Darryl Patterson

I find that my TTC rides home are a great time to try and grok the many events and thoughts that happen during my day. With the recent release of OpenSocial and Facebook’s press release about how it’s moving forward with advertising, much of my time has been spent on the idea of social networking. Not sure why, but I started to think about how history often repeats itself. This isn’t news, I think we generally all know this, but we do often forget this too. Earlier in the day, someone I work with asked me a question something like:

“Who do you think will fall first? Google, or Microsoft?”

The answer doesn’t really matter, what does matter is that history shows us that all good things come to an end… all empires fall, new empires rise. What if we took the idea of history, and applied the concepts of design patterns? We can easily map out how a civilization generally rises and eventually disappears. We can map out how carnivores generally interact with herbivores. We can map out the generalities of human behaviour. It’s this last one that got me a thinkin’.

Lets travel back in time to when humanity lived in villages or small communities with a few dozen people, maybe a few hundred. These villages were central to the way we lived and the way we’ve evolved. Humans are communal creatures, we like company, we need friends, we have a better chance of survival in groups. These tight-knit communities all knew each other and lived together and died together.

Lets come back to today. Although there are many villages today, most of the population lives in cities with thousands, hundreds of thousands, even millions or people. Now to my point… or maybe it’s a question.

Do people in very small tight-knit wired communities use social networking? Do they even need social networking? Could the very success of social networking be attributed to the lack of “village” in our daily lives? Does Facebook replace the sense of village that, in the very core of my humanity, I miss? I’m curious. I’d love to find stats that show percentages of population in small communities who are active in the social networking and compare that to the big cities.

I’m not saying this is a bad thing, it just kinda proves my point (if I’m trying to make a point). History shows us that humans adapt. With the lack of the village, perhaps we’re finding new ways to make those tight communal bonds using the virtual world. Social networking keeps me in touch with the people that matter most to me in ways never before possible. Little snippets of friend’s and family’s lives are delivered to me. I can comment back. I can easily communicate and share pieces of my life. I think that this is what we’ve stumbled upon here. Social networking is filling a deep down need that’s just difficult to find in the large urban environments we’ve built around us. Continued success in social networking will be dependent on identifying the patterns in life, and applying those patterns to the online world.