Looking back over the notes I made while reading, I notice that I’m much more accepting of corporate communications (and marketing) in the relatively “low presence” (as I defined it towards the end) forms of social software. That is, I don’t have any issue with corporate blogs that are essentially offering knowledge so that you’ll stick around long enough to read their sales pitch. Likewise, I don’t take issue with the ads on YouTube videos, either.
But when it came to virtual worlds, I suddenly seemed to take a much more anti-corporate stance. My first reaction was to want all corporations to stay out of the virtual worlds altogether. And though I moderated my position, I still very much exhibited a desire for corporate marketing to stay unobtrusive and optional. Why is this?
For one, I suppose it’s a practical matter of wanting to avoid the marketing. When I hit the marketing section of a blog entry, I can close the tab and stop reading. When I have the ad on YouTube, I can look away or hit the “skip” button. But if I’m “present” in a virtual world and mentally inhabiting the avatar on screen, then it’s much, much more disruptive to that sense of presence to suddenly be confronted with RL companies marketing their RL products and services. If I think about seeing marketing for an in-game, virtual business, suddenly that feels less disruptive to me.
On a more personal level, I suppose I also want to avoid unwilling crossover or leakage between offline and online lives. Real life is challenging enough and has a multitude of unfeeling corporations all grubbing for my time and attention (and personal data); I would enter a virtual world seeking to leave that behind for a time and move into a world less crippled by these effects. Being followed by unskippable ads into what might otherwise feel like a refuge would be an extremely negative experience.
In terms of how I relate to various types of social media, I find that each has a purpose. Blogs are what I write to share information, or to gain information from a single person. Wikis are what I read to gain information from many people on many topics. Videos are what I watch for light fun, and any information gained is secondary to the desire to have fun. Instant messaging systems are merely communication tools, no different from email or a telephone.
What elevates any given type of social media into something truly valuable? For me, it is a sense of community. Communities may form around games or other interests… they are often mediated by various communication tools, but the tools are not usually the point. (When’s the last time you saw a Telegram channel dedicated to how amazing everybody thinks Telegram itself is? I’m sure it exists, even so!) When a series of blogs can be collected into a “friends” view like LiveJournal did, that can become the basis of a self-selecting community. While the tools are not the point, I do think the depth and richness of a community is measured, to some extent, by how much interaction can be advanced by that medium. A free-form blog can go on for some length (clearly!) and that allows more insight into the writer’s thought process and opinion. A 140-character snippet on Twitter is barely enough for anything of substance, save for some snappy remark here and there. Tools like Slack or Discord can allow users to ramble at length, or switch to higher orders of communication by opening voice or video channels, increasing the amount and speed of communication.
So, what do I gain from reflecting on these points? First, I can clearly see that a sense of community is most important to me in elevating social software beyond just being a tool. Second, I can see that I want to avoid simply replicating existing attributes of the offline world (like corporate marketing) into an online, virtual world. Something needs to change in order for this to feel suitably “different” from “the usual”–and the more creatively or subtly this can be done, the less I mind it. But break that sense of separation from the real world, and many of the benefits of a virtual world will, for me (and probably some others), be lost.
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