I’d like to bring up some questions regarding social networking for you to ponder. The idea sparked from a discussion we had this evening in my core ID class, where we were launching a project involving live media. We branched off into groups to talk about the domain of live media, and later re-grouped for a great debate regarding its definition. Does it have to be technology based? How live is, well, live? Can calling someone on the phone count as live media? If so, what about a face-to-face conversation?
The same borders could be drawn regarding social networking. If you mention the activity, the first things that pop up are Facebook or Twitter, at least to me. Five years ago, it could have been Friendster or LinkedIn. There are plenty successful and unsuccessful examples that have had internet limelight, and I’m sure we could compile a list of dozens of internet services that could constitute social networking.
However, what happens when you actually begin to really define social networking? What if you look at the established social networking sites, the services they provide and connections they complete, and drop their physical or virtual homes? Where one person tweets about a little wine soiree to their friends, an older, less tech-inclined person might just call their acquaintances that afternoon. These two people achieved the same goal and both had a great night with gossip, hors d’oeuvres and cheap plonk. Does the privacy of a phone booth equate a personal message on Facebook? Is chatting loudly on a cell phone on the street car as impersonal as a wall posting? Boing Boing editor Lisa Katayama questions the same thing. How are audience, anonymity & intimacy considered in your definition of social networking?
The previous evening’s get-together poses a pretty legitimate case for defining social networking being not the website you use, but moreso the action of getting in touch. If you look back through history, this theory holds true to the human’s need for communication. Columnist Sarah Milstein uncovers how near-live communication, as we have with Twitter or status updates, existed even in the early 19th century, where mail was delivered up to 6 times a day. This certainly eliminates the medium being the message, as technology has only simplified the method in which we achieve that communication (check this super badass text messaging service from 1935). Suddenly, we could be talking about smoke signals and carrier pigeons (what was that one site that had a bird as its logo?).
However, the medium in which social networking is carried certainly does have a large effect on how we behave socially. How many phone numbers do you know off by heart? How do you check if your friend Bruce’s birthday is the 15th of June or July 15th? Do you accept her friend request? This is all another notch in the medium’s battle over the message.
I’ll let my ramblings end there. I want to hear your definition of social networking. Let’s hear one statement and some supporting context/examples/cases that strengthen where you think social networking begins and ends. Does it influence our greater human behavior? How do clever devices affect this activity?
Love,
Ansis Kalnins
Great post, and I love the parallels with older technologies.
ReplyDeleteAt it's core social networking should be defined as simply human behavior, with all it's complexities. All technologies do is allow an outlet for innate human desires to be made manifest in behaviors.
It's very true that perhaps there is little difference now between a Tweet and a phone call, at least in the example you gave. But it's undeniable that self-broadcasting technologies such as Twitter, blogging, etc have changed the way we deal with our relationships and the world at large. As powerful as the telephone or the mail system is, there is something to the instantaneousness and accessibility of online medias such as Twitter.
I'm also not going to ramble, because I'm tired. But to answer your final question, I would say "no". I don't see these things as influencing human behavior, but rather I see it as a way for human behavior to express itself. If behavior changes it is because of new potential made suddenly available to it.
When I consider something like Twitter, or Facebook, I ask myself, "What does this let me do as a human being? How does this let me share, love, or express myself." How does it make you feel safe, or accepted or loved? Looking at it that way we might see that these behaviors come not from the medias but from the way they allow human beings to express or fulfill these innate desires.
So all these things like issues of anonymity, shallowness of relationships, etc; I don't necessarily see them as problems, but rather simply another face of the way things are changing.
Hope that makes sense