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Sunday, February 19, 2006
Won't you be my friend? Please? For the love of God PLEASE BE MY FRIEND!
Anyone who surfs the internet on a regular basis and/or is under the age of say, 35, is aware of the current revolution in online networking. This revolution has its roots with the internet itself but has gained momentum in the past couple of years with the websites MySpace.com and Facebook.com. Both of these sites are geared toward high school- and college-aged kids obsessed with who knows them and who they know. Facebook.com spread through college campuses like a virus (and this time it wasn’t sexually transmitted) and eventually having a Facebook account was the norm among undergrads. I never jumped on the Facebook or Myspace bandwagon for a number of reasons, number one being I just didn’t care.
The premise behind these sites is simple: you create an account, upload a picture and some personal information, and people see your page, become your “friend”, and look to see who your “friends” are. Before long many users have an extensive network of people they go to school with and friends they’ve lost touch with in high school (users’ profiles are searchable by school name, hometown, etc.). I know all of this information because of the number of news stories that have come out over the past two years about the perils of being a part of these communities (read the AP story that prompted this post). As with anything on the internet, popularity brings negative attention and in the case of Facebook and Myspace it is rather pronounced due to the personal nature of the service. Indeed, the entire point of signing up is to disseminate personal information. Critics warn that these sites are dangerous and that personal information shouldn’t be given out, but what they don’t realize is that the entire foundation of social networking services is built, brick by brick, by such information.
I write this post to criticize the criticizers for not fully examining the implications and sociological dynamics of online networking of this breed. These communities are ripe for a scholarly study but not in the traditional framework that has typically structured studies of internet life. Individuality has been expressed online since the beginning but not in such a dramatic way as on Facebook and Myspace. To have a personal website or blog is to invite others to peruse your life in digitized form. You post something and people read it, sometimes interactively. With social networking sites a whole different plane of personal existence is being accessed. Kids expect for people to “accept” or “reject” them as virtual friends and expect this to translate into the real world. It is difficult to translate the virtual world into the physical but when it is attempted, the outcome is often undesirable.
This post was brought to you by a lack of sleep and several cups of coffee.
Posted by Will at February 19, 2006 11:48 PM in In the News | Personal Reflections