I wanted to iterate on a point I brought up in class that I didn’t really get to explain the other day because I had trouble articulating my thoughts on the spot. I remember coming across the “Great Wall of Facebook” article last semester, and being taken up by the story of the intense competition between Facebook and Google trying to compete for the playing field that is the internet. It didn’t really make sense to me, at the time, why Facebook was becoming a basis template for new social networking sites; it seemed, when designers tried to come up with concepts for how to re-approach profiles and social networks and how we used them, they always would work off of what they already knew, whether they intentionally meant to or not. Twitter’s success mostly lends itself to allowing users to post short diatribes rather than elaborate paragraphs defending their arguments and so on, but it’s character limits can be suffocating for the embattled writer (I’d like to see anyone try to write this much on a twitter subject line…) . So anyway, when I said I felt that social networks were more or less a trend, I was going on what I already knew about the internet; that email accounts are slowly no longer being disbursed by schools, and if this was happening to email, who’s to say the same wouldn’t happen with a social networking site? We only communicate through them because we haven’t gotten accustomed to any other way of communication, we rely on the people we know in our lives simply being available whenever it conveniences us. The convenience of having our friends and cake too made me cynical of what can be pushed in terms of innovation of social networks that hasn’t already been done or is in the process of being done.
As for Bill Joy’s “Why the Future Doesn’t Need Us”, there seems to be a constant theme of humanity merging with technology to the point where humans, as a single organism, cease to exist. But depending on how you approach this dilemma, if you can even call it a dilemma, is this really such a bad thing after all? I argued last year about books like Fahrenheit 451 in my Collab classes, how there seems to still be a prevalently accepted paranoia about technology and the dark and new places it can take us. Indeed, I’ve heard many interesting words used to describe people who have a co-dependence on technology to be able to live, to the point of them being dismissed as mere cyborgs. If technology can give people the power of being able to continue living, to know a diagnosis without having to see a doctor, in an area of the world where they might not be getting immediate coverage, is that a bad thing? Furthermore, when does someone stop being human? When they’re no longer able bodied?
All three articles got me thinking about social networks and how marketing plays a huge role in our daily usage of them, not that that’s necessarily a bad thing, but would we use Twitter and Facebook if it wasn’t for the fact that it’s the most easily accepted way for people to communicate? If not that, how about the advertising? Facebook continues to receive intense scrutiny for sharing user information with advertisers, but it’s not like people are as transparent about what brands they use, or what they like. Facebook pages for products such as Tide, Starbucks, KFC and so on receive thousands of likes each day, and all of these pages get added to profiles for over a million users. Companies constantly search Twitter for negative/positive comments, and to gauge user feedback on their products. In a way, social networks have made it easier for us to always be watched. Depending on how you feel about that, some may not see that as a negative, but a minor inconvenience for the luxury of using something they otherwise can’t live without for free.
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