Social ‘What’ or Social ‘Who’?
'Social' is a characteristic of living organisms, i.e. human beings and animals. It defines a behavior that takes the interests and/or needs of other living organisms into account.
I have written about the meaning and implications of 'social' before and I will continue to do so, because I believe it to be a fundamental issue that so far is not getting the attention it deserves. Just look at the never ending debates about Facebook's privacy policies.
Let's face it. Facebook and the other networks are nothing more (and nothing less) than very smart programs, systems of communication that allow their users to express themselves and exchange ideas as well as information. The networks are NOT social, because they are not human beings. The people that run the networks and their users can be social, but not the communication systems themselves.
Let's look at Facebook for a moment. It can not redefine social norms, as has been suggested recently. However I do believe that its owners are trying to do so and that is an important difference. From an economic perspective, the people that run Facebook are acting very rationally: The less privacy there is, the more they know about their users. The more they know about their users, the higher the price that they can fetch for those users, when renting them to the advertising industry. After all, how else are they going to make a profit? Sounds familiar, doesn't it? It should, because that's exactly what traditional media was and is doing.
Whether or not the owners of Facebook are going to be successful, depends on us, i.e. users. If we disapprove, we are free to leave Facebook. Facebook depends more on us than we do on them for the time being. I personally would prefer to see many more 'smaller' networks, catering to very specific needs. Diversity with Facebook as one of many networks is for the public good, a Facebook monopoly is not.
Rather than focusing on the tools we use, we should take the time to think a bit more about why we do what we do, as this will raise our awareness for the social implications of our behavior.