Jackie Danicki

Leave it to Adriana to nail exactly why Flickr’s enforcement of Yahoo ID sign-ins on their very earliest customers is a very big mistake. She also offers this point about ‘community’ online - one that a lot of marketers and self-described social media gurus would do well to understand:

A lot has been written and powerpointed about the social and the communal on the internet, most of it missing the point. By a wide margin. Community is not a ‘collective’, it is a voluntary association of individuals drawn to something that motivates them to sustain the connection over time. It is a web of such connections between autonomous individuals who are happy to congregate because they feel understood, captivated and derive value from the association.

There’s a lot of talk about “getting it,” and who does and does not, but I can - hand on heart - say that I have not met many people who truly understand points like the one Adriana makes here. Community for the sake of community will always be doomed, as will the marginalisation of the individual. This is true offline as well as online, though for some reason a lot of people find the concept highly offensive and ’selfish’ when applied to the offline world. More fool them.

Filed under: Life