Ello! I love you, let me jump in your game!

This is a guest post contributed by Anuj Srivas. Formerly a tech. reporter and writer for The Hindu, he’s now pursuing an MSc. at the Oxford Internet Institute, and blogging for Sciblogger.

If there were ever an artifact to which Marshall McLuhan’s ‘the medium is the message’ would be best applicable, it would be Ello. The rapidly-growing social network – much like the EU’s ‘right to be forgotten’ – is quickly turning out to be something of a Rorschach test: people look at it and see what they wish to see.

Like all political slogans, Ello’s manifest is becoming an inkblot onto which we can project our innermost ideologies. It is almost instructive to look at the wide range of reactions, if only for the fact that it tells us something about the way in which we will build the future of the Web.

Optimists and advocates of privacy take a look at Ello and see the start of something new, or view it as a chance to refresh the targeted-advertising foundations of our Web. The most sceptical of this lot, however, point towards the company’s venture capital funding and sneer.

Technology and business analysts look at Ello and see a failed business model; one that is doomed from the start. Feminists and other minority activists look at the company’s founders and notice the appalling lack of diversity. Utopian Internet intellectuals like Clay Shirky see Ello as a way to reclaim conversational discourse on the Internet, even if it doesn’t quite achieve it just yet.

What do I see in the Ello inkblot? Two things.

The first is that Ello, if it gains enough traction, will become an example of whether the free market is capable of providing a social network alternative that respects privacy.

For the last decade, one of the biggest debates among netizens has been whether we should take steps (legal or otherwise) to safeguard values such as privacy on the Internet. One of the most vocal arguments against this has been that “if the demand for the privacy is so great, then the market will notice the demand and find some way to supply it”.

Ello is seemingly the first proper, privacy-caring, centralized social network that the market has spit out (Diaspora was more of a social creation that was designed to radically change online social networks, which was in all likelihood what caused its stagnation). In this way, the VC funding gives Ello a greater chance to provide a better experience – even if it does prove to be the spark that leads to the company’s demise.

If Ello succeeds and continues to stick to its espoused principles, then that’s one argument settled.

The second point pertains to all that Ello does not represent. Sociologist Nathan Jurgensen has an excellent post on Ello where he lashes out at how online social networks are still being built by only technology geeks. He writes:

This [Ello] is yet another example of social media built by coders and entrepreneurs, but no central role for those expert in thinking about and researching the social world. The people who have decided they should mediate our social interactions and write a political manifesto have no special expertise in the social or political.

I cannot emphasize this point enough. One of the more prominent theories regarding technology and its implications is the ‘social shaping of technology’. It theorizes that technology is not born and developed in a vacuum – it is instead very much shaped and created by relevant social groups. There is little doubt that much of today’s technology and online services is skewed very disproportionately – the number of social groups that are involved in the creation of an online social network is minuscule compared to the potential reach and influence of the final product. Ello is no different when it comes to this.

It is a combination of these two points that sums up the current, almost tragic state of affairs. The technology and digital tools of today are very rarely created, or deployed, keeping in mind the needs of the citizen. They usually are brought to life from some entrepreneur’s or venture capitalist’s PowerPoint presentation and then applied to real world situations.

Is Ello the anti-Facebook that we need? Perhaps. Is it the one we deserve? Probably not.