As a kid growing up, my parents thought the best way to seed knowledge into my impressionable mind was to offer me a bunch of books that described the world around me, as it existed. Since times immemorial, books have been the way all of us have learnt to comprehend the world. All along through the annals of history, authors have used text-based books as a medium to think, form, articulate and share their ideas. Of course, the year 1439 (yep, long time that) will go down as seminal in the history of publishing - Johannes Gutenberg showed the world how to print using a mechanical process.
Visual is the building block
Yet surprisingly, one of the first things that your mom teaches you isn't through the use of text, but through visual imagery (think hard and you'll see how). Remember how she would show you a rabbit's image in the moon or when she would show a pigeon that flew to your window pane. How the concept of something edible was communicated by doing a 'show and tell' of fruits.
Remember how your dad would conjure up the impression of a fish or a deer on the wall through skillful use of shadows with his fingers?First books we are shown during the kindergarten days aren't prose, but full of images of common objects around us. There is something about visual imagery and the human mind which connects the dots more instantly than any other kind of form or emotion. I didn't bother to check, but I am sure there are tonnes of behavioral studies conducted to prove this phenomena. Don't believe me - try recalling how you learnt your ABCD (A for ...). Hence proved :).
Social networking or compliance???
Fast forward from your childhood to the present age - everything internet. Needless to say how hopeless most of us find ourselves if disconnected from the internet for even an hour (the reason you are reading this is also because of the ubiquity of the web in your life tsk... tsk...). We are at a stage where a significant part of our individual identity is either spent / exposed on the internet. For many, the web may be their entire entity. Social networking sites, both personal and professional, such as you-know-which-ones take this construct to whole new levels. There are social connections / gaming / buying / selling / dating / contracting (crowd-sourcing) / etc. It's almost as if every aspect of what we do on the internet these days has a social angle to it. And therein lies my fundamental hypothesis about what I want to discuss here - the conflicting aspiration with which the Web presents itself to us as.
Most of the social networking sites are aimed at making us pretend (to ourselves and others around us) about the whole social construct. The idea of being connected with people even if we wouldn't care to drop a hi if they crossed our paths. How many of us have added people we usually would not interact with or are least bothered to know what's happening in their lives, but add them because the social convention dictates us to.
I wouldn't back this up with any statistic because I shouldn't have to - we all know this for a fact.Businesses whose operating models are based on these fundamentals have been under the spotlight in recent times. I get it - serving ads to a user base that boasts 1/5th of the world population (and growing fast) is cool, and investors see a lot of potential there. Having said that, I think there is a crying need for the web today to 're-connect' at levels which are more genuine, less cosmetic. A place where users congregate because they want to, and not because it's a popular social convention to do so. Om Malik refers to such an experience as "Alive Web" - a platform that fosters the social quotient of it's users with something that is fundamental yet immersive.
What makes immersive Web tick, and why???
Good news - the web is buzzing with such Alive Web instances. Err.... don't go too far - something BIG happened very recently. Let's take a moment to analyze it. Reflect upon my initial premise of how humans associate naturally to visual imagery. There's a non-descript outfit on the mobile front which makes it's living by offering filter choices to photos clicked by users through their iOS and Android devices. This outfit goes by the name of Instagram and they recently made it big when Facebook decided to buy it for a oh-so-cool 1 billion dollars. Now hang on, if you expect this discussion to go on and validate whether Instagram's valuation was just or not, you might be in for some disappointment. There are a zillion sites which have done that already. Instead, what is more interesting is the emergence of Instagram and the potential of such services.
This is an experience difficult to fake or put a facade in front of, and which is why Instagram has become the hottest pixel real estate on the mobile apps front.Other users (even people outside your circle) engage on the basis of their likeliness towards the image, and not because they have to as part of some social convention. I've do that personally and I can see how this works. So do the rest of the 50 million Instagram users (as of 1st May). Pinterest is another similar service that comes to mind. Just the mere thought of how it works can freak out anyone - but hey, things work in the social age we are in.
The long and short of all this is...
I believe we are currently witnessing a shift in the way we've communicated with the Web and our web communities so far. Visual imagery seems to be the new wave of sharing our ideas, concepts and beliefs with rest of the world. And the creative genius of the Web will figure out a way to create profitable business models by figuring out how we share some of our most fundamental experiences on the internet. Social networking has been a great success story, but I guess we've only just started scratching the surface of 'the social' potential. It's a small percentage of people at the moment, but the pace seems to be increasing (just look at the meteoric rise of Instagram and Pinterest subscribers in recent times).
Image credits:
http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-kA59gyccc64/T6oyEsBVatI/AAAAAAAAIuU/F7Z1rFWMiFo/s400/visionary-540pixel-thumb.jpg
http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-YR5Md7Q7kgM/T6qBTiZ64mI/AAAAAAAAIuo/ex79BkH79UA/s320/INSTAGRAM-articleLarge.jpg
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