Thursday, November 6, 2008

Glut and 5 Levels

I have been reading Glut by Alex Wright.

He thinks that we humans have a natural need to classify things. He also thinks we are most comfortable with classifying things at 5 levels of complexity. The middle level apparently is normally the thing itself.

Let's assume this is true. What are the 5 levels of Facebook, Twitter, etc? I am not sure I can see 5 levels. Is this a problem? Is this because we are so early in the way we use and understand social online?

Here is an example of the 5 levels:

Animal
Mammal
Dog
Hound Dog - in North Carolina that would be a Plott Hound
Bassett Hound - again - not in NC
Pets

On Twitter would this be:

World Wide Web
Social Web
Blog
Mirco Blog
???

Do relationships have this same 5 levels? Online - again say Twitter:

User of Twitter
Me
Followers
Following
?????

Any other thoughts.

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