The personalization paradox
Natalie Klym
October 1st, 2008
As we focus our attention on social technologies, I have become particularly interested in the notion of social capital. The core concept of social capital theory is that social networks—groups of connected individuals—have value. Social capital theory long precedes online social networks like Facebook, but is an obvious and natural fit that reveals an interesting paradox in today’s communications.
Robert Putnam of the Harvard Kennedy School has written a fascinating tome on the notion of social capital called Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, published just a few years before the explosion of MySpace and Facebook. Putnam’s basic thesis is that participation in community organizations, and thus social capital, increased during the first two-thirds of the 20th century and then sharply declined as society became more private and individualistic. This trend started in the 1960s and entered a death spiral by the 1980s and 90s. Three exceptions include involvement in small groups, social movements, and virtual (online) communities.
A large part of Putnam’s efforts involve a search for the culprit responsible for the individualization of society, and after excluding many potential causes related to pressures of time and money, mobility, and sprawl, he lands on technology and mass media—TV in particular—as a prime suspect.
Putnam attributes the decline in social capital to the non-social or disconnected quality of the TV experience, which stems from increasingly customized services (what I want, when and where I want it) consumed in private space (the home) as a solitary experience (the typical home now has more TVs than people). In Putnam’s words, “No longer must we coordinate our tastes and timing with others,” thereby diluting the one very social aspect of television as a common gathering place. (And this was before the proliferation of on demand, online, and mobile TV, which have only enhanced the individualized experience a thousand-fold.)
Putnam’s characterization of television in the 20th century is a specific example of personalization. The CFP has used this term to describe replacing shared media devices that support group experiences with personal devices for disconnected and customized experiences. Examples include the shift from the PC to the laptop; the living room stereo to the Walkman and now the iPod; or simply the shift from the family TV to one for every member of the home. Personalization also refers to the tailoring of standardized services to suit personal preferences, e.g., the customized Web page or the list of favorites on the EPG.
Putnam looks at the social consequences of this personalization of technology and mass media in terms of civic engagement, which he believes is the basis of a healthy society. But in the case of TV, the paradox is that personalization—when combined with social networking technologies—enables what we call “social TV,” an emerging category of interactive video services geared primarily at real-time interactivity with peer groups (virtual shared viewing) on multiple devices (TVs, PCs, and cell phones), and peer recommendations (what are my friends watching right now? what are their “favorites”?).
In short, we are seeing the transformation of TV into an activity that is at once individualized and group-oriented. Friends are watching TV together again (albeit remotely) and think in terms of “our” shows rather than “my” shows. The current CFP research on the future of TV is exploring this transformation with the view that the social dimension may eventually become a standard feature of the TV experience. (As Andy Lippman and David Reed put it, in today’s world of communications, “There is no I, there is only we.”)
The question remains, will the “socialization” of TV jack up its social capital? Putnam asks this question of virtual communities in general, pointing out that they tend to be single-stranded, meaning based on chosen and narrowly-defined shared interests rather than on a shared place or set of circumstances, and are therefore more diverse (but not always). Single-stranded connections lead to what Putnam refers to as bonding social capital (linking people from extremely homogeneous communities), but do less to generate bridging social capital (linking people across socio-cultural divisions). Other more philosophical or moral investigations question the implications of any kind of virtual interaction, at least when viewed as a substitute rather than a complement to face-to-face interaction. In a recent post, David Clark asks some poignant questions regarding the gains and sacrifices we might make by going virtual, while other scientists have probed deeply into how much of our humanity can be expressed, or not, online. And the negative implications of online social networks in particular, such as narcissism and the cheapening of the meaning of friendship, are carefully being explored by social scientists around the world.
I personally tend towards the neo-luddite’s view of virtual relationships—at least as a substitute for face-to-face communication, but am nonetheless intrigued by the notion that in online social networks, an increase in personalization does not necessarily come at the expense of collective identity—and vice versa.
