social networking is killing society

Is it killing society? No one told me about this, sounds worrying.

I don't have any sociological knowledge about anyfink...

I think the main issue is that the internet can facilitate specialisation, which is great in many ways.

But there is a risk that people increasingly form relationships with people who are just like them or share their niche interests (whether musical or sexual or whatever).

Which means that potentially your pool of friends becomes less diverse, and less based on location or face to face stuff.

I was talking to a friend of mine recently who was doing online chat with a view to getting a boyfriend and a large percentage of the blokes she found were basically only interested if she would immediately agree to fulfilling their specific sexual pecadillo. She wasn't so they were out of there, onto somebody else. It was very much like the dating process had been reduced to browsing ebay or something.

But I think the negative aspects of social networking are really just an acceleration of the atomisation of society anyway - this is a process which has been happening for some time before the internet came about. ("there is no such thing as society" etc).

So you'd have to look at how "civic" people felt in the sixties and seventies compared to now.

On the plus side it does allow people to hook up with others who live in their area and you do get groups evolving who do things off the net from that. Facebook has a bunch of groups for people who grew up in different parts of Hackney for example.

there was a shock horror headline recently (ie this week) that said 50% of teenagers are happiest online. i saw it onlineo), couldn't tell you where (but one of the clever papers ), tho no doubt it's full of some heavy number crunching and 'we're all doomed' editorialising.

I'd love to reply in detail but I'm too busy working on a status update for facefuck.

The current generation of teenagers is the first that writes voluntarily and habitually. To be sure previous generations have written in school and as part of the job, but never -- as a generation -- voluntarily for expressive and social purposes.

This is gonna have an effect of some sort, not sure that it might be.

crackerjack said:

there was a shock horror headline recently (ie this week) that said 50% of teenagers are happiest online. i saw it onlineo), couldn't tell you where (but one of the clever papers ), tho no doubt it's full of some heavy number crunching and 'we're all doomed' editorialising.

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I'm probably happiest online to be honest. Especially when it comes to the awkward business of getting to know people. I'm not sure if this is a good thing though. For instance, I've just started university, and my usual tactic has been to meet people, almost immediately ask if they're on Facebook, and then not bothering to find out anything more about them (knowing I'll find out their likes/dislikes and much of their history from FB) -- then on the basis of this, judging whether I'll actually want to speak to them again in 'real life'.

I suppose it removes the element of surprise. If I find someone likes the same books as me, then I'll likely gravitate toward that person, and we'll end up talking about the books - 'facilitating specialization' I suppose.

3 Body No Problem said:

The current generation of teenagers is the first that writes voluntarily and habitually. To be sure previous generations have written in school and as part of the job, but never -- as a generation -- voluntarily for expressive and social purposes.

This is gonna have an effect of some sort, not sure that it might be.

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I think as a general rule, anything new (especially any new technology) that people are flipping out about and insisting will "ruin" society turns out to be just another thing to thread through that has good and bad sides.

But have you seen what these teens are writing? On the social networking sites?

I think it's good that people are getting over the initial thrill of novelty with them and seeing that they're just another tool that can be used for good or ill.

The utopian talk about their infinite openness and "classlessness" and "facelessness" (esp when it comes to friggin twitter) is just too much, on the other side.

(I notice that the more I rely on spellcheck the faster my ability to spell correctly/write intelligibly deteriorates. )

john eden said:

But there is a risk that people increasingly form relationships with people who are just like them or share their niche interests (whether musical or sexual or whatever).

Which means that potentially your pool of friends becomes less diverse, and less based on location or face to face stuff.

I was talking to a friend of mine recently who was doing online chat with a view to getting a boyfriend and a large percentage of the blokes she found were basically only interested if she would immediately agree to fulfilling their specific sexual pecadillo. She wasn't so they were out of there, onto somebody else. It was very much like the dating process had been reduced to browsing ebay or something.

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I would argue that all of these things happen offline, too. In almost exactly the same manner and to the same degree, just with a tad more subtlety (in some cases, the last in particular).

nomadthethird said:

I would argue that all of these things happen offline, too. In almost exactly the same manner and to the same degree, just with a tad more subtlety (in some cases, the last in particular).

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yes I think that's fair enough, so perhaps social networking just accelerates or intensifies these things?

Virtual Communities: Abort, Retry, Failure?

By Jan Fernback & Brad Thompson (1995)

"Citizenship via cyberspace has not proven to be the panacea for the problems of democratic representation within American society; although communities of interest have been formed and strengthened...and have demonstrated a sense of solidarity, they have nevertheless contributed to the fragmented cultural and political landscape of the United States..."

http://www.well.com/~hlr/texts/VCcivil.html

______________________________________________________________________

Virtual Communities and Social Capital

Anita Blanchard and Tom Horan (1998)

Robert Putnam (1993) has developed a theory of social capital to explain the effect of decreasing community participation and civic engagement on declining institutional performance. Subsequently, there has been much speculation as to whether emerging virtual communities can counteract this trend. We apply the findings of computer-mediated communication and virtual communities to the networks, norms, and trust of social capital and also examine the possible effects of virtual communities on the privatization of leisure time

http://www.igi-pub.com/downloads/excerpts/garson.pdf

______________________________________________________________________

Looking For Social Capital in Online Virtual Communities

Jeff Elliot (2005)

( virtual)Communities that exhibit highly cohesive forms of social capital are thus not necessarily beneficial to the overall society. Cohesive communities that manifest strong social capital may exclude others from entering into the communities, and this can lead to abuses that harm the community.

http://www.usask.ca/education/coursework/802papers/elliott/index.htm

I dunno, I find it a bit sad (in the actual melancholic sense) that four five one describes getting to know people as an "awkward business". I doubt social networking's killing society, but maybe the fact that certain social relations are being torn apart is feeding into FB's popularity, rather than the other way round.

Take, for instance, Matt B - I have met him in real life, and found him an utterly pleasing character. However, online, he has brought my name into disrepute by accusing me of being 'Room with a view' - and, for this crime, I demand a £75 Paypal apology fee, or a duel outside Euston Station before Xmas.

Also, I totally disagree with 3 Body about today's young generation being the first to 'voluntarily and habitually write' for 'expressive and social purposes' -if you laid out all the fanzines produced in the 80s and 90s, they'd stretch to Mars.

martin said:

I dunno, I find it a bit sad (in the actual melancholic sense) that four five one describes getting to know people as an "awkward business".

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Same for me, but it was the judging from their likes/dislikes on Facebook thing that I found jarring. I'm a bit guilty of this myself in a way, seeing what people are in to and what they do with their time and letting that inform my opinion of them, whereas in a time before Myspace/Facebook etc, I'd have to let my face to face interactions with them tell me whether or not they are a genuinely nice person, or someone I'd like to know better. Maybe I'm just seeing the pre-internet/pre web 2.0 era through crazy utopian specs, I suppose the same thing would still happen 10/20 years ago but just through hearsay instead of the internet, but I can't shake the feeling that social networking and the internet in general has a negative effect on the way people relate to each other.

I prefer my conversations to be embodied, so I can pick up on body language and whatever chemical signals that might be wafting about in the atmosphere.

There's a reason why businessmen fly halfway round the world to shake hands on a deal.

mixed_biscuits said:

There's a reason why businessmen fly halfway round the world to shake hands on a deal.

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yeah, freebie holiday on the expense account!

room with a view said:

yeah, freebie holiday on the expense account!

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!

nomadthethird said:

I would argue that all of these things happen offline, too. In almost exactly the same manner and to the same degree, just with a tad more subtlety (in some cases, the last in particular).

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I'd go with that - people just have to be slightly less direct in the 'real' world. It's always mystified me why people think that any online dating is that different from er, offline dating - the precise formulation of the relationship may be different, but the people and their desires/idiosyncracies/foibles are just the same at base.

On the original question (sort of), the phenomenon of people sending one friend invites on F***book (I went back on to retrieve some pictures from someone, and haven't left again, to my shame, tho I barely use it), without so much as a 'hello', and then not answering when you send a simple 'how have you been' message, not the most irritating thing in the entire world?

What is up with those people? i thought i was mildly desperate sometimes before facebook arrived, but it's made me realise how utterly desperate a significant proportion of people are to show they're liked, and I just don't care to half that extent. Is it social approbation they're seeking, or is it somehow linked in to a weird way of circumventing loneliness (a kind of idea that loneliness is not a lack of actual contact any more, but a lack of potential contact, so that IF you needed to, you'd have 420 people you could speak to, althought inevitably tht's not actually true....work with me here, I'm formulating as I'm writing...) ?

On the other hand, these things make me think I'm saner than most of the world, which is very therapeutic.

matt b said:

I think the more interesting trend is how it is changing things like privacy- it seems that many young people don't feel they exist unless some record of everything they do is left on facebook/twitter etc.

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i would add that it's not just teenagers who are affected this way - many 30-somethings I know (of) put up absurdly insiginificant details of their own life on their facebook updates.

Wonder how this type of film would have looked if made in the Twitter age:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeanne_Dielman,_23_Quai_du_Commerce,_1080_Bruxelles

i think someone should remake it, in fact.