Journalism of Courage
It has finally happened. We have stretched ourselves so thin in the world of social networks that people are now actively seeking to escape the ubiquitous nets of sociality that we have built for ourselves. Of course, ever since multi-generational presence on mainstream social networks like Facebook has been on the rise, we have heard about how digital natives are abandoning these platforms in search for things that are more niche and less exposed.
These conversations have been couched for us, so far, in terms of information management and privacy. Even as Facebook denies the decline in growth of its younger user base, the social networking site has constantly tried to introduce features that allow for people to remain private and not expose themselves to the daily new connections that the platform fosters.
There have been different attempts at replicating other Facebooks — and every few months, we hear of the next new social networking site that is going to replace Facebook or Google Plus or any of the other mainstream social networks. And with equal regularity, we find that the social networks which are seen as the challengers are acquired by the services that have come to define the nature and notion of friendship and social interaction online.
So we saw Instagram and Snapchat integrating with Facebook. We have seen our Google accounts linked to our Google Plus and Hangouts. Skype silently blended with Microsoft. Flickr became a part of Yahoo! And with each of these integrations, one waits for the next big social network that is going to change the way we think of digital sociality.
Cloak and GottaSplit are new anti-social networks that are slowly making a buzz, because they question this quest for the new social network. Both are mobile applications that take data from existing location-based services like FourSquare in order to show where all your other contacts are. But here comes the twist. Cloak and GottaSplit do not want to connect you with all your contact data base. Instead, they offer to hide you from the hundreds of people you are connected with! Cloak uses different data from different location-based applications to “cloak” you, to make you invisible to acquaintances, colleagues, relatives, neighbours, contacts and followers who become “friends” in the logic of the social networking systems. GottaSplit allows you to tag the “unwanted” people so that you can avoid them by knowing where they are, through their checkins and mobile app data.
These are apps that recognise that one of the problems of the social networking site is not that it doesn’t have enough controls, but that it produces an inescapable mesh of connections so that we are never truly alone. With applications that encourage us to produce self-quantified data, mobile devices that emit signals and help triangulate our locations, and visual platforms that allow for easy tracking and identification, the need of the hour is not a better social network but maybe an asocial network — a network that recognises that different connections that we make within the network are not valued in an “always-on” mode. Right now, almost all the social networks put us in a condition of constant accessibility — so that even when you are disconnected or sleeping, people are always talking to your profile, adding information to it, and interacting with it.
While Cloak and GottaSplit still have drawbacks and kinks — they don’t collect data from the big social networks like Facebook and Twitter yet — they seem to be a platform a lot of young users are positively responding to. The same users love Snapchat over other applications because it doesn’t archive, store, and build information profiles about its users. There seems to be a need, among the younger users, to have online spaces that are forgiving, forgetting, and which give them a space to escape to without falling off the grid. The emergence of these new applications that allow people to disconnect, to hide, to actually separate the realms of their physical and digital transactions is a slowly growing trend worth examining.
This trend seems to suggest that the next big thing is not going to be a social networking site, but actually an anti-social networking application which now allows people to protect themselves from the never ending onslaught of online data. Though, of course, the irony is not missed, that in order to be able to use Cloak, you still need to be online, have a data connection — that you need to be online in order to avoid your online connections!
Nishant Shah
digitalnative@expressindia.com
