Ok but what if there was... an Internet-less social network.
"Madness," you say, "How can that be useful."
Well, right now I can't say it is useful. I can't even say it will eventually be useful. But I think it might be fun for now, and has potential for useful later.
At this point, nearly everyone owns a smartphone, and I bet you do too. You carry it with you everywhere, and rarely let it leave your reach. And it just so happens that all these phones are capable of communicating with each other without using the Internet.
They are also pretty much uniquely identifiable on the hardware level, which means as much as we, the phone-holders, are individuals, so are the phones. Why should we need the Internet, an email, and accounts on 50 websites to be able to communicate, when our phones are perfectly capable of communicating on their own.
Now, of course, this is not the solution for every problem. The Internet is important these days because it satisfies a very big, useful role. However, it is not the only solution, and there are problems even the almighty Internet can't solve.
Personally, I find that the Internet connects us, but in a way that makes us feel disconnected. With the Internet, everything is just so BIG.
Take Facebook for example. Scroll down the feed and you'll find a few memes you were tagged in, some articles from a sketchy news site, a photo from some long forgotten high school acquaintance's recent trip to Greece, some ads, a new song from what was your favourite band a few years ago, some photos from your grandmother's birthday. People share things, but not because they want you to see it. They just want to get more "likes". In the end, it's just not personal.
Now I'm not saying all that is a bad thing. Facebook, among other sites, all have their purpose and their own reasons as to why they are now so popular, but they're lacking something that the Internet can't provide. While they claim to be "online communities," they aren't often really "communities" at all---they're just websites full of content.
A social network without the Internet will have to be fundamentally very different. It won't be about mass sharing and consumption, but instead about providing a means to share the content we like to share online, but in a more personal setting.
Consider the core components of many social networks:
- A personal profile (with public and private components)
- A way to find your friends
- Groups to join, with both friends and like-minded strangers
- The ability to make posts (inside the network, tweet style or blog style, you decide)
- Content sharing (memes, videos, and articles from outside the network)
- Instant messaging (group and individual)
Now consider what a social network could look like without the Internet. Pretty much all of these components are still applicable, only now they are limited by physical distance. Everything gets a lot more personal and community driven. A culture starts to develop between you and the people around you. Here's how I think it might work:
Your personal profile, of course, still works just as it would on Facebook. You have public info (your name, a small bio paragraph, maybe a few hobbies, and your favourite local coffee shops), and private info (birthday, email, address). The public information would be made available on the local network, while the private information would, of course, remain private.
Suddenly, everyone around you knows a little bit more about each other. Maybe you'll discover your new favourite coffee shop on some random guy's profile. Or maybe you'll find something you have in common with that cute girl you see every morning on the way to work. Or maybe some other dad at your kid's soccer game is the golf partner you've been looking for. Or maybe the guy on the bus has great taste in music. Who knows what you might find.
Now say you're at your new favourite coffee shop, and you see the guy who had mentioned it on his profile appear nearby. At this point, it only makes sense to thank him for his great recommendation, but it's weird to walk up to a guy you don't know and thank him for something he doesn't know he did (or maybe you don't even know which guy it is in the real world). Instead, you decide to just send a message, which turns into a brief conversation resulting in the discovery that this guy is actually at the table just behind you, so you continue the conversation in person.
Imagine that. Talking to people... In person!
Eventually you have to go home, but you enjoyed the chat and you decide to add this guy to your friend list. Now, you might wonder, "what good is a friend list if I can't talk to them on the Internet?" Well, that's a good question, but there are a few possibilities:
- A notification when you both end up in the same coffee shop again?
- A bit of their info saved on your phone so you can find it later?
- Enough to find them on an Internet based social network, perhaps?
The groups feature would work similar to how you expect too: people join groups and then they have a shared space to share content and discuss things related to the common interest. Certainly it would be harder to run a successful meme page in one of these groups, but a community bulletin board would make a lot more sense. Being in a group with your all neighbours could help to bring everyone together. Maybe someone living just 3 doors down is into all the same things as you, but you never knew because you don't talk. Being in a local group with them could be the start of another new friendship.
Local businesses could set up groups, or even just use the neighbourhood group, to share promotions and set up events. It's similar to advertising, but now the ads are all immediately relevant, since you could just walk over to the store and pick something up. In the current world it's pretty hard to promote your local business, but a local social network could provide the platform for such a thing.
In and around schools would be interesting as well: the kids would have a place to share all those things they share online, but with an invite-only group, it's their own little community where nothing can get in from outside, and nobody outside can see what they are talking about. The actual school administration could even hook into some part of this system to distribute announcements, assignments, and to be able to reach out to students directly when they need to.
Posting content would be, again, similar but different from the way we are used to. Everything you could have shared online could be shared in just the same way, but again, it becomes a lot more personal. While there is little market for news articles about the local area online, and local newspapers tend to be dying out these days, community driven blog posts about local events would be pretty relevant when shared only with people nearby. It would even be possible to share content from the regular Internet by either just sharing the URLs and linking out to the actual content, or downloading the articles themselves and then sharing it directly.
Pretty much any feature of an Internet social network can be used in a local social network as well, but in a local network big companies don't have the same access as they would online. There is no central distributor (like Google) to go to to spread your ads around: the only distributors in this network are consumers themselves.
If a company did want to show ads on your network, they would need to use you to spread the ads around. "Why would I want to do that?" you wonder. Well you'd get paid of course. There are plenty of digital currency systems already in place (crypto being the most likely candidate for success in this sense, but even just using PayPal could work if crypto never becomes trustworthy), so it would be easy to, say, attach $50000 to an ad and send it into the network. Each person that sees the ad would be given a few cents from the pool before sending the ad along to whoever they pass by next. If you'd rather not receive ads and not get paid, you could do that too.
Personally, I wouldn't mind giving companies little bits of information, and passing along their ads if it was of no additional effort to me, and I was getting paid. It's pretty much just free money at that point. Plus, any information you send in and out of your phone is controlled by you---there is no more question about what is being tracked and sent to companies like there is online, since you have the control over the central source of information on yourself.