Introverted sharing (blogging) vs. extroverted sharing (lifestreaming)
Sometimes one blog post will provide insight into a seemingly unrelated blog post. This most recent insight allowed me to grasp something that Alexander van Elsas wrote a number of weeks ago about one of his complaints about FriendFeed: the lack of intentional sharing.
Sarah Perez’s post at ReadWriteWeb, The future of blogging revealed, discusses the apparent rise of the lifestreaming phenomenon. Sarah describes lifestreaming quite well in her article. In simplified terms, lifestreaming is a persistent automatic sharing of various kinds of creative content that you generate on various Web services.
Some people would consider FriendFeed to be a lifestreaming application which you can direct the RSS feeds from blogs; photo sharing applications; video sharing applications; various consumer services like Amazon.com and Netflix; blog commenting systems; and other miscellaneous web applications. Swurl, Jaiku, and SocialThing are other examples of these services. Sarah also mentions a couple of newer services that handle lifestreaming.
From Sarah’s blog post:
There was a time when casual, personal blogging was your way to communicate with your friends on the web. Via posts, commenting, and blogrolls, bloggers formed niche communities on the web to socialize with each other. Today, new tools provide that same level of socialization – perhaps even better than blogging ever could. Via micro-blogging sites like Twitter, every quick thought or link can be shared with your community of followers and you can see theirs, too. You can join and exit the never-ending conversation at your leisure. Plus, other social sites like FriendFeed provide today’s new discussion boards where conversation occurs surrounding the items posted and shared, leading to even more of a community feel, and one that’s drawing more users every day.
Sites and social tools like these and many others encourage more participation on the social web than ever before. Although the social participants on these sites are often more active in socializing than they are in blogging, there’s still that need to stake out your own piece of real estate on the web. But we wonder: does that really need to be a blog anymore? Perhaps not.
Sarah’s article reminded me of Alexander vanElsas’s article Why I don’t like FriendFeed as much as I wanted, it lacks intention. For a long time I struggled with Alexander’s use of the word “intention” and then lost the train of thought. Sarah’s article helped me refocus on Alexander’s point, however.
In Alexander’s point of view, although we may do a lot of things during the course of the day, many of them won’t be very interesting to anyone except ourselves (although we don’t always know which ones our audience will find interesting). Alexander then goes on to say that a service like Twitter can be more valuable because you selectively decide what you are going to post as a Tweet. In other words, there is specific intent to share an item that we think is valuable. With lifestreaming or content aggregators, you get everything, like the infamous “firehouse” analogy that’s used by people to describe the raw amounts of text, images, and links that appear in FriendFeed streams.
With blogging, you normally have selective sharing of information, although it can be automated to resemble lifestreaming in many ways. Lifestreaming applications don’t filter or eliminate specific items from a stream: you get everything from that stream or nothing (unless the tools become more sophisticated, but in a sense that would fly in the face of the intent of lifestreaming).
Using my own biases and filters, I’ve taken these two ideas and propose the following:
- Traditional blogging is a more introverted form of communication and interaction
- Lifestreaming is a more extroverted form of the same
It’s true that bloggers aren’t all the same. Some bloggers keep no secrets and live their entire lives in full view, so in effect they’ve been lifestreaming for ages using these tools. They don’t hold anything back, they let it all out, especially personal bloggers.
However, many of us don’t write about everything in our lives, particularly if we are professional or niche bloggers. We pick and choose the content that we publish based on our own preferences and our assumptions about the kind of material that our audience wants to read. Many of us do not mix the personal or professional or else we do it in controlled ways. There is intent behind what we share – we share for a purpose in a way that we are comfortable doing.
There can still be a certain amount of intent and selectiveness when following a lifestreaming model, but again, it’s harder to be selective. Instead of choosing what to share (blogging), you have to choose what you don’t want to share (lifestreaming). For an extrovert, someone who may be more comfortable socializing and sharing information about themselves, lifestreaming is probably a better option, especially since lifestreaming is so automated that it doesn’t take much time or effort away from socializing.
In fact, I’d argue that lifestreaming is probably a better way to increase social media adoption amongst non-users, because it’s a low cost, low maintenance way to build a social media presence. Just keep doing the things you do, feed the appropriate pipes with content, and it will spew out to the world. Introverts or private individuals probably won’t sign up for lifestreaming for the very same reasons. In fact, many of us won’t become bloggers, either, except for professional or niche interests which serve to meet other needs.
I’ve said my piece. What do you think? If lifestreaming a more extroverted activity? Will it appeal to the mainstream? Will it appeal to introverts?
vanelsas:
Mark, good followup. I like the thought train you are entering here
To make things simple consider the following.
Situation #1
You decide to write a blog post about topic X. You do that because you have knowledge/an opinion/a question about X and you wish to share that with you readers
You send a picture of a party last night to a friend that was there too
You mail another friend with a question you wanted to ask him
You read a great post about topic Y and send it to your colleague becasue you know he is interested in it too
Situation #2
You get on-line read some mail, share a few bookmarks, upload 100 foto's to flickr, listen to some music, chat with a few people, make some travel plans, write a blog post, reply to some tweets, enter a few comments here and there on Friendfeed, joke around a little over some social media channel, see a few video's over at YouTube and probably do 20 more on-line things that day
Now let's assume you've managed to install all these social media channels of situation #2 into an aggregation service like Friendfeed or your own lifestream.
As a subscriber to your aggregated content I know I'll get a certain value out of situation #1. The actions performed by you as a sender are intentional. You specifically wanted me to see those things.
5 August 2008, 6:32 amNow take situation to the extreme and assume you have been aggregating content like this for a year or so. You are sharing these incredible amounts of aggregated content and actions with anyone that is subscribed to you. It might all be very valuable to the receiver, or it might not. But because you do not have to make any decisions anymore on what you do and do not share, you will be sharing lots of things without intent. You probably really didn't mean everything to be shared with everyone. As a result, the receiver is forced to find the good stuff (the signal) through this constant, never ending (noisy) stream of data from Mark Dykeman.
That's the difference in my mind between intentional and unintentional sharing.I'm not so sure about the introvert/extrovert notion. It'll be a factor, but relatively small. Everyone on the web is much more extrovert then in real-life. It's much easier and less frightening to behave like that on-line.
Aggregation is making life easier for the sender, but it is only really valuable for the receiver if the sender uses intent
hawksdomain:
Although lifestreaming appears to be a more extroverted activity, I feel that it is much easier for an introvert to be involved with lifestreaming than to have a blog. Yes, you have to what will be lifestreamed and sign up for all of these different services, but a true introvert will never provide too much of themselves to any one service, in turn keeping the lifestream to include only things that the individual feels comfortable with.
On the other hand, blogging is intentionally opening yourself up on a site that is all your own, there is not other noise of other people included into the mix. You have to consciously decide what you will be sharing with your audience, and a blog post generally has more involved than what song you like, a photo you took, or whatever tidbit you have shared on Twitter.
I have started several blogs over the past couple of years, but I have been unable to maintain most of them. As an introvert, I find it very difficult to go back and post and bare my soul on a regular basis.
I may not be all that interesting to follow, but I find it much easier to share things on FriendFeed than to share my soul with blogging. I do have one blog that I have been able to stay very active on and I really think that is because it is a photo blog and I am only writing short paragraphs to go with the photos, rather than sitting down to share my thoughts on a specific topic.
Although I disagree with your theory, I want to tell you that I very much enjoy you taking the time to look into the psychology of blogging and social media in regards to the introvert/extrovert.
5 August 2008, 7:40 amMark Dykeman:
I agree with most of what you are saying, except the extrovert vs. introvert part. Yes, it can be easier to seem extroverted on the Web, especially when you don't have face to face contact with the people who see your stuff. However, introverts tend to be more private than extroverts. Therefore, I think they'd be less likely to distribute photos of themselves by lifestreaming, as an example.
5 August 2008, 7:45 amMark Dykeman:
Hawksdomain, I appreciate what you are saying. If we look at the example of your photo blog, however, you seem to do OK with that. Blogging doesn't have to involve personal details, despite what some people think. It can include critical analysis or objective commentary. In the end it is just a publishing platform, but one that uses intent. Having said that, you do have a good point about what you choose to put in any service.
It's good to hear from another introvert about this.
5 August 2008, 8:01 am:
Hi Mark. I'd argue that blogging, micro-blogging and lifestreaming has nothing to do with intro or extravertion. The original defintion of these concepts, as developed by Myers and Briggs, pertains to the way people form their thinking and gain energy, from inside out (for introverts) or outside in (for extraverts). Thus, both types have the potential to enjoy et do well using these technologies.
5 August 2008, 12:31 pmThe more important factor, as you point out, is the intent. It may be true that introvert need a sense of purpose to do something that extraverts could function without.
My two pence.
Patrice
Michael Rawdon:
I agree with Patrice that splitting these writing forms between introversion and extroversion is a false dichotomy. If anything, I think bloggers have a little more chutzpah in that they've founded a whole site around themselves, whereas people who use Twitter are subsuming themselves in a much larger community.
Admittedly, after using Twitter for several weeks I still think the value there is pretty small, compared to blogging, because the form is so restrictive that there's very little content. If that's an example of “lifestreaming”, then I'd agree that it's low-cost, but you get what you pay for.
I read Sarah Perez' article and while it might be the way blogging will go, it seems at odds with the way blogging should go. Rather than trying to pack more and more non-content onto a single page, we need tools that will present the content in an elegant, readable form, and help people to find real content and not have to slog through all the “Going to lunch now” Twittering noise.
While this sort of web site might have helped Julia Allison (who?) achieve some level of fame, I think Perez mistakes a handful of success stories for a web-wide trend. How many non-success stories are there are every Julia Allison, and how many people are reading them?
5 August 2008, 1:00 pmMark Dykeman:
Patrice, you are absolutely correct about the definitions of introversion and extroversion. Thanks for your comment.
5 August 2008, 5:29 pmMark Dykeman:
Certainly getting lots of thoughtful feedback on this post, which I was aiming for. I'm starting to agree with you guys about the introversion vs. extroversion aspects of blogging and lifestreaming.
Thing about Twitter is that it's best used as a broadcasting mechanism. If you have a lot of people following you, it's a good way to broadcast links and other short bits of information. However, if that's all you do then you probably won't have much of an audience. I didn't think much of Twitter at once, but I'm starting to see it as more of a newswire thing.
No doubt lifestreaming will appeal to some people, so I do expect it to grow. Will it displace blogging? I doubt it, but I think it will pick up an audience and users who don't currently blog today because it will fit their own interests better.
5 August 2008, 5:35 pmDid the conversation move? | AccMan:
[...] Introverted sharing (blogging) vs. extroverted sharing (lifestreaming) [...]
5 August 2008, 11:04 pm(Anti) Social-Lists 8/10/08 | (Anti) Social Development:
[...] Introverted sharing (blogging) vs. extroverted sharing (lifestreaming) – Mark Dykeman argues that blogging is sharing for introverts while lifestreaming is for extroverts. In my opinion, it is the opposite. [...]
10 August 2008, 1:49 pmwebomatica:
I've always thought lifestreaming would be more appealing to the masses from an ease-of-use angle, but I think you've keyed in on something in regards to personality type. Lifestreaming on Twitter is well suited for a mobile phone (camera, short blurbs) and people who are actually out and about constantly (extroverts) will take advantage of that. Meanwhile, I consider myself an introvert and much prefer the selective blogging approach, which fits into this post.
11 August 2008, 12:40 pmMark Dykeman:
Nice to see we have some common thoughts, Jason. I'm somewhat persuaded by the comments that the other commentators have made, but I tend to agree with you on the selective blogging bit.
12 August 2008, 6:30 pmJayCruz:
My comment is biased, because I'm an introvert, but I agree with this view. Lifestreaming services tend to have a more “chit-chat” nature to them, which introverts don't tend to enjoy much. I doesn't mean that introverts won't enjoy “lifestreaming”, I like and use Twitter, but we wont thrive as much as having a blog.
12 August 2008, 8:21 pm