The Network Unbound

The spring of 2006 will go down as a curious moment in the annals of buzz. The mainstream-media steamroller caught up with a bona fide cultural phenomenon, then flattened it into a cliché before the average person knew what all the fuss was about. That's ironic, because the fuss was about the average person--that is, his or her participation in what's known variously as "social media," "social networking," "user-generated content," the "live Web" or the dreaded "Web 2.0." But don't worry, this isn't yet another story getting all up in MySpace or metaprofiling Friendster profiles. This is about how those sites, and their successors, are growing up--and about their impact on how business gets done. Companies, whether they sell software, movies, or dog food, are changing the way they communicate, make decisions, and develop and market products, all because of the exponential rise of new tools that allow people to express themselves more easily online--and on the streets.

Two major examples of the networks' real-world power broke barely a week apart. On Monday, March 27, about 40,000 mainly Latino high schoolers in Los Angeles played hooky to protest the Senate's proposed bill to crack down on illegal immigration. It was believed to be the largest such demonstration in L.A.'s history, double the size of the historic Chicano walkouts of 1968. Through the week, thousands more walked out in California, Texas, and Florida. Then, on Tuesday, April 4, 24-year-old Sandi Thom signed a £1 million, five-album deal with RCA/Sony BMG out of her basement in London, live via Webcast. She had just finished 21 straight nights of live performances--also Webcast from her basement. By the end, Thom was pulling in a nightly audience of 100,000 listeners. In both cases, the "audience," whether of pissed-off students or besotted roots-rock fans, was drawn together, at least in part, by word of mouth on social-networking sites such as MySpace, the two-and-a-half-year-old company with an unbelievable 72 million members.

"In the beginning, there was sociability," proclaims Danah Boyd, the 28-year-old savant of social networks. But in the first-generation Web, technical barriers meant that the pleasures of group communication online were limited to the geek subculture. Blogs, then social networks, changed all that. A PhD student at UC Berkeley's School of Information, Boyd is helping invent the field of Internet anthropology. The occasionally boa-clad Burning Man attendee has studied online social behavior from Usenet (the early-1980s bulletin board for groups such as alt.rec.camping) to Craigslist; Friendster; Tribe.net; Blogger; and now, armed with a research grant from the MacArthur Foundation, MySpace. Separately, she looks at social media for Yahoo Research Berkeley, a major initiative by the company to work closely with academics in the hope of figuring out where the Web is going next.

Boyd's point is that while first-generation Web sites were all about human-computer interaction, culture now drives the Web and its design. "What you're seeing now is people interacting not just… with 'the computer' or with 'information' but with other people," she says. "You have to bring out the sociology and anthropology." Personal connections--forged through words, pictures, video, and audio posted just for the hell of it--are the life of the new Web, bringing together the estimated 60 million bloggers, those 72 million MySpace users, and millions more on single-use social networks where people share one category of stuff, like Flickr (photos), Del.icio.us (links), Digg (news stories), Wikipedia (encyclopedia articles), and YouTube (video).

This hive of activity has already generated a lot of noise, but what most observers have yet to realize is just how productive the hive really is and how powerful it can be when it swarms in a particular direction. In fact, it's hard to overstate the coming impact of these new network technologies on business: They hatch trends and build immense waves of interest in specific products. They serve giant, targeted audiences to advertisers. They edge out old media with the loving labor of amateurs. They effortlessly provide hyperdetailed data to marketers. If your customers are satisfied, networks can help build fanatical loyalty; if not, they'll amplify every complaint until you do something about it. They are fund-raising platforms. They unify activists of every stripe, transforming an atomized mass of individuals with few resources into an international movement able to put multinational corporations and governments on the defensive. (Those immigration protests played no small part in stymieing Senate action over immigration.) They provide an authentic, peer-to-peer channel of communication that is far more credible than any corporate flackery. And all this after only four years or so in development. On the day you read this, a quarter of a million more people will jump onto MySpace, each with her own particular purpose in mind.