I've been enjoying the flurry of discussion about Asymmetrical Follow sparked by this post from James Governor. I'm not really qualified to debate the ideas involved though it did make me suspect that every tool, even/especially those designed for intimacy will at some point be used for broadcast. And that every tool even/especially those designed for broadcast will at some point be used for intimacy.
But JP Rangaswami's splendid addition to the conversation brought politeness into the mix and that reminded me of Kate Fox's Watching The English and ideas of negative and positive politeness.
As I remember it, in a Positive Politeness culture (such as North America) your primary social responsibility is warmth and openness - making sure the other guy is OK/good. Whereas in a Negative Politeness culture (such as the UK or Japan) your primary social responsibility is to respect the other guy's privacy - not to intrude. Thus the ideal newspaper buying experience in Portland, Oregon involves a ten-minute conversation and the ideal newspaper buying experience in London, England involves no words and, ideally, no eye contact. (I speak from positive experience in both places.)
There's a more informed discussion of this idea here (the perspective of a Briton in America) and there's a Wikipedia entry on Politeness Theory here.
Now obviously these are sweeping generalisations and I'm sure proper Anthropologists, Sociologists and Readers In Rudeness would shudder at my crass assumptions but they seemed true enough to me to be useful when negotiating a trans-Atlantic life for a few years.
So it seems like it might be useful to think about this stuff when thinking about Social Networks too. Because not only are we trying to work out what's polite on IM versus Twitter but we're doing it with a bunch of people who have different assumptions about what's polite in the real world. And for all of our worldliness and globalism, miscommunication, mistakes, sleights and unintentional rudenesses happen every day and every time different cultures meet. And don't get me started on the Finns.
So, when we wonder whether silence is acceptable on IM, or whether asymmetrical follow is joyous or vulgar, it's as well to remember that there's no global consensus on these things in ancient channels like regular conversation. And that until the UN Working Group on International Loveliness reports there probably won't be. In everyday practise most people I know seem to have settled on a sort of mid-Atlantic compromise with the frequent use of no-longer-really-ironic Yays! And internet slang works to paper over some of these cracks by creating another culture/place you can be from. But as these social technologies become more evenly distributed around the world, I suspect frequent use of LOL won't (dread word) 'scale' to the planet. And I can't think what a global equivalent of 'mid-Atlantic' might be, a Lagrange point maybe.
Or something. Anyway. Sorry. (Negative politeness)
(PS - which has just made me realise. If you were going to be create a killer social application in the UK, the Social Object you'd build it around would be The Apology. Anyway. Again. Sorry.)