This blog post from Will Richardson is quite interesting and sums up how I’ve been feeling lately:

I’ve always maintained, and still do, that the bulk of my learning these days comes in the conversation, that the publishing piece, the putting myself out there in a blog post (or video, or stream or whatever) is only the first step and, in reality, is not where I learn the most. I learn when my thoughts get pushed, when I read what others have written about other ideas on their own blogs, when I engage in the conversations about those ideas. And these “conversations” are different; they are not synchronous (though they are getting moreso), they are not linear, and as just the short sampling of link above conveys, there is a lot of complexity in the distributed nature of how we “talk” in this realm. In fact I think that might be the biggest frustration that newcomers to these tools experience. It’s random, seemingly aimless, and requires a whole bunch of other skills to navigate effectively.

Is the conversation moving from more centralized platforms, such as blogs and forums, to a decentralized pseudo-realtime mode? Are we losing the quality of thought that goes into a paper or a blog post in favor of less contextual snippets and links?

The Map of Future Forces Affecting Education suggests that Long-Tail economics, in the form of consolidation and commoditization, will likely reduce and refine the social networking media and tools into more mature and accessible platforms. It also suggests that Extreme Diversity will require networks to allow Deep Personalization to be truly topical and useful.

The immature precursors to whatever comes next are here:

• centralized social networks like Facebook, which offer everything in one place but suffer from identity issues
• micronets like Ning, which just got a nice treatment by Educause
• blogs, which take quite a bit of dedicated attention to maintain and read
• and microblogs like twitter, which is growing in popularity but is suffering from a signal-to-noise issue right now because it’s all one big melting pot of conversations

So, as a futurist, I’ll make a forecast: soon, we will see a proliferation of highly customizable social networks that offer multiple forms of collaboration and co-creation, with real-time communication and a definite sense of identity based upon affinity.

Some will be open, some will be closed; some will rely more on the depth of thought that goes into a paper or a book or even a blog post and resemble research teams or business meetings, others will be entirely composed of real-time updates and resemble smart mobs; all will adapt to the needs of its unique set of users.

And every participants’ identity in his or her communities - because this is really just the development of the right tool (the online, mobile social network) to support a set of practices and relationships - community - will be ephemeral or persistent as needed. This is the natural result of today’s highly Media-Savvy Youth coming of age.

So, are we losing depth in favor of immediacy? No, we are just seeing the seeds of a new, dynamic, and richer form of community. Right now, it’s in its infancy and distributed across disconnected tools. Soon, it will become part of the underlying infrastructure and we won’t even think about it.

In other words, the shifts and struggles and snags in the conversation will no longer be a topic of conversation.

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 1st, 2008 at 4:20 pm and is filed under Smart Networking, Strong Opinions Strongly Held. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.