The same goes for people who sit on the outside of 2-seat places & don't move in when a 2nd person wants to sit down. Instead they have to negotiate legs, bags & a body to get round the outside person. Just move in. Come on. Lyndon Morant http://SociableSport.com
You should follow me on Twitter http://Twitter.com/SociableSport

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Have you every looked up from their desk and realised that you haven't uttered a word to anyone in over an hour? Maybe longer? 

It occurred to me recently when my phone hadn't rung for 3 hours. I'd been communicating with lots of people en masse during this period, mostly by email but also on Twitter and Facebook. But I hadn't actually spoken to anyone; not a peep.

It seems today that more and more conveniences are set up that take the burden of vocal conversation away from us. Typing appears to provide more freedom than talk: you can think of which words to use, edit or delete things if you change your mind, and choose when to execute the communication by pressing 'send'. Those sorts of luxuries don't necessarily exist in regular dialogue - people have expectations when they look you in the eye, and they donate a significant portion of their time to listening to you, even on the phone. So you have to get it right. 

The pressures of efficiency and immediacy - immediacy in particular is, for me, the most important trend today - leave little room for idle chit-chat, and maximum opportunities for conversation-juggling. Email chains are a form of conversation, remember? How many do you have in a day?

But it's not just email, or text message, or BlackBerry Messenger, or Facebook wall posts, or Tweets... but every day there are fewer and fewer instances where vocal dialogue is required. In London we have a travel service called Oyster that allows people to 'tap in' on a magnetic pad to record their journey and debit their account for the cost. When I was 10 I had to ask the bus driver for a particular fare. At that age, I had to pluck up the courage to talk in front of a bus full of people and admit I didn't have a clue where I was going, get the change out of my pocket and pay the nice man in an orderly and timely manner. Not any more. We just tap and go on by. 

Then there's food, and drink. It's more convenient to be less personal. And electronics, too. I can do all my Christmas shopping on my mobile which is super-convenient and really cool, but it's ultimately anonymous. I become a number in a system. Is that what being a customer means today? It's just strange that while relationships are becoming so efficient, and relationship-tools so effective, the quality of these relationships cannot possibly claim to match those that preceded the existence of these tools. 

Why not? I'm not being nostalgic here or suggesting that what's happening here is bad. But what I do sense - what I feel - is that the more relationships we have that are based on convenience, the more we rely on a smaller number of strong relationships that don't. Is that healthy? Well, possibly not. My suspicion is that most people of my generation (I was born in 1984) will stick to a very tight-knit friendship group their whole life and be a little more reluctant than the previous generation to, say, be outgoing at parties, talk in front of groups of people or be confident public speaking, live and work abroad, be comfortable networking at work events and generally forge deep relationships with people unless they really have to. 

I'd like to think I don't fit that description above. But I feel it coming. If people grow up not needing to make 'I'd step out in front of traffic for this guy' or 'I trust him with my life' relationships (note: love is different... remember, we all need love, here I'm focusing specifically on relationships that are not prerequisites of leading a full life), then all I see is a people interested sporadically in the lives of others, with individuality formed from exposure to a multitude of influences inconceivable to those only two generations previous, and a crisis of personal identity where we know not what we really are, and all that we could be. No decisions and little confidence. Easily persuaded and fickle with emotions. Will a 'moral standpoint' exist? For how long? Weeks, months, maybe? Morality will likely be fuelled by statistics and an ability to articulate (be it simply in visualisations and text - like this post - or by creating movements in social networks quicker and with bigger numbers than anyone else). The internet makes campaigns of us all. 

My great hope among this disorder is that the notion of God will dissolve in place of rapid and universally accepted progress. I just don't know where that direction will be.

[I put the picture of my Facebook profile page up because in reality, that is me. That is my identity as the vast majority of you will ever know. It's the closest you will come to seeing my face & it doesn't even have a picture of me on it!]

Posted via email from SociableSport

via vincos.it

And as if by magic, here's another really useful infographic outlining the dominant social networking sites around the world.

However, please approach with caution.

While the analogy works insomuch as illustrating the geographic and, therefore, culturally diverse community that Facebook has helped connect, the world's largest social network by volume of user accounts is actually QQ in China (but only just). QQ is an information portal a bit like Yahoo! and offers a chat service called QZone that's similar to Yahoo! Messenger or MSN Messenger, but users are able to upload files, images, videos, and profile information. This classifies QZone as a social network (in my book at least).

Earlier this year, in reading a financial report published by QQ's owners, Tencent (a listed company on the Hong Kong stock exchange), I read that QQZone has around 640million registered user accounts. This is marginally (in % terms) bigger than Facebook's user base, and of course much less diverse (the service is created for native Chinese speakers; both the user experience and user interface reflect this.).

It's a bit disappointing to see Techcrunch cover this story purely from a Facebook angle, but I guess that shows the western bias.

More on China to come in Q1 next year. Watch this space.

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