Social Taxonomy: Alpha

I introduced the idea of a social taxonomy in my last post. A social taxonomy provides a structured way of thinking about the concepts inherent in all things social. In this post, I will share some of the thinking involved in arriving at an alpha version of a social taxonomy.

First Principles

1) It became apparent that the taxonomy could not be tautological. The way data is envisioned cannot reference itself. (The alpha version of the taxonomy does not fully address this problem, which is why reader input is very much appreciated.)

2) A social taxonomy needs to be able to describe diverse data and information elements, which unlike other taxonomies, need not be organized in a linear hierarchy, but instead work together in what I call a "relational hierarchy."

3) A social taxonomy must account for elements which cannot manifest themselves within social media. By and large this is a symbolic logic issue which requires us to account for the differences between a real thing and its digital representation.

Let's use "The Matrix" as an example. There is the real Mr. Anderson, whose flesh and blood is plugged into the machinery of The Matrix. There is also a digital construct, a computer generated version of Mr. Anderson which "resides" within the software of The Matrix. We can perceive both Mr. Anderson and the digital projection of Neo. Here is the important part: we cannot perceive what Neo thinks of himself, we can perceive the impact of that self conception. Equally important to the projection of Neo's digital self, is how others shape Neo's self perception. The taxonomy therefore needs to account for the intangible notions of a person - with an allowance that both self perception and the perception of others influences the intangible notions of personhood. In other words, there is A) the self of Mr. Anderson / Neo, B) his effect and his C) affect; all of which are important in understanding both Neo and his relationships.

4) A social taxonomy is not merely about people. Relationships are not merely interpersonal. Relationships exist within the context of time, purpose, and location, etc. Further, just as self-effect-affect is required to understand a person, everything in social has a similar structure which needs to be captured and described. Even "time" features these three qualities in the context of social media. A) There is time itself, which is relative, but which obeys certain rules. B) There is scheduling, which is a representation of time reserved or allocated. C) Finally, there is attention. Within the context of social media, attention is the "affective" element of time. Without attention expended, it is not possible for the "time" spent in content creation to be appreciated.

Brain Dump

The first part of the process is to merely document different kinds of data which need to described. The black text represents what needs to be described. The branches from the highest order (relationship, who, what, etc.) are intended to test and validate that the taxonomy in fact captures first order concepts.

Social Taxonomy Alpha: Part 1

Looking at the whiteboard pictured above, it became apparent that it was possible for data to fit into more that one part of the taxonomy. This is clearly wrong. On closer inspection, the self-effect-affect organizational structure emerged. In it's first iteration, the concepts of self-effect-affect were rendered as A) Rational Concrete; B) Rational Virtual and C) Irrational. It would seem that the self-effect-affect concept is both simpler and more descriptive.

The next step is to clearly show how the different elements of the taxonomy relate.

Social Taxonomy Alpha: Part 2

Presenting the social taxonomy in a table format shows how the self-effect-affect concepts work at each level. For example, the self-effect-affect grouping for "people" is "people-avatar-mental construct." The self-effect-affect grouping for time is "time-schedule-attention."

A table format does not necessarily show how self-effect-affect groupings work. If we pull the table apart, we can better show the inter-dependencies of a grouping.

Next Steps

There are two necessary next steps. The first is to define each element of the taxonomy to allow real world application. The second is to describe how each self-effect-affect grouping relates to the other self-effect-affect grouping. I will address these two "next steps" in my next post.

Please feel welcome to comment. I look forward to all comments and constructive criticism.

Acknowledgements

As I started down this road I realized, and wish to acknowledge, that I am not introducing something radically new. I have had great conversations with people who truly understand social. Allow me to acknowledge some of the people who have influenced my thinking. In no particular order:

• Phil Brown, a friend an coworker who is now probably used to me popping over to his office with my usual opener "Hey Phil, ya gotta minute?"
• Augie Ray, a prolific blogger and great thinker on social media. If you are not reading Augie's blog yet, what are you waiting for? :) https://www.experiencetheblog.com/
• Erik Qualman, the New York Times best selling author and social media thought leader. We have hired Erik as a speaker for several conferences and he never disappoints.
• Beth Wood, an unsung hero of social media in financial services. She gets it. She really, really gets it... and lives it and leads it.