Meeting needs - why social computing works

Andrew Boyd has written an excellent article that explores the motivation behind blogging by looking to Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. He suggests that people blog because they are motivated to satisfy a need:

• the need to belong to a ‘community’: so people blog about ideas that correspond to those of a specific group (or audience)
• the need to gain esteem through the respect of others: so people blog about interesting and thought provoking ideas to attract attention
• the need to self-actualise, be creative, be spontaneous, and solve problems: so people blog to articulate and incubate their thoughts

As with all needs, people are motivated to fulfil and satisfy them. Once satisfied, a need no longer motivates you. This factor not only explains why people blog (to fulfil the need), but also why people don’t blog (i.e. they may feel these needs are already fulfilled by other things).

In speaking to Andrew (he works in the cubicle opposite me) about all these things I came to feel that this model explains much of why social computing works.

While there has always been much debate in psychology-land about whether Maslow’s model is correct, thanks to him, we do acknowledge that people act because they’re motivated by different things — some external (extrinsic) and some internal (intrinsic). Ultimately, his model recognises that people have physical, social and personal needs, and that if these go unmet, these needs drive us and motivate our behaviour, to satisfy them.

If we focus on social needs, we can reimagine Maslow’s heirarchy as a diamond - one whose larger parts are those needs that are more important to us as ’social animals’. This highlights the niche for social computing tools — tools that help people fulfil their need for belonging and esteem by giving them the ability to interact with others, anywhere, at any time, online.

Using tools to be social is not a new thing. We saw it with smoke signals and with the invention of the telephone. I am sure in each instance people threw their hands up in the air and said civilisation was doomed because people will never meet face-to-face again. Of course, they were wrong. Civilisation went on regardless. But these tools gave people new ways in which they could interact, new ways to communicate, and new ways to be social.

This is why social computing works for so many people — they are motivated by their need to be social, and, simply, the online environment now has the capability and the capacity to meet this need.

M

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