When I commented about Lady Greenfield’s moral panic speech in which she accused the Internet of infantilising minds I said I felt that her ladyship would benefit from “being sat down and given a good talking to by danah boyd.” I’m pleased to say that danah has not disappointed me. Here she is:

There is NO EVIDENCE to prove her claims. Listening to her talk, it is very clear to me that she has no idea how social network sites work. She bemoans users’ practice of collecting friends on social media, saying that no one _really_ has that many friends. She claims that today’s youth are spending more time with social network sites than any previous generation spent with TV or rock-n-roll (with no evidence to back that claim). She clearly doesn’t understand how people are using these, how they are being integrated into people’s lives.

There’s more here, including danah’s take on the “grooming” idea.

I’ve mentioned a few times that the online world tends to follow a power law. High profile people like Neil, Cory and Scalzi have vast numbers of readers. Lesser celebs (in our corner of the world) such as Jay Lake and Elizabeth Bear have very many readers. Minor names such as myself may have a few hundred, and the vast majority of people have only a few. But there are other interesting aspects of online behavior as well.

One is the degree to which people will credit sources. I see this quite a bit. One of the reasons I really like Neil is that he always credits the little people. You’ll often see people talk about a Gaiman spike when he sends traffic to their blogs, and that’s great, but the main point is that he does it. A lot of other high profile people don’t. As someone who produces a fair amount of content, I see this fairly often.

And it isn’t only high profile people who ignore sources. I’m sure I forget sometimes. SFAW also provides useful data. I see people who will take a story from SFAW and not credit us, but if they take a similar story from Locus they will credit them. With breaking news, such as yesterday’s sad announcement about Philip José Farmer, people will tend to credit seeing that news from a high profile source even if they see it elsewhere first.

Part of that, of course, is that everyone sees way too much information. They may follow minor people like me, but they don’t actually bother to read what I post – they save those valuable attention cycles for more high profile people. Part of it is also a question of authority. People are likely to say “as seen on Locus” as an indication that what they have written is authoritative. “As seen on SFAW” doesn’t have the same cachet.

However, I’d also like to offer another explanation. This article in today’s Economist reminds us that we are all primates and we still have a tendency to act in primate-like ways. People who study primate behavior apparently recognize a lot of what happens in social networks as “grooming”. And you know, that makes a lot of sense. Link love is essentially a grooming activity. Us low-status monkeys indulge in mutual grooming with people we think of as allies, and we groom high-status monkeys whom we admire and whose troop we wish to belong to. High status monkeys don’t need to groom others, but may do so to reward their followers.

And some high status monkeys are just plain nice people.

Ian McDonald’s article reminds me that it is about time for another post about my friend & follow policy. He says:

I don’t actually Facebook or network either because I don’t want to get into the whole 21st Century social minefield of who to friend and who not to friend and who to unfriend.

I know how he feels. It is way too easy to give offense because you are not familiar with the rules of a given (sub-)community. Here’s what I do.

– On Facebook I’ll accept any friend invitation I get. I do not follow up friend recommendations unless I actually know the person being recommended.

– On LiveJournal I will friend back unless the person concerned is an obvious spammer or has really annoyed me. I may be changing this, because some of you have real blogs and I don’t see any sense in following both (this means you: Jay and Gigi). Also the list is getting rather long and I’m skipping through it very quickly.

– On Twitter I generally don’t follow people who follow me unless I know them and what they are doing looks interesting. Twitter is way too time-intensive for me to be able to read everyone.

So, who have I offended now?