The Happy Moron

Online communication can be tricky. I think one of the reasons that it’s tricky is that the tools are so crude.

Think Twitter. A single tweet could be personal communication between two close friends. It could be a message between colleagues. It could be a broadcast from a famous person to a million people.

The same device is used for entirely different purposes and hijacked by each person for their own intent. As a medium, it’s flexible enough to be many different things but it’s not advanced enough to describe which of the different things it is. In the flat world of the internet, it can be confusing to sort out what is what. If someone asks, “Do you want to read a tweet?” the only answer can be the question, “What is it?”

Facebook found this out when certain users began to exceed the maximum allowed number of friends (I believe 5000). The users didn’t really have that many friends (that’s impossible), but they wanted that many friends, because a friend is not a friend is not a friend.
Facebook solved this problem by introducing a more complicated, more realistic model of things. Now important entities on Facebook have Pages and you can become a Fan of something (a weaker relationship). Problem solved.

However, in solving the problem like this, you kill a little bit of the magic of the internet, because there’s something magical about knowing that your name is alongside Oprah’s name in the same follow list. The flat internet is magical, because there’s something magic about a system that treats everyone the same, even when everyone is not the same.

We don’t want the internet to be exactly the same as the real world, because that would be boring.

Part of the problem with communication online is that in order to move something from real space to computer space, you have to describe it in some way. You have to model it.

Trying to describe something to a computer is a great test of understanding. If you don’t understand something, you can’t describe it to a computer. (Sometimes, even if you *do* understand it, you still can’t.)

The problem is, some things are indescribable. A conversation held online rather than in person doesn’t have body language or intonation or facial expressions. Sarcasm and intent get lost in the shuffle.

Sometimes (like being Oprah’s friend) there’s fun to be found in a broken model. Sometimes there’s discomfort. Sometimes there’s creepiness.

The secret, it seems, is finding the best representation of relationship. One that is not too restrictive but not too loose. How do you represent the fuzziness of friendship, while keeping the spammers out?