OnLine Tribalism & the Future of Social Media

A couple of weeks back, I wrote a piece on the future of social media. It was not my best-received post. It is one of the few times that I have ever been criticized for brevity. But the issue was that I had a thought that has not fully developed, one that has been coming out in drips and drabs for several years.

The key thought is that while tools keep changing people don't. We behave, for the most part, the same way we did when we were cave dwellers. The online tools we use today have allowed us to scale out conversations and eliminate many barriers such as geography, allowing us to build global neighborhoods whose members sometimes reside thousands of miles apart. The relevance of social media is that it allows us to interact in the world increasingly more like we behave in our own physical neighborhoods.

Yesterday, I was pleased that my SM Global Report on Francois Gossieaux's study of Online Tribalism was so much better received. It is among my favorites in the series of more than 100 interviews I have done in the past 15 months. By providing data gathered through conversations with online community managers at 140 organizations, Francois has added numerous valuable insights into how people behave in online communities.

His key point fall right in the crosshairs of what I have been trying to say. Humans are tribal by nature. It is in our DNA. It has to do with why we are passionate about sports team and rock bands. It has to do with those whose roots are in heartlands or the burrows of New York City, or the barrios of Mexico. It has to do with why most people want to marry people of their own race or religion and it has to do with the unfortunate human tendency to mistrust or downright dislike people of apparently different tribes.

Let's go back for a moment to a time before social media or the internet, before electricities or the cave; before the development of synthetic music and genocidal bombs. Let's go back to the caves and how we lived and communicated.

We collaborated for food, in the same ways that we now collaborate in global workgroups. We self-organized to achieve a common goal. Before we could perform the magic of binary languages, we grunted and gestured. And the result was that we and the ones we loved back in the cave ate and were clothed. We signaled to our tribes the success or failure of the hunt, by banging rocks on hollow logs in certain rhythms, inadvertently inventing music. Back in the cave, after we feasted, we told our stories by drawing lines in the dirt with fingers and sticks, and we narrated with increasingly refined grunts. Eventually, we illustrated our stories by using blood and berries to draw pictures on the cave walls.

hen we were out foraging, we sometimes encountered "others," people from tribes we did not know, people who may have looked differently than we look, who used different series of grunts and rhythms and gestures. Sometimes we ended up trading with them and perhaps sharing food.. At other times, perhaps because a gesture was misunderstood, we bashed each others heads in.

The refinements continued in a near-linear direction over millennia. We evolved relentlessly from stone to iron to steel to silicon to something we have not yet dreamed of. Our communications and our tools allowed us to travel further, to leave our neighborhoods for other places, some at the bottom of the ocean and some into the first inches of the space beyond our planet.

Yesterday and this morning I watched the response to Francois' perceptive comments about online communities. I saw thoughtful professionals take his contribution and begin to work the problem. They will take the information he has gathered and shared and apply it in varying ways to a great many online communities. He has moved the needle on the body of knowledge that will be used to extend and refine the online community.

From my perspective, Francois has shown that people behave online as we do offline. We behave a certain way in small communities that is different from large communities. He has shown that what is needed is more tools and greater focus on letting people behave online as they do in real life and he has given ample evidence that communities online are about people, not technology as much as communities in the real word are about people not bricks, mortars and machines.

I am glad to have played some role in amplifying his findings and I can't wait to see what happens next.

Comments

[Mark Dykeman]

The only thing that bothers me (and not that much, really) about the concept of the tribe is that it implies that there must be a leader or leaders of some kind. Difficult organizations and different cultures use different leadership models (autocratic to democratic; centralized to decentralized; individual vs. group). If we're going to persist in maintaining the leadership concept, I'd like to see humanity evolve more to the point where members can disagree with leadership but somehow resolve those differences with less waste and hard feelings than most of us appear to be able to do these days. In other words, disagreements shouldn't be perceived as threats to leadership.

This is going a bit off track, I guess, but those are the kinds of thoughts that pop into my mind when the term "tribe" is used.

[Sam]

"It has to do with why most people want to marry people of their own race or religion and it has to do with the unfortunate human tendency to mistrust or downright dislike people of apparently different tribes."

Although over all I think this blog posting is very interesting, I have issues with this statement. It is true, to some extent, however I think it has less to do with "tribal nature" and more to do with an unwillingness to budge on old ways of doing things. I do not think it is inherent nature, rather a lack of insight into the way the world currently operates. The online social world seems to be a much more open forum, with fewer very small tribes, and more large harmonious communities where many different types of people exist together sharing thoughts, ideas, and wisdom.