The-Greenman.net

I drank a good bit last night. I drank to forget just how bad my Drupal 5 presentation at Minibar was. After years of public speaking practice I realise that I have just been in a comfort zone - speaking to the same group of people for 3 years does not actually count as public speaking, because they are no longer the public. Anyway, this is not a post about letting myself down, this is about a conversation that happened many hours later when the booze had done it's work.

Dot is a pretty clued up girl. He has been thinking about, and living within, social networking systems for most of her life - and has a knack for buzzwords that work. Some time this morning, in the corner of the pub, we ended up discussing the fact that associations within online social networking systems are (almost) always positive. In the case of EBay, this gets a little blurry because anything less than 100% counts as a slur, but that is a different kind of system. In real life however, social networks are often defined, not by who is in them, but by who is NOT in them.

Small cliques gain status by having the ability to say, "This person is NOT one of us". Whole subcultures base their identity on what they oppose; anti-capitalist, anti-authority etc, so, what would happen if we start to allow active negative relationships within online social networks ? (Active negative as opposed to the the usual passive negative connections - the lack of connection, or some kind of hidden ban.)

Dot immediately called this "Negging", and turned it into a handy verb, "To Neg", and launched into the effect this would have on relationships. "Why did you Neg me yesterday ? I don't understand, what did I do ?". How disruptive would it be to allow people to publicise their non-relationships ? My feeling is that it may actually be pretty useful. It may cause some strange disruptions, and some chaos, but, since these kind of relationships exist in physical reality, they do have their place in our new, online world.