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Customers of a feather, flock together

Posted 10.20.10 by Becky Lang

Picture 67
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By Becky Lang

My friend Chris Cloud sent me this presentation as a response to my post about mass customization yesterday. The slideshow was put out by a “cool hunter” group called Canvas8.

Anyway, it’s crazy how many complex ideas about society can be summed up in a slideshow. Maybe slideshows are getting too powerful. Maybe they will walk off of the Internet and sweet talk our CEOs into submission and eat all our party subs.

I do think one trend they missed was what I might call the Flock Together trend, where digital media allows people to increasingly model their social network after their own interests. For example, a World of Warcraft player might find like-minded people online and form bonds with them. He’ll spend more time talking to them than people in his actual physical proximity, and possibly end up rooming with some, modeling his physical proximity after his online interests.

Point being, we are increasingly spending time with people who are more and more like we are.

This is good and bad. Geek and “niche” interests are no longer something you tinker with secretly, in your spare time, but they can now double as your social life. On the other hand, people are challenged less and less to relate to people that they don’t have anything immediately in common with, and cemented ideologies become even more cemented.

I think this is what’s really behind the merging of the “I” community with the “We” community that this slideshow talks about. People who are stubborn in their individualism can finally be happy in community scenarios because they can create communities that mirror their own individualism.

What do you think?

Does this slideshow sum it up?

Which trends are going out and which are staying in?

Are you in a community of people just like you, more and more?

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  • Alangdell

    There’s definitely an interesting movement happening thanks to social media regarding our ever increasing ability to find like-minded people. As you rightly point out, this is good and bad. Good for our social lives, potentially horrible for our social structure. Maybe the best evidence of this is found in politics where we’ve seen two distinct groups continually grow farther and farther apart and lose any sense of common ground. Of course, it could just be the MEDIA reporting of the differences forcing this perspective on us, but what we hear is often what we believe.

    Hell of a deck though.

  • Debbi

    Thanks for the kind comments. So glad you enjoyed the report – although I’d like to politely stress that we don’t really describe ourselves as ‘cool hunters’ :) We’re more like behaviour hunters – we seek to understand why people are doing what they’re doing, and how they interact with each other.

    And what you’re saying about ideologies becoming cemented is very interesting, and true – and something that social researchers have been saying for a while. At the FutureEverything conference in Manchester this year, Nokia’s Adam Greenfield spoke about how the networks we’ve created online – as structured and rule-heavy as they are – are now being imposed onto the real world. The surge of so-called ‘serendipity apps’ (Grindr, Foursquare etc) are an attempt to counteract these effects, encouraging you to rub up against diversity. But because of the way we’re programmed to operate, I don’t think any of these have been massively successful so far; in spite of Foursquare’s success it’s still only used by a relatively small percentage of the smartphone population. Be interesting to see what the next step in solving this problem is….

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