Merli - Wouldn't you agree that from a pure social psychology perspective - at least theoretically - pleasing or not - SNAs do allow for three key group/social dynamic needs, Stalking, imitation, and gossip - a recent book actually has come out talking about the huge importance of gossip in maintaining social networks... you might find the following interesting:
*"Stalking, imitation and gossip* What would a good social system be without some means of stalking, imitation and gossip? (Speaking of which - I was recently reading something about evolutionary psychobiology and the importance of Gossip in developing language and semantic maps in early humans, but can't for the life of me remember where -- need to come back to this - anyway, I will look into this and come back with some references). Part of social life is all the things we pretend we don't do when in polite company. Most of us, at some point or the other stalked someone (remember when you could "finger<http://www.cs.indiana.edu:800/finger>" people). Some report<http://laughingmeme.org/articles/2005/12/26/tag-stalking> *learning about others' personal lives* using their *me* and *craigslist*tags. And of course, we can *imitate people* we watch (copy their items and tags). Recently, I have started noticing the watercooler type post-event conversations around photographs on Flickr (facilitated by specific event tags). Luckily, tagging systems do not promote popularity lists the way blogs do. If they did, then this rich social tapestry might degenerate to popularity contests, and otherwise sane people would start behaving as in high school (specifically American high school. For a fascinating article on Why Nerds Are Unpopular - the importance of Gossip, pecking order, arbitrary hierarchies in social organizations and group flock behavior in american high schools - read this article by Paul Graham<http://paulgraham.com/nerds.html> )." ~ will - "Where you innovate, how you innovate, and what you innovate are design problems" ------------------------------------------------------- will evans user experience architect [EMAIL PROTECTED] ------------------------------------------------------- ________________________________________________________________ *Come to IxDA Interaction08 | Savannah* February 8-10, 2008 in Savannah, GA, USA Register today: http://interaction08.ixda.org/ ________________________________________________________________ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ....... [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe ................ http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines ............ http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .................. http://www.ixda.org/help
