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Hello everyone.. let's talk social networking.

In modern times, you need only notice the recent making of a Facebook movie produced by Kevin Spacey to gage the significance of the ubiquitous social network. After this week’s tutorial on social network sites however, a number of issues seemed to warrant extrapolation, namely the paradoxically decentralising yet thoroughly complimentary effects these networks have had on other ‘networks’ or sociological frameworks. Specifically, the proliferation of these networks and the supposed ‘freedoms’ they afford us in connecting us with friends around the world - in light of the purely capitalistic motivations of these sites in placing cookies on users computers, tracking information and interests in order to personalise advertisements for us - seems contradictory.

Having perused a few sites to gauge the gravity of these countervailing interests, I’ve tried to wrestle with the underlying point of it; that is, if there even is one. As canvassed by Danah Boyd in the first reading: Why Youth (Heart) Social Network Sites: The Role of Networked Publics in Teenage Social Life’, there are many different ‘publics’ to which we may refer in society and in the cyberworld. When looking at the effects of social networking sites in recent years however, is the transgressive nature of these publics: note the surreal nature of Twitter’s importance in the Iranian protests following the 2009 Iranian presidential election, when the US State Department requested that Twitter delay scheduled network upgrades that would take the website offline during busy Iranian Twittering hours (see here for a fleshed-out discussion of the positive and negative effects of social networking sites just to get a feel for exactly how many issues there are beneath the simple veneer).

Whatever the determination of all of these intangibles however, it may be said with some certainty that while our online identities are increasingly an extension of our hopes, our dreams, our bodily presence is inexorably absent from these virtual realms (Boyd 2007). The significance of this, I believe, is both in its liberation from the physical but also by its tendencies to disrupt our perceptions of the virtual/physical continuity: there still seems to remain an ineffable sentiment of social networking being divorced from ‘reality’. Hence, perhaps why the snooping parents in the cyberworld in Jane Long’s article from the readings, are just that and not the predatory lurkers they would appear to be if they were physically peering after their children after school’s out. However, the technological Gods that be will no doubt remedy this and it will no doubt be a $1.99 app usable only on the iPhone 4.

So no, there is no definitive answer. Yes these networks were founded for capitalistic gain and propagate solely because of advertising dollars, but the same can be said for news media and an overwhelming majority of services on offer in society. Watch this space... for a long long long time and maybe one day we’ll at least move on as a species from pointless and abusive facebook wall posts towards some small realisation of the true Utopian potential of all of this unadulterated interconnectedness.

Andrew