Quora Answer: Placing Google+ on the Anti-Social spectrum of alienation of “Social Networks”

Oct 18 2014

Namesake.com: So everyone has Google+ now. What are you thoughts? See http://namesake.com/conversation/shawnleonardi/so-everyone-has-google-now-what-are-you-thoughts

I never really liked facebook, so for me it is a pleasant surprise that I like Google+ at all. I think with circles they have refined the facebook model in an essential way, allowing us to talk to different groups of friends differently, rather than one wall fits all style of Facebook, where you have to think about the implications of “friending” someone. On my scale of the anti-social I would place it somewhere between Twitter and Quora on the scale of alienation. I don’t know when we are going to realize that what we are calling “social” media is really “anti-social” and we are involved in a kind of newspeak when we call it “social”, when most of the people we interact with we will never meet. There is a certain amount of alienation evident in this distancing.

I made up a scale that goes from Facebook, to Namesake, to Quora, to Twitter, and finally to 4Chan. Complete anonymity plus only very short term memory is the ultimate in this alienation scale. At least on facebook there is a good chance you actually know some of the people who are your “friends”. Namesake because of its chatty realtime nature is a bit more alienated, and it seems that Google+ tries to split the difference between Namesake and Quora. Notice that many posts are questions trying to elicit comment trails. If you watch it it can be like realtime, except you have to update it yourself. It does not have the limitations of Twitter that makes it more alienated than Quora. Something to consider . . .

See original Quora answer which proposes the anti-social spectrum of alienation as a measure of “social networks” http://think.net/2011/05/28/quora-answer-do-people-value-twitter-or-quora-followers-more-why/

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