Comments on: on social network sharecropping

By: Law Firm Web Strategy : The Problem with Twitter

Law Firm Web Strategy : The Problem with Twitter — Tue, 23 Dec 2008 23:42:16 +0000

[...] this year, D’Arcy Norman wrote about social network sharecropping. The idea that we are dumping our thoughts, pictures, notable links and relationships into the [...]

By: Social Bookmarks

Social Bookmarks — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 17:13:52 +0000

I don\’t normally leave comments… but I really enjoyed your post! I will be leaving a link back here in my blogroll! Thanks!

By: Trevor Meister

Trevor Meister — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 04:05:12 +0000

I was waiting to see if any of the comments would touch on a couple of other farming scenarios. Agrobusiness – where the “farm” is run by a corporation that may be publicly owned or in private control, and collectives/cooperatives ie. a Hutterite Colony. It may not be necessary to throw these into the mix, and there may not be overly relevant direct connections to social networking, but I did just in case it stimulates some other lines of thinking. Both are essentially products of sharecroppers who were fed up or displaced. Individual sharecroppers found new lands where they could till their own soil, flourish and let the next generation continue. This was the norm for quite a while, but times change. If the next generation doesn’t want to take over the family farm it gets sold, usually to another farming operation which then gets bigger until = agrobusiness. Individual sharecroppers with something in common ie. religious beliefs did a similar thing except as a group. Today, many are as successful if not more so as any big Agrobusiness around and have more than kept pace operationally (except they usually pay cash for the big tractors and combines). I have a few ideas of some parallels that could be drawn to social networking, especially in the field of education, but need to think about it some more, and as soon as I begin to till my own land, will plant it in the soil there.

By: sharecropping clarification - D'Arcy Norman dot net

sharecropping clarification - D'Arcy Norman dot net — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 18:04:00 +0000

[...] I should probably clarify a couple of things about what I was trying to say about social networks as sharecropping activities. [...]

By: dnorman

dnorman — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 04:11:25 +0000

Rachel, there’s a distinction between hosted services, such as wordpress.com, uniblogs.org etc… and sharecropping social networks such as Ning, Twitter, Facebook, etc…

The ones that are just providing hosting in exchange for a fee or other arrangement are an entirely different ball of wax from the ones that take ownership over your content and/or plaster ads all over it to gather revenue for themselves.

I’ve got absolutely nothing with properly run hosted services. It’s the less upstanding ones that are sucking the soul out of the social networks.

By: Rachel Crouch

Rachel Crouch — Sun, 20 Apr 2008 14:20:24 +0000

It seems to me that when you have someone such as myself who is quite technologically ignorant; most anything we do online is going to be on someone else’s “land”. We depend on that “landowner” to manage things for us, so that we can go ahead an plant our crops, so to speak.

By: | EDUC 628-Spring-08

| EDUC 628-Spring-08 — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 03:16:08 +0000

[...] sharecropping Phaedrus addthis_url = ‘http%3A%2F%2Fahinson7.edublogs.org%2F2008%2F04%2F17%2F89%2F’; addthis_title = ”; addthis_pub = ”; Posted by ahinson7 Filed in 1 [...]

By: Response to Sharecropping « One Fish’s Thoughts About the Ginormous Pond of Education

Thu, 17 Apr 2008 13:41:54 +0000

[...] to Sharecropping The article posted on Phaedru’s blog entitled “On Social Network Sharecropping” it seems to me that the community found within Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, etc. is the land for the [...]

By: dnorman

dnorman — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 15:24:55 +0000

@Martin I would argue that because there is no real sense of scarcity online, that sharecropping is far worse there than in the real world. Real world sharecropping can be effective for the individual farmers because it gives them access to things they might not otherwise be able to afford (land, tools, raw materials, processing, storage). In online applications, there is no scarcity. Every individual has access to essentially the same tools as the largest “landowner” – there is no reason to not till your own land.

Disaggregation is the very real downside to distributed individual services – and that’s where much work needs to be done. OpenID needs to be beefed up. Things like OpenSocial need to be extended. Data portability, application interoperability etc… XML-RPC, trackback, and lots of other little ways of connecting apps together…

@David I’m not saying that communities aren’t important – they are absolutely essential. My only concern here is that the community, in the form of a “company town” is not functional or beneficial to anyone but the Company.

By: David Esrati

David Esrati — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 10:10:30 +0000

The thing about metaphors- is they depend on a common understanding of the metaphor.
Farming has been around since day two.
I’ll posit that we couldn’t have distributed masses to aggregate until after we’d had the critical mass to create the standards that would enable the aggregation.
ie. had we not had the huge communities like Facebook, MySpace, Flickr, YouTube- we wouldn’t have come to the RSS standards and trackbacks etc so quick.
The web has moved at incredible speed- especially in building mass. Now, the question is- when this all really does become as easy as WordPress (and some of my students still find it tough- but then again- they find the basic OS tough) will the common person prefer being part of a large group- a city? or an individual farmer in the country?
Past experience says many will find their home in the largest communities…