Posts Tagged ‘Culture’

The Social Geeks

Published by ConfigSys.boy! on August 9th, 2010

It is an interesting incongruity to me that Geeks of all stripes have traditionally been painted as either anti-social or otherwise completely incapable of existing in any form of community. This I believe is a misrepresentation brought on by the dissonance between our behaviors and the social norms that exist around us. In my experience though, It is not anything like an accurate portrait of the average Geek. Quite the contrary I believe that our culture, while certainly out-of-phase with the mainstream, may in fact be more socially oriented than the norm – we just tend to have a different center of gravity for our social connections.

Take for instance all of the fan conventions we have created and nurtured into the giant hulking behemoths of today. Is there another cultural slice of society outside of Geekdom that is so driven to gather in this way, to this extent?

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Social Networking On and Offline

Published by ConfigSys.boy! on July 11th, 2010

This presentation by Paul Adams, Google’s User Experience Research lead, is a fascinating examination of how we as human beings interact both on and offline, and how current social networking technology is and isn’t responding to our natural human patterns of use.  The setup may be a little long and turn you off (its a 216 slide presentation all told) – but the real meat of the talk starts at around slide 46 and goes until around slide 145 when he moves into Privacy Issues (interesting in light of recent conversations about RealID) and Influentials.

A few highlites:  People tend to have between 4-6 groups of friends.  Each group has 2-10 people in it, and the groups are formed around life stages and shared experiences.  The average American has just 4 strongly tied relationships and about 10 people they meet and speak with weekly.

Check out the whole thing to get an idea not only of how we interact with each other IRL and Online, but also to see how the industry is looking to respond to those interactions and leverage them for business use.


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