A friend sent me a text the other night — from a humongous holiday party held for a well-known biotech firm — with this thought: the hallmark of mall culture is the decreased possibility of a unique experience.
This feeling had come over him while walking around the baseball stadium that housed this particular party, to which he had walked from a friend’s high-rise apartment in the trendy section of town not far from the stadium. It had struck him how homogenous the experience of many of the party attendees might be. Many of them likely lived in that high-rise apartment or one just like it and had a couple of drinks there with their friends before heading to the party.
He told me about these impressive looking fire pits they had brought in to counteract the chilly December air. They were concrete slabs, perhaps 15 feet across with a basketball-sized flame in the middle around which people could huddle. From afar, they looked great, but when you went to go use one to warm up, you were disappointed to discover that the heat didn’t reach you unless you were on the inner part of the slab.
Underwhelming experiences like this aren’t uncommon these days, when bigger, newer and more popular is often mistaken for better. We see it everywhere, in Texas strip malls, New York boutique hotels and Nevada housing developments. The idea of reaching as many people as possible has become so ingrained in our cultural psyche, that it seems like nearly every business insists upon being the next Google, Myspace or Facebook. In fact, if I could enact twenty changes to the business world, I am fairly sure that one of them would be to outlaw the use of the words “changing the face of.”
Social networking sites like Myspace, Facebook and even LinkedIn are a perfect example. They are relentlessly hyped. A search of LinkedIn and the phrase “changing the face” returns nearly 6,280 pages. Sub in Facebook and you get more than 40,000 pages. Finally, Myspace and “changing the face” returns more than 67,000 pages. Talk about homogeny, with that many faces changed by these sites, it seems that the faces out there might start looking pretty similar.
Writers, investors and entrepreneurs are breathless about the viral effect of these portals. Look at all those users! Look at those unfathomable page-view numbers! The kids love it! It’s the wave of the future! Questions arise like: “Can these sites change the face of our employee relations?” Will Facebook change the face of enterprise collaboration?”
What is forgotten is that people just don’t want their whole life to be the same experience, viewed through the same prism. Just as dot-coms overestimated people’s eagerness to buy everything from the comfort of their own home, many of the same people are now overestimating individuals’ desire to funnel all of their social and business interactions through a customizable Web page.
The hard truth is that social networking sites are largely trafficked by the lonely and isolated. For the most part, that means kids too young to drive and people bored to tears with their home lives or jobs. Sure there are exceptions, but most people I know fit the following profile. Received invitation to join Myspace from friend and checked out the site. Seemed interesting, so they signed up and built a limited profile. Invited a few friends to share in this interesting new experience. Forgot about it until they got a friend request, replied “yes” to friend request. Forgot about it again.
You get your friend aggregators, and some of them are so prodigious at sending friend requests that they even get their own reality shows on MTV. But most of us fall below even the level of casual use. The only time we touch our Myspace page is when our new girlfriend insists we go on to change our status to “In a Relationship”. And if we break up, we defiantly go and switch back to “Single” or “Swinger”.
This seems all the more true for LinkedIn. I overheard two people in the office yesterday discussing LinkedIn. “Hey, we’re connected on LinkedIn.” The response was, “Oh, really, I forgot I was on that.” On second glance, maybe these social networking sites are merely changing the face of hyperbole.
What do they offer the already connected individual? Is it a warm hearth of human connection or is it an impressive-looking fire pit that leaves most of the crowd feeling a bit chilly?
Stay tuned for a look at whether Facebook, LinkedIn or Myspace really offer any benefits to your team.
