Remember the Old Spice commercial? If so, open your facebook page. Pick the third person of the same gender as yours on the newsfeed and open his feed in a separate tab. Look at his last 8 wall posts. Now, back at yours. Now, back at what his posts are about. Now, back at yours. Chances are they don’t differ much. Yet, you do. Sadly, it’s barely visible through your web presence.

Statistically speaking, depending on your age, gender and friend count likeness, you use similar structures, words and write about corresponding subjects at corresponding times. In case of my facebook friends, there’s at least one niche music video link, at least one ‘funny picture’, at least one thankful post and at least one slightly ironic rant on — in general terms — state of the culture. Which makes 50% of the rather small sample entirely predictable. The question that follows is: are we entering the age of mass unification that reshapes us into rather amorphic and impersonal shells or simply are we that similar?

There are a few things to consider:

1 The medium is the message

Trivial as it has become, McLuhan’s notion of the medium affecting the content is still valid. If you ever had doubts on the extent of its relevance, consider the impact of a slight redesign of FB’s status update box on the use of pronouns:

‘Until March of 2009, the status update box appeared next to the person’s name. So, up until March of 2009, the most common status update motif was to state what you were doing or how you were feeling with a status update like “is happy,” which would show up as “Lars is happy”. When this changed, the usage of “is” dropped off dramatically and usage of “I” doubled almost overnight. After March, people started updating with “I am happy” instead of “is happy” to achieve the same message.’

However, what is often overlooked is the influence of the provided means of reaction by other people. We’re social beings, we supply content and share it to be admired, liked, to be understood, to feel accepted or solely heard. Consequently, sooner or later, consciously or not, we design our messages so that they’re more appealing to our target group. At the same time, it’s difficult to remain personal and relevant if you’re talking to 47 people at once. Besides, imagine that the person next to you is capable of only two reactions: ‘I like it’ and ‘I like it and repost’. Undoubtedly it would limit the scope and depth of a conversation, wouldn’t it?

Looking at this image, it’s hard not to draw a conclusion that we’re living in the Recommendation Age (or, to be precise, the Repost Age). Still, as much as soup.io is social, it’s a quite accurate tool for spreading memes, no less and so is the larger part of other social platforms.

2 Limits of control

Obviously, the majority of the social networking sites has some limitations to at least the length or the subject of the messages you exchange. If you ever tried writing movie summaries in 140 characters or less, you know that in most cases you inevitably end up with genre descriptions stripped of any kind of particularity that might have made a movie gripping. It becomes slightly more bearable if you apply E.M. Forster’s distinction between narrative and plot (Plot is ‘The queen died; the king died.’ Narrative is ‘The queen died; the king died of a broken heart.’). The difficulty is that if you’re not a screenwriter or currently suffering from dissociative identity disorder, you tend to think about your life expieriences in a plot rather than a narrative. Not to mention the miserably flat amplitude of real life drama compared to most of the stories we read/watch.

3 One to rule them all

Social networking sites are created as mass products, carved for the so-called average user. They are based on universal truths, universal paradigms and equally unversal models of interaction, expression and needs. At the same time they’re designed to provide means of personalization and become as transparent & technologically friction free as possible. The catch, as always, lies in between.

When considering technologically advanced, mass market tools or products, the simple rule applies: The more you try to make it universal, the more uniform the outcome is. One way of evading that is clearly through customization (e.g. NikeID), but still, does it make a product more universal or merely less uniform?

The deeper problem lies in the process of finding these universal truths. We’ve become infatuated with data, their patterns, networks and correlations. Evidently this is the age of information, since like never before we’re able to accurately compute and estimate almost every single thing. However, what we’re often missing is the difference between analysis and reasoning. Analysis is a description of a current state (think: Hans Rosling). Reasoning is taking the risk of forming judgements about the things that are not clearly visible in data. It’s the search for insight and superior understanding. We have knowledge, we need more wisdom. Without the latter we’ve created great tools for being connected rather than feeling connected.

Still, the infatuation with data and our computational capability is a mere side effect of the broader cult of staying up to date.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m an average, slightly addicted social media user, clicking Like button 9 times a day, writing 25 comments and spending around 55 minutes per day, just to stay up to date. As such, I’m also inherently ‘resistant to being levelled, swallowed up in the social-technological mechanism’, as Georg Simmel described it.

One of the last lines of Synecdoche, NY (which I cannot recommend enough) goes as follow:
‘You realize you are not special. At some point this is everyone’s experience, every single one. The specifics hardly matter. Everyone is everyone.’

In a deeper sense, we are the same. We live the average, encounter the same joys, tragedies or monotony. Yet, what makes us exceptional and our relations meaningful are ideas. Not some abstractly conceptualized ideas but ideas expressed through our emotions, beliefs and broader idiosyncratic context. One may call them stories, I call them personalities:)

I’ve always thought that information design could extend far beyond the sole purpose of displaying information effectively and attractively.
So when I first came across a self-organizing system of particles-emotions, it had immediately become one of my favourite sites.

Several new interactive information aggregators have been created since (msn Spectra being the latest), yet very few exceed simply visualizing same content in a different way.

Jonathan Harris and Sep Kamvar once again took another path: “I Want You To Want Me explores the search for love and self in the world of online dating. It chronicles the world’s long-term relationship with romance, across all ages, genders, and sexualities, using real data collected from Internet dating sites every few hours.”

The piece, presented on a 56″ high-resolution touch-screen, was installed at MoMA on February 14, 2008, Valentine’s Day. The less fortunate may see it on youtube, no touching though:).

From technical point of view, it’s just another data visualization engine. It’s the content that makes it remarkable. The mosaic exploring search for love turns otherwise narcissistic online dating sites into engaging storytelling.

There are not many interfaces that combine intuitive curiosity and pattern detection with insights into human behavior at such a personal level. The project might not fulfill standards of scientific research. Yet it’s one of very few examples in which information architecture does not conceal the essence of any statistical data — the single experience.