It’s been about a year since I wondered about the origins of networks and their specialties. I was thinking at the time that there’s a reason why Facebook is not the end of all discussion, full stop, dominant and well positioned as it is to be the only network for everything, at least on the surface. I was thinking at the time that there’s a reason why networks and their uses are different from, say, search – an activity more prone to standardization and universality – and why we use different networks for different reasons even if we mainly use the same search engine for everything. I concluded then that both phenomena have something to do with habit that gets formed at inception, which is difficult to break individually and even more so globally as networks solidify out of intertwined individual habits.
I still think this, a year later, and because it is a year later and evidence keeps pouring in, I now think a little more. It was my recent introduction to Instagram that planted the seed. A friend turned me on to the picture sharing platform the other day. As I played around with it and as it quickly grew on me (I had been a viewer but now also as contributor), it dawned on me that social networks are different from applications – say, search – because networks mirror our mental processes and the variety of our daily existence, while applications are strictly utilitarian. Instagram is about as pure an illustration of what I mean, functioning as it does as an outlet for its users to describe how they see. By the same token, Spotify or other music networks are a reflection of how they hear. To extend this reasoning a bit more broadly, Twitter is an outlet for how we think (sure enough, in snippets), Facebook for what we like, Foursquare for where we go, LinkedIn for what we do.
More than to (hopefully not) state the obvious – and certainly not to diminish the scope of large global platforms – the point of the above is principally to say this: Just as we don’t, strictly speaking, see with our ears or hear with our eyes, we have tended not to intermingle the networks that reflect our assorted states. And unlike our use of functional applications – say, search – which is perhaps more truly attributable to habit, social networks are profound elements of who or what we are. A corollary to this generalization is that a utilitarian application – a search engine, for instance – depending as it might on mere habit in a commoditized environment, will be at risk of being displaced (because habits can be broken), while a network is much less exposed to this risk. It also follows that elemental networks have an ingrained asset-value that functional applications have to perpetually build.
Having jotted down these thoughts, I’m going to post a link on Twitter, which is where my snippets are carried every day. Because this article relates to sector analysis and certain stocks, I’ll take it directly to StockTwits, where the audience shares my analytic interests most of all. Follow me there, if you like, or if you’re curious to see how I see, check out this batch of pictures I loaded up on Instagram. These were taken on a recent trip to Los Angeles, which is a city I love.
