How Real Are Digital Relationships?

Kaliya Hamlin, the Identity Woman, and I were grousing yesterday at Techcrunch's Real Time Stream conference about how all the panels were stacked with guys, members of the Silicon Valley boys' club (and its East Coast branch represented by John Bostwick, who sounds British to me but was easily the most articulate and strategically oriented speaker of the day). 

It was also obvious that companies had paid cash to do product demos between the speakers, and it was also obvious that the paying companies automatically got real time coverage in Techcrunch.com. But then Michael Arrington, event (and high-tech media) patron, has never been shy about demolishing the wall between editor and publisher.

Bostwick -- addressing the potential for monetization (which was Arrington's and hence the conference's focus) -- said that social relationships are the most valuable data in the real time stream. The panels and product demos about social relationships referred to shared interests over movies, food, and other consumptive, quasi-cultural qualities of life that seem more to reflect a collective intelligence (or morbid fascination with Michael Jackson's death last week) than an individually inspired choice (such as a preference for Stockhausen or Carlos Sastre, a Tour de France cyclist).

I might have to agree with my friend Andrew Keen's ("Cult of the Amateur") assessment that the digital often abases rather than elevates what is best in humanity. On the Internet, a social relationship is based on shared interests in cultural artifacts such as movies, music and social causes. In meatspace, as John Perry Barlow calls the analog world, a social relationship is based on time spent together over food and drink, or sports and outings, with friends, maybe family, while sharing ideas, one's sorrows and joys, one's hearth. A face-to-face social relationship may last but a minute, or a lifetime, and unlike the digital variety of relationship, its value cannot be calculated. 

Which is why, on the Internet, much of what is real doesn't count. And why the drive toward monetization of "social relationships" on the Internet might be based on real data streams signifying nothing.

Comments

[Donna Murdoch]

Interesting post, because I think there are many different angles of approach to the "digital relationship". Monetizing the relationship and the value of it, which you speak of, is a challenge and I think that generations are segregated in this regard. Shared interests during the development of younger minds still defining personal identity can be a key to their development, hopefully in a positive way. Conversations might not lead to real life satisfying relationships, but they act as canaries in coal mines - feedback from anonymous friends give them reinforcement (or the opposite) about their opinions and can give them more confidence about themselves in the real world. These are the same people (high school age) who I believe may be the upcoming monetization generation. Digital social relationships for adults are different. We view it as augmentation to a relationship. I did a post, and am about to do a study on this - more from a cultural anthropology standpoint really. I think the impact of what many parents think of as "my kids playing around on the computer/role playing" is far different than they perceive. And I think it in a positive way.
What this means to monetization of the upcoming generation and the value of a digital relationship is going to change in a very big way.
Good post, thanks.

[Sylvia Paull]

You have a point: the technology per se can change the nature of social relationships and the next generation is a litmus test.