So I haven’t seen “The Social Network” yet and there is a good chance I won’t get around to it at all, as I am crazy busy at the moment (and fighting off a cold).  But I have read enough reviews that I have a good sense of the positions people are taking.  I am a fan of much of John Hagel’s writing and thinking and so was not surprised to see him come up with an excellent  review.  The gist of Jon’s piece is that “old media” feels compelled to construct a negative narrative around what is happening on the web as a response to the threat that the web represents for them.  John rightly references Malcolm Gladwell’s piece in the New Yorker about social change in the same context.  I would add much of old media’s coverage of the AGs unfair fight against Craigslist to this as well.

The basic narrative of all of these is that online interactions are shallow, potentially dangerous and ultimately not beneficial to society.  Leaving aside that the same could be said of the bulk of interactions in the real world (e.g., passing strangers on the street) this narrative misses two critical points.  First, the spread of ideas and second, the time necessary for social change.  I am reading Steven Johnson’s Where Good Ideas Come From and right in the opening chapter he contrasts how quickly Youtube spread on the web with the diffusion of HDTV.  The key take away: ideas and even behaviors can spread very quickly on the web. That is an important pre-condition for social change, but the change itself will take a longer time.  We see small examples so far, such as Gap’s quick reversal of it’s new logo.  But it might be a while before we see some big social or political movement.  This is not unlike commerce moving online.  It took a while for that to become a common behavior.  But now online commerce is huge and growing rapidly.  Social change will be even slower but that doesn’t mean that it won’t arrive.

This is not to say that there are not legitimate criticisms of what can happen on the web.  One is that the first socially impactful movement to take off might well be a radical and destructive one.  The other is the idea of the digital balkans in which society becomes increasingly polarized as everyone only reads what confirms their own biases.  But to take both of these threats seriously would entail admitting first that the web interactions will in fact be highly socially relevant.