Following Hurricane Katrina, my nephew was a US Coast Guard search and rescue team member. He took this photograph (and many other compelling images) during rescue operations in the days and weeks immediately following the hurricane.

Katrina represented a catastrophe of the largest kind, not merely because the technology failed, but, more importantly, because our normal social structures failed. People, when separated from food, shelter, medical care, safety, and other basic needs, rapidly lose a sense of group membership and start to think purely of their own self-interest. There’s nothing surprising in this, but Katrina brought it, shockingly, in front of our eyes, with devastating impact.

Social collapse usually happens on a much smaller scale, however. Someone loses a job, runs out of money, feels desperate, and starts to behave in an anti-social manner. Or they may have an agenda to push and are willing to stop at nothing to see it succeed. Or they may feel slighted, and they respond with uncharacteristic viciousness.

This is the dark side of the social media world, and one that I honestly hope most people haven’t experienced. However, I’ve found myself doing and saying things online that I would never have done or said in person. The reality of close contact with people establishes some of those social controls that guide our behavior in the real world, and those controls are often missing online.

The Internet and all its capability for communication is still in its infancy. The focus to date has been much more on the technology than on its impact. Social media is the latest technology that gives an enormous amount of power to its users. To date, however, the emphasis has been on the technology; for example, the latest release of FriendFeed incorporates “real-time” streaming. To the people who didn’t try the Beta version, this came as a huge shock, and it’s very overwhelming to see the quantity and pace of change.

There’s no good real-world analogy to this. I can picture in my mind a person who loves writing letters; she has a hundred people with whom she corresponds around the world. Every day, she takes out her pen and paper and writes a dozen or more letters. She also works in her garden, does the shopping, goes to work in the morning, and has her car repaired. This is the state of FriendFeed before the upgrade.

Her friends know that her birthday’s coming up, so they arrange a surprise party. At 7 o’clock one evening, just when she’s gotten home and picked up her pen to write a few more letters, several thousand people show up at her front door and cram into her house. She’s excited, of course—it’s her birthday! But there are people in every room, and there are people on her front lawn, and out back in the garden, and they’re all talking at once, and, though she knows most of them, they also know each other, and they haven’t met before, and she hears snippets of conversation, and every time she says something the person gets jostled away and she finds herself looking at someone else, and then someone makes a joke, and someone else finds it insensitive, and there’s a religious argument in the kitchen, and people are talking politics in the front hall, and someone’s drinking, and somehow bacon is cooking on the stove, and there’s cilantro being spread on toast, and someone else is showing pornographic pictures on her computer, and she can’t keep up with it all.

Yes, that’s what it feels like.

The technology, by this point, is mostly trivial. It’s the social aspect that’s going to require much more subtlety and careful handling. Similar issues have been seen on Facebook every time they’ve changed their main landing page. Sometimes the company has forced the users to go along with the changes, but, other times, the company has had to backtrack from them.

The next person to start a social media company should include a psychologist or social scientist as a founder.

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