Oxford SEO Studies Blog

We really like this cartoon taken from Rob Cottingham’s article  on ReadWriteWeb .  We like it because it’s really funny and at the same time reflects the more comedic  obsessions of Twitters and other Social Network (Soc Net) aficionados.  We understand that there are some 600,000  new joiners to Facebook every day, which by our maths  means in some 20+ years everyone on the planet will be on Facebook.  

Why exactly, isn’t clear.

One perspective is that the culture of self-absorption has reached critical mass and that we are now so obsessed with the potential significance of every little detail of our lives that spending hours a week accounting for ourselves on Soc Nets like Facebook, Twitter or Frendfeed, (that self-accounting or self reporting), has become the primary activity for Twits:  I tell everyone what I’m doing therefore I am.

One pundit has referred to the Soc Net phenomenon as the ultimate voluntary self- voyeurism, we so desperately crave people to ‘follow’ us or watch us almost as if we needed Orwell’s 1984 to stave off our own actual loneliness.

Now we are all Big Brothers and Big Sisters carefully scrutinizing what all of our ‘friends’ are buying, watching, listening to, reading, vacationing, or visiting.  Why live vicariously through only one when we can live through the herd?

Of course the argument is made that Soc Nets provide filters of information through the web that are more relevant than any semantic analysis because the information is delivered by real people in real time having real experiences, who share our interests, perspective, values etc.

That makes sense of course if you consider your friends and acquantances to all be entirely reliable sources of information.  When it comes to purchasing CDs, seeing films, or finding a nice hotel in New York, I have no doubt.

But if when it comes to identifying a potential illness from a list of symptoms, a historical date or tracking down reliable information about election fraud in Chicago, I’ll stick to the machines, thank you.  Most of our so-called ‘friends’  wouldn’t necessarily want to know.

It does give celebrity stalking a credible anonymity.  We’re stalking, uh, I mean ‘following’  Stephen Fry, Neil Gaiman, Seth Godin and Jonathan Ross; but what what we’re really hoping is that they notice  and start following us!