Maybe it’s just my pre-coffee mood, but it feels like this post could use more time to gel. It strikes me as less focused than your usual posts.

At one point you write, “we lose a bit of who we are and adopt an aura of who we want to be.” It seems like your point here is about the personal cost of “transparency.”

Yet you close with this lovely and touching bit: “The constant search and dedicated activity to narrow the gap between who I am and who I want to be serves as my catalyst to participate and learn each and every day.”

It’s the same concept, imho.

I guess my comment about those two quotations is: this is the heart of your thesis, and it’s strong and thought-provoking and worthy. But, it’s buried. So much so, in fact, that I’m distracted by some of the other (engaging) points around it. I’m inspired by what you’re saying; so I’m wanting it be in starker relief.

But, now that the coffee is setting in, another comment is demanding I give it voice.

The emotional price we pay for expressing ourselves in a truly honest, authentic way (is this what you mean by “transparency”?), is the same struggle faced by every artist. Artists hope to express themselves authentically in their art — and they pay a price for that (exposing vulnerabilities to criticism can be emotionally draining). But they also reap the incalculable benefit of self-realization (and sometimes even “the overwhelming and addictive sensations of finite acceptance and prominence”).

You write: “Transparency is the ante to participate on the social web. Social capital is the payoff. Conversations serve as the currency.”

How do you react to this: “Authenticity is the ante to engage in artistic endeavors. Self-realization is the payoff.
Dedicated artistic activities serve as the currency.”

How is what you’re writing about here similar to the life process of artists?

Just two thoughts:

1) I think human nature does change, especially if you take a long-term view. But this change isn’t uniform, it is usually culturally specific, it doesn’t occur at the same rate with every individual and it is usually in ways that we can not predict. At best we can try to understand the present and see how we got here but even those interpretations are better made 20 years after the fact, when we have some hindsight.

2) I’d disagree with this statement: “Instead, we’re focusing on the quantity of connections, the number of links, grades based on the reach of followers, and the volume of updates and links back to them.”

I think the “we” you are talking about is actually a very narrow range of social network users. If you look at Hubspot’s latest blog post, you can see that the vast majority of the Twitter users they track have a medium-sized social network (~600 people or less). The “we” who are keeping score, obsessing about their rank are a small minority of users but they take up a lot of space, so to speak. They are really competing against each other not with the typical Twitterer who doesn’t care who has 20K, 50K, or 100K followers.

I did an informal poll where I asked people where they found names of new people to follow. Those ranking sites fell far, far down on the list. I’m beginning to think that only the people who are on them (or who want to be on them) pay attention to ocial network rankings. I’ve even run into people saying that are unhappy to get bigger numbers of followers because it makes keeping track of people more complicated.

Our view of the world is always colored by the opinions of the people we are in conversation with. They are our reference group. Broaden that circle of people and you’ll see social networks in completely new ways.

Before the advent of mass communication, people communicated in small communities around the marketplace, which is still true in third-world countries and minority neighborhoods. People knew everything about everybody in the community within a day and social conformity developed according the the personality of the small community.

With the invention of movable type made it possible for people to store concepts in something other than human memory and pass them to more people, growing the virtual community, but at the same time, it helped enforce a larger “group think” because those who controlled the media could establish the format of the discussion. As print became ubiquitous, more communities formed around particular publications.

Radio and Television, however, made it possible to isolate yourself from the print community. It was possible now to get information on a global scale and ignore the local community.

Social media has brought us back to the marketplace, but at the same time isolates us from the worldwide community. This time, our village is electronic and can include people from multiple geographic locations, but still establishes social behavior described by the group. It is more efficient, but more limited in scope.