The Social Contract Does Not Exist

Cyndy Aleo-Carreira,

on May 22, 2008,

handshake image At the risk of participating in a little more blogosphere navel-gazing, one of the strange things I've seen in FriendFeed is the conversations that break out there completely out of the blue. Whether it's due to the frequent Twitter outages, or just a different way of looking at a lifestreaming service, I'm not sure, but people are starting conversations completely unrelated to any content fed into the site.

In the course of one such conversation (about FriendFeed and its use, of course), it changed from debating how you use the "Like" and "Comment" features to debating the idea of a social contract. The idea here is that you have a certain responsibility to your followers, or, as Mark Trapp said,

I'd argue the follower/followed relationship is a social contract between two people: you do have an obligation to provide to your followers content that lives up to the reason you were followed. The consequence of neglecting that contract usually just means losing that follower, and you may not care about that, but then what's the point of interacting in social media?

I thought about commenting directly on the FriendFeed thread, but decided I had far too much to say about this idea. Mainly, that the only contract I have with any person who follows that me is that I will attempt to conduct myself as a relatively sane member of the online society. Any expectations beyond that are simply never going to be met. so any person who thinks they will be might as well unfollow me now. Go ahead. I'll wait.

The idea of social media is that you can interact with others who have similar interests, operating under the premise that some of those interests may be fleeting. The very nature of my last.fm feed into FriendFeed may demonstrate that point; you'll find me "loving" anything from Suicidal Tendencies to Rachmaninoff. I would assume that some people would connect with me in one area and some in another. The same would hold true for my feeds, which may run the gamut from cloud computing issues to the latest and greatest Web 2.0 app to global issues. I don't expect that any one person following me would be interested in ALL the same items, but merely a subset of them, skimming over many, and paying attention to just a few. The whole point of "drinking from the firehose" is that you can give your full attention only to the things that really call to you. Do I really think the Robert Scobles of the world give their undivided attention to 20,000 people? No, they have mastered the art of self-filtering that information to find the bits and pieces in the stream of information generated by those 20,000 people to hone in on.

I also recognize that most people aren't able to do that. I know I can't, which is why my ratio of followees to followers is never 1:1. I generally save notifications of new followers, and go back through them when I feel like I've mastered the current load of information, adding a few more at a time. If I feel that someone's signal-to-noise ratio is getting too far out of alignment for me to continue to follow, I stop following, and find someone else. That's the whole point here. I'm not forming a deep personal relationship with followers or the people I follow, nor am I entering into any sort of business relationship, which are the two instances in which I'd assume a contract of some sort, whether applied or actual. I don't take it personally if I see my number of followers at any given time drop, because I assume that those people have found that my signal-to-noise ration is out of alignment for them as well. There is no social contract in social media other than acting like a civilized person. Beyond that, everthing is a la carte. Including the people you are socializing with.

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7 Comments (Subscribe to rss)

Leslie Poston - May 22, 2008 at 06:47 pm PDT

“There is no social contract in social media other than acting like a civilized person. Beyond that, everthing is a la carte. Including the people you are socializing with.”

amen.
Mark Trapp - May 22, 2008 at 10:14 pm PDT

I think a good analogues to the follower/followed relationship that I’m really driving at are the relationship celebrities have with their fans, and I believe there are a few really good case studies for it: Britney Spears and Miley Cyrus. Fair warning: the amount of detail I’m going to go into regarding pop culture icons might frighten many people.

With Britney Spears, for years, she was considered to be one of the defining role models (for good or for bad) for teenage girls. Her albums sold phenomenally well in addition to the Britney Spears brand making anything into a solid gold hit. Then, she made a series of personal mistakes that her fans thought were unbelievable: she married the wrong person, she started partying way too much, she mistreated her children, she acted in ways that were completely alien to her fans. Now, to mention Britney Spears without cringing is a feat in and of itself: every attempt she’s made to reboot her brand has been met with a huge amount of resistance.

With Miley Cyrus, you see nearly the same level of brand value that Britney Spears had. The Miley Cyrus / Hannah Montana brand can do no wrong, and yet she’s had a few major missteps herself: racy photos, performance issues, ticket exploitation, among a few others. Yet her brand value is still as strong, if not stronger, than before.

So what’s the difference? They’re both very much the same brand, repackaged. Prima face, there isn’t anything different in their stories. However, the major mistake that Britney Spears made was her refusal to admit her social obligation to her fans. At every point, she met the outcry about her actions with “Why can’t you people just leave me alone? This is my life, stay out of it!” Miley Cyrus, on the other hand, publicly apologized for each issue, even when it was dubious how large of a problem what she did or didn’t do was.

That commitment to her brand over Spears’ in the eyes of her fans is what makes her a success even when she makes a mistake. She has no obligation to apologize for anything: she’s a normal person who is only human. But the fact that she cared enough to recognize her fans’ cause celebe is what strengthens her brand.

The follower-followed relationship is never as strong as a personal friendship: it’s not meant to be, but there is definitely a value for both the follower and the followed that transcends a passing whim. For the follower, it’s the ability to get content from an interesting and trusted source: for example, when I follow Robert Scoble, I trust that I’m going to get interesting content about the state of business technology. That’s valuable to me as a follower. For the followed, the relationship brings any number of things that hold some value: whether it’s validation for your ideas, a higher page count, feedback, or reciprocal content. That’s valuable to you as one who’s being followed.

Therefore, when you break that agreement of value (i.e. the social contract), the value for both parties becomes much less. Going back to Robert Scoble, if he started posting about his thoughts about abortion, the value of following him diminishes. If he continues to do things contrary to my original reasons for following him, eventually the value drops to zero and I stop following him. On the other side, my value to Robert Scoble is to be a constructive fan of his content. If I’m abusive to him, or if I don’t meet his expectations in other ways (whether it be advertising potential, reciprocal content, etc.), the value of me as a follower diminishes for him.

On an individual level, this may be insignificant to someone who has 20,000 followers: the law of very large numbers evens out the impact of the breakdown of the relationship. However, on a larger level, for Robert Scoble to ignore his followers would be devastating to his brand in very much the same way that it was devastating to Britney Spears. The fact that he maintains his high follower count is a testament to his ability to manage his brand to thousands of people, all of whom think Scoble has valuable content for them.

I agree with you. It’s very, very hard to manage your brand, even on a small scale, much more so on a Robert Scoble scale. But the payoff at the end is so worth it, you ought to at least try.

As a postscript, you mentioned your last.fm feed as being insignificant or not worth basing a solid opinion of you: I disagree. Things like your last.fm feed, or your diggs, or your flickr photostream, or even what you wind up liking flesh out who you are as a person in the social web. It makes you human, much more than a blog post does. Keeping with my whole celebrity analogue I have going here, the “fun feeds” of Friendfeed are like the Barbara Walters softball interview to your illustrious acting career.
Lindsay - May 22, 2008 at 10:29 pm PDT

That same FriendFeed conversation prompted a response from me as well: http://macrolinz.com/macrolinz/index.php/2008/05/22/its-conversation-for-me-why-do-you-social-network/
Webomatica - May 22, 2008 at 10:39 pm PDT

Agreed. Most social sites are desperately trying to gain users any way possible. They aren’t in any position to be dictating how they should behave.

Another thought - everyone who has let an account on a social site languish for months without logging in is surely guilty of breaking this social contract (I have many sites I just got tired of). If some “social contract” police contacted me from one of those sites, trying to get me to participate, I’d just delete my account.
Cyndy Aleo-Carreira - May 23, 2008 at 05:43 am PDT

@Mark Heh. I used to write for a celebrity gossip blog, so I know more about the world of Hollyweird than I like to admit. I still respectfully disagree; the difference between Britney and Miley is that Britney, once she became an adult, went off the deep end. I don’t think mental illness counts as ignoring what fans think of you. As for Miley, trust me, her team (because I don’t think a 15-year-old is capable of making decisions intelligently regarding a fan base) is not thinking of her core audience at all, and the ratings decline for Hannah Montana are demonstrating that. They are trying to position her the way they want, and don’t particularly care about who the audience is so long as the money keeps pouring in. (Hi, I’m Cyndy, and I’ve seen every episode of Hannah Montana. And the movie.)

Also, I wasn’t saying that my last.fm feed wasn’t significant, only that I doubted it would appeal to every single person since I have such an insane range of things I listen to, from swing and Judy Garland to speed metal.

@Lindsay I’m off to read your take on it now.

@Webomatica I think that there is so much navel gazing that people like to come up with theories to spawn more blog fodder. The whole “social graph” and “social contract” stuff is really just more of the same. You no more have a social contract with someone on a social networking site than you do with someone you exchange pleasantries with at a concert for a band you both like. You both like the same band. You talk about the band. Maybe about previous concerts you’ve both enjoyed. And then you go your separate ways.
Andy Beard - May 29, 2008 at 05:10 pm PDT

I do believe in a social contact with my audience on my blog, in that they expect me to tell the truth, my true feelings about anything I review, even if paid.
At times that has really limited my earning capacity, and I have ripped apart sites over instant messenger or email, effectively telling people looking for a review that if I cover it, it is going to be less than positive.
On Stumbleupon these days I try to keep 100% on topic, because I look on it as an extension of my blog.
Yes, even if Svetlana drops me a link to look at, I really ensure that if I share it with my audience it is something they would appreciate reading.
With Digg I go off topic sometimes

Everything ends up on Friendfeed, Mybloglog, Blogcatalog and other Lifestream services., and in my sidebar using Blogcatalog widgets, so it needs to be quality.
Gab Goldenberg - June 24, 2008 at 06:42 pm PDT

Yes and no, I do/don’t believe in it. You want to participate well to build relationships, but not any relationship and not thumb stuff up just for its own sake. An important topic you raise here though, so thumbs up on that!

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