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Comment by ubercore | Hacker News Reader

Calling out social networking for being trivial is a bad analysis of what social networking is all about. Your social networking experience is defined by your friends and what you choose to socialize about. Scoble is socializing about mobile apps, and technology. I'm sure he has a whole raft of very insightful posts, balanced by more mundane ones like the example in the article.

In my experience, some friends post consistently interesting and thought provoking links and paragraphs. Others post about their coffee habits. That mirrors my "real life" experience of interacting with them. Why is there this expectation that online socializing should be inherently more profound than real life socializing?

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I agree with your basic sentiment that social networking is driven by the tenor and tone of your real life friendships and interests. However, it differs from real-world socializing in that it is a broadcast model rather than a conversation model. When you and I meet for coffee, the cost of telling you about my new 19t Surly steel cog is, shall we say, two minutes. We only have so much time for coffee, and I ought to spend half of it listening to you, so am I going to decide that the cog is worth two minutes of our limited time to tell only one person about it?

But online, I appear to have unlimited time to broadcast what I want to say. If I spend two minutes on the cog, it takes away from two minutes of the Real World, but it doesn't appear to take away from our limited time together, and I blast it out to all my friends, some of whom may care.

I believe this gives me an incentive to talk about fairly trivial stuff that doesn't exist in the face-to-face world.

I had to google "Surly steel cog."

That's actually another advantage of online interaction. In real life, you wouldn't be able to google something mid-conversation, so you'd basically need to sidetrack the conversation to be brought up to speed.

Or disadvantage. It's far easier to ask what a Surley steel cog is than to force a cognitive break to go look something up. You'll probably get a better answer too.

And you can also avoid the inevitable 30 minute trek through Wikipedia as you get distracted and end up looking at what other types of cogs you've been missing out on. And don't even start looking at sprokets.

Thanks, that's a good distinction I was overlooking. It does seem to be somewhat dependent on the network we're talking about though. Twitter swings far to the broadcast side, but Facebook seems to push the needle back towards a conversation model. Maybe not a super in-depth conversation, but I do often have discussions with people around posts that were seemingly pretty trivial, meaning there was at least some level of interest and discourse.

Twitter allows me to interact with my friends more regularly. I still spend time at the pub, and those conversations can be more endearing because I'm up-to-date with the social hubub.

That said, we are in a special demographic. It's hard to validate our experiences against the "fragile youth".

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