Exploring Key Distinctions

Intro/Background

• The Social Media Club is an excellent forum to discover and create an articulation to address the question of what is social media and how is it relevant to us and the world. However, we (a few members of Social Media who have only been to a couple gatherings so far) think that Social Media Club is missing a shared language: distinctions, offers, narratives ("Who are we and which of your concerns will we take care of?"), and other practices we have for building and supporting social unities.

This idea for this project came out of conversations from the April 26, 2007 meeting, where questions like "How do we create networks?," "How do we create value in our networks?" and "How do we define value?" were the orienting questions of the meeting. However, over the course of the meeting, we didn't listen to any shared distinctions for "network," "value," "trust," "intentionality," etc. In our assessment, having a shared language is very important for creating a cohesive social space.

We also are guessing that the Social Media Club meetings are not a good space for beginning this discussion -- maybe these questions aren't valuable for most of the participants; maybe participants have other concerns they want addressed in the meetings. But that is why we want to open this wiki and invite others to join in this discussion. For us, we are hoping that this project/experiment is valuable for enriching the distinctions we use together and for creating a common language for the Social Media Club.

Distinctions:

Trust:

What we Listen to in SMC Conversations:

Some said that trust was the ability to see who the author really was. For example that "real names" were attached to their comments, or work. The use of aliases some saw as a barrier to establishing trust. However, aliases are held to the same standards of establishing trust as "real names". If a blog posted by Miscalias makes ungrounded assessments, lots of noise, and makes commitments he/she doesn't keep- it will be difficult to establish trusting relationships. Same with a blogger who gives out his/her real name.

An Emerging Interpretation:

Understanding what trust is, it became apparent out of today's conversation, will be instrumental in knowing how networks produce value. We should work on a distinction to work with in the future.

Value: Sometimes used interchangeably with trust, value was another concept that came up repeatedly in the conversation. I have the following to say about value, and it came up from today's conversation. Within the networks individuals have a lot of power. They have the power to become associated with some other individual, or allow another individual to become associated with them. Who

Intentionality: