Introvert media – what “private” social networks tell us about the future of online sharing
by. Ron Daly
It used to be that social media was all anyone talked about in business. “How do you use it? How can you grow an audience? Who should we hire to make it happen?”
With social media came a slew of new issues: people sharing photographs of their credit cards on Twitter (that account still exists, but the heck if I’M going to link to it); people sharing account information of every kind with newly-formed social phishing accounts; employees “over-sharing” or, in some cases, taking pictures of members’ feet. And then, there’s the marketing component. If there’s a new medium out there, there must be some way to work in ads and direct sales/customer support, right?
I don’t know if that’s true with the offspring of social media – introvert media.
Now, I know – there are nuances to what makes an introvert and an extrovert. I’ve been around a Myers-Briggs test before – I got a B+ (that’s a joke, for any uptight psychologists reading this). But if social media is a more ideal environment for extroverts (lots of sharing, big crowds a must, plenty of feedback) then this new wave of private, shut-off social networks has got to be a big blessing for introverts (small crowds, not a lot of hubbub, not “open”).
Take Snapchat, for instance. If you’ve never come across Snapchat before, ask your local teenager about it – they’re likely to have it on their smartphone and use it to send pictures of God-knows-what to their friends. The idea behind Snapchat is pretty simple – take a picture, share with a friend, and a few seconds after they open it, the picture is deleted from their phone and from yours. Snapchat’s programmers swear they can’t see the pictures and that any attempt to screen-grab shared pictures alerts the photographer that the recipient tried to save the image. The entire point of Snapchat, according to their website, is to “share a moment”. Users take pictures, send them to other users, and the pictures vanish. All that remains – at least according to Snapchat’s privacy policy – is the memory.
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