As I write my piece for Michael Pick's upcoming Web-publication, Audience 2.0, I keep running down tangents that, while interesting to me, aren't entirely on-topic. One of these is the issue of the archival properties of networked social media, which could more or less the central question in any analysis of identity and interaction on the Web. How do our interactions become a piece of collective and individual prosthesis memory in these new media? How does this build upon or break from past popular forms of social archivization - from 8mm home movies, to printmaking, to graffiti? These questions naturally lead to discussions of the structure of our socially-enabled media; but in many ways it seems that people in the techsphere of blogs (I don't like the term "blogosphere" very much - hence the awkward rephrasing) often fail to understand the basic flows and processes occurring.

A prime example is Steve Rubel's attempt to map a universe/galaxy/solar system style of metaphorical hierarchy onto his conception of social media. Steve writes:

"* Galaxies: centers of gravity that attract the like-minded - e.g. YouTube, Digg and Second Life
* Stars: online celebs, such as Robert Scoble, Thomas Hawk, AskaNiinja, etc.
* Planets: individuals who follow the stars, yet are influential in their own right
* Shooting Stars: insta-celebs that create viral videos or memes and then fade
* Comets: recurring themes, such as transparency, veracity and entitlement
* Asteroids: desolate, lifeless places with negative energy — think splogs"

To critique his system, let's first look at the basic structure he attempts to invoke. Going from galaxy, to star, to planet the structure envisioned is one of nested hierarchy combined with an illusion of anarchy on - but not between - each individual level. In other words he sees order in the progression from galaxies to solar systems, but essential disorder in these levels themselves. The belief in disorder is highlighted by his categorization of "shooting stars," and "asteroids." For him, these elements disrupt the structured order of progression from one level to another - a "shooting star," is a lower-level member, inappropriately and temporarily above it's natural status.

I won't go into how this metaphor reads astrophysics wrong, because that would miss the point and mostly because I have no grounds to correct anyone on astrophysics. I will however say that to make this systemic comparison is an attempt to read a politics and network structure into social media that is misleading.

Mixing hierarchy and level-specific anarchy in this way takes a narrow view of social media both temporally and physically. At any given time, within a specific sector of social media, this structure may exist, but over time and across the expanse of use and interaction structure is not nearly as hierarchized, centralized, or teleological. YouTube only attracts the like minded as much as a park bench does, Robert Scoble is only an online celebrity as much as Blake Schwarzenbach was a celebrity in the early/mid-nineties proto-pop-punk scene. We must see these networks as ever-modulating, compartmentalized, and interlinked. What we see today is not necessarily true for tomorrow as far as this social hierarchy is concerned.

The most crucial reason why this structure is flawed is that it completely ignores the very bedrock of social media which can be found on MySpace, LiveJournal, the del.icio.us networks among friends, and basically every interactive network of individuals that few pay attention to. If all of Rubel's "stars" and "planets" were to suddenly be gone, these undercurrents would continue to thrive and give birth to new high-points and low-points (to speak in topographical terms - what I see as perhaps a better metaphor). Social media is driven by regular people using these media to interact. I realize very well that on some significant, if unrecognized, level the purpose of interaction is self-reflexively spectacular and celebrity-driven, but this drive occurs within a socially driven network rather than being an inherent property of it.

Steve's post, then, typifies many of the techsphere's attempts at reading structure into what is essentially a process of archivization. It reaffirms the current structure as it is seen without regard to influences of time and expanse and often seems to be a self-congratulatory theory that claims the author's place in the structure is almost divinely ordained - natural - when it is in fact entirely dependent on collective, unpredictably organized interactions.