Action Streams & individual empowerment

Blogs are so powerful because they enable people to express themselves personally -- and to completely and easily control that expression. So much of self-expression in this world is otherwise tied into other people's identities and other brands, that it's sometimes hard to break free. We've seen a cycle on the Internet where large online media have yielded in great part to individual media, only to then be eclipsed by large online communities, which I believe are starting to yield to more individualized forms of community and communication. "Individual community" sounds like an oxymoron, but I submit that what makes a community is more heterogeneity than homogeneity. Sure, common interests serve to bring people together, but a community takes on its own form not by being a mere amalgam of clones, but in the interplay of individuals.

So it is that the large communities are bursting with individualism. This tension is inherent even in the name "MySpace." MySpace is a single place where everyone is trying to be different (albeit often in the same kinds of ways). Who's space is it anyway: is it the user's space or News Corp.'s? Even the austere and formulaic Facebook has evolved with customization, personalization, and a host of apps, if not much diversity on the design front.

The social networks have been aggregations of online action and activities, but they've been isolated from one another because it would seem the network owners prefer control to freedom. Facebook owns its turf, MySpace owns its turf, and they haven't been much interested in allowing their folks to mingle, I suspect because they fear that loss of their control over their users will mean loss of ownership for them, and then loss of their value.

But just as big online media made way for individual media with blogs, big social media will give way to individual, and individualized, forms of social media. Blogs have always been about individual control and freedom and they too, I predict, will be the force to free people from social networks. Not *remove* them from social networks -- blogs haven't replaced traditional media, they've augmented it -- but give them options to construct their own persona, on their own terms.

That's why I think MT's new Action Streams (see mine in the left sidebar) is more than just a cool new set of capabilities for blogs, but in fact something indicative of a much larger trend and perhaps an inflection point for blogging and social media. Rather than actions being held hostage within online services, now, using the power of blogs, people can have their actions aggregated around them -- not the other way around.

Huge props to Mark Paschal from our MT team who did an amazing job on this. And his post on this is both eloquent and intriguing. Here's an excerpt:

There are both a mighty need and a grand opportunity for us to knit our society back together, and I expect us to use the internet to do that. Putnam mentions the idea that the internet lets us connect in ways we haven't before, but rightly views the utterly unproven possibility with skepticism. I've yet to adequately articulate myself on the topic, and I'm still not able to do so here, so instead let's discuss a meager tilt I took at that windmill: the new Action Streams plugin for Movable Type 4.1.