hashtags in twitter, or boolean searches in Google, or even from the act of friending folks in your social network. All of these behaviors are humans teaching the system how to understand us, so it can better serve us.

The Intelligent Web: Software that is able to collect and make sense of all the data in the system and is able to deliver meaningful content back to people in context — often without us saying or gesturing that we need it."

The web was built on links between documents — objects — and since it’s inception has grown to accommodate not only many different object or media types, but their relevance, popularity, and other measures of use also. In fact links on the social web need not always point to the same thing. Social navigation in the form of a top-ten, for example, points to not only a changing set of top ten items, but updates itself as it is used, thus reflecting social use.

Behind Jeremiah’s vision of the future is the system’s interest in capturing and recontextualizing its own use. If the static web was merely a network of static connections, the social web is a dynamic network of changing connections. If we assume that social use will remain a priority for web builders and designers, applications and their businesses, then the relevance of information provided by the web will likely be qualified along two axes: the personal and the social, or the particular and the general. The next generation web, in systems speak, is a second-order observer system. Meta data supplies a second order observation of its own use: the web knows not only what it publishes but also how users interact with it.

Because the system is open, is dynamic, and is always in use, the new system is not a static collection but a dynamic and changing set of connections — connections whose relevance to an individual user and to the audience in general change over time. The next generation system has time. The first generation system did not.

I see, or would like to imagine, a system whose links are no longer document links but are instead "views." Each view (link) of information might then take into account meta data along our two axes: one user-centric, the other social-centric. A user centric view would be informed by my past history and tacit (learned) and explicit (declared) preferences. My tastes and interests, in other words. The social-centric view would be informed by social usage, social ratings and votes, interests, trends, and so on. I might use sliders to set the view I want on a social site — stuff for me or stuff socially organized.

There is another development coming for the next generation system, and that is the temporal organization of system (vs spatial organization). The topic comes up in discussions on lifesreaming and flow apps (which I’ll discuss soon), and often takes the form of talk-based apps vs page-based apps. Twitter, for example, is not page based: it lacks navigation, topical organization, topical layout, and so on, choosing instead the temporal organization of content used by time-based apps like IM, chat, and email. As more of these apps innovate, become more visual, and go mobile, time-based interaction tools will mature. We’ll have two modes of interacting with the system: from within the river of flow or from its shores: watching as it streams past.

Innovation of late may have produced many look-alikes. But it’s when things begin to look alike that exploration begins anew at the margins.

Adrian Chan is a social media experience expert and analyst. You can follow him on twitter at gravity7.

We have moved beyond "generation gap" differences in technology use and moved into the "experiential gap" in terms of use and understanding. Your experience with an application such as Twitter provides an understanding that cannot be communicated by reading about it or even being told about it.

Tom Foremski recently penned on twitter in which he notes the growing experiential gap that separates those who use new social media tools from those who don’t. Those who use, get it, and those who don’t, don’t. Well, not surprisingly, this digitally dividing line is also the void that old media needs to bridge, if it, like its users, are to join the ranks of the initiated. The adoption curve sweeps like the arc of a #suspension bridge (!) plotting the line of escape from the old and tired traditional media landscape to the bright and shiny shores of the new.

As Marshall McLuhan (pictured above) insightfully observed:

"The "content" of any medium is always another medium. The content of writing is speech, just as the written word is the content of print, and print is the content of the telegraph."

Now that bit about the telegraph may be a bit out of dot dot dash date, so simply substitute in "social media" for telegraph and you’re back in the present tense. Social media are a recontextualization of old print forms and contents within a new distribution and communication framework (social web). It’s not surprising that so many of our social practices (tools and uses) echo, if not amplify, their old media (broadcast) forebears: celebrity, self-promotion, news, anchoring, commentary, top tens, ratings, rankings, and polls (diggs, votes).

Speaking of telegraph, there was also recently a fine piece penned as well as printed by the New York Times on the ambient proximity of new conversation tools like twitter. I prefer talk tools to "micro blogs" because I think the connection is stronger between the acts (talking) than the form (writing). Blogs had sought to be conversational, yes, but clearly twitter is more a talkie than it is a bloggie. (I’ll skip the temptation to riff on silent films, inter-titling, and the arrival of the talkies, but the possibilities for extracting something out of "old content and new media" there are rife.)

This Times article artfully testified to the experiential gap, too, describing twitter with the pleasantly fuzzy phrase "ambient intimacy." The intimacy possible over social media is at best approximate, and the proximity at best ambient. Social media can only approximate the relationships and interactions of the real. And in spite of the close contact many of us now have on a daily basis with hundreds of friends and followers, there’s an experiential gap between "being there" and simply "there."

French sociologist Jean Baudrillard mischievously likened contemporary media to the peripheral image of thought footnoted at the base of any sideview mirror: "Caution: Objects in mirror may be closer than they appear." Mass media, he believed, distort the real to such a degree that he warned of a new "hyper-reality." Not only do they distort the appearance of reality, but the ambiguity suggested by "may be closer" hinted that media are also destabilizing.

To reverse McLuhan’s operational logic, we can deduce that in New Media objects may be more distant than they appear — which might describe the proximity manufactured across myriad connective webs and online social spaces. In fact, I like to liken social media some times to "social systems in failure mode." Time is discontinuous, communication fails to communicate, relationships are unrelated, attention is unattentive, attraction is distracted, audiences are disaggregated, and so on.

But it is early days still for social media, and were we to look back to the first years of TV, we’d find naught but radio shows revisualized. The migration path from old to new media is yet writing its narrative, and that arc has many more dots to connect before its line can be fully traced. If we overuse (and do we?) mass media forms and contents in how we build and use social media today, is that so surprising? What will come next can arrive only when we have stepped up to it.

Only as cultural and social practices online mature to the point that we can see what we might build next can we stitch a tighter weave, and by warp and woof, wend our way towards a tighter experiential gap.

Adrian Chan is a social media experience expert and analyst. You can follow him on twitter at gravity7.