John Connell: The Blog

.…the trade­offs we make on social net­works is not the one that we’re told we’re mak­ing. We’re not giv­ing our per­sonal data in exchange for the abil­ity to share links with friends.

So writes, Alexis Madri­gal, in a piece on The Atlantic tech­nol­ogy blog enti­tled: Dark Social: We Have the Whole His­tory of the Web Wrong.

He goes on:

Mas­sive num­bers of peo­ple — a larger set than exists on any social net­work — already do that out­side the social net­works. Rather, we’re exchang­ing our per­sonal data in exchange for the abil­ity to pub­lish and archive a record of our shar­ing. That may be a trans­ac­tion you want to make, but it might not be the one you’ve been told you made.

Madri­gal sum­marises the Dark Social phe­nom­e­non as:

1. The shar­ing you see on sites like Face­book and Twit­ter is the tip of the ‘social’ ice­berg. We are impressed by its scale because it’s easy to measure.
2. But most shar­ing is done via dark social means like email and IM that are dif­fi­cult to measure.
3. Accord­ing to new data on many media sites, 69% of social refer­rals came from dark social. 20% came from Facebook.
4. Face­book and Twit­ter do shift the par­a­digm from pri­vate shar­ing to pub­lic pub­lish­ing. They struc­ture, archive, and mon­e­tize your publications.

It makes a lot of sense to me that:

.…the social sites that arrived in the 2000s did not cre­ate the social web, but they did struc­ture it.

War is hell—there’s no way around that. And the growth of alter­na­tive media, social media, cit­i­zen jour­nal­ism and the like now gives the pub­lic many ways to access con­tent that would oth­er­wise have been lost in archives. Peo­ple now have the choice whether or not they want to bear wit­ness, and I try to help them make an informed choice.

Any­one who still thinks Twit­ter is syn­ony­mous with trivia and celebrity vacu­ity should go read this inter­view with NPR’s one-man Twit­ter News­room, Andy Carvin, on the Impa­tient Opti­mists blog.

The rea­son I pre­fer to call Twit­ter a news­room rather than a newswire is because its fun­da­men­tal strength is around real-time con­ver­sa­tion. Yes, there are lots of news orga­ni­za­tions, includ­ing my own, that send out tweets when there’s news to share, but I like to take it another step fur­ther and tap into the col­lec­tive skill sets of every­one fol­low­ing me on Twit­ter. They help me sort out fact from fic­tion and sort out rumors from the truth—just as you would in a news­room. The big dif­fer­ence, of course, is a TV or radio news anchor would be sur­rounded by news­room staff help­ing them cre­ate break­ing news cov­er­age, while I rely on my tweeps to play those roles.