Social Network Sites

Since their introduction, social network sites (SNSs) such as MySpace, Facebook, Cyworld, and Bebo have attracted millions of users, many of whom have integrated these sites into their daily practices. As of this writing, there are hundreds of SNSs, with various technological affordances, supporting a wide range of interests and practices. While their key technological features are fairly consistent, the cultures that emerge around SNSs are varied. Most sites support the maintenance of pre-existing social networks, but others help strangers connect based on shared interests, political views, or activities. Some sites cater to diverse audiences, while others attract people based on common language or shared racial, sexual, religious, or nationality-based identities. Sites also vary in the extent to which they incorporate new information and communication tools, such as mobile connectivity, blogging, and photo/video-sharing. (via)

Big news at the moment still, and subject to a great deal of discussion – both pro and anti. Whats your opinion?

I started writing on this prompt, and found myself rambling on about experiences with each of the social sites. And that didn’t really seem to answer the question.

My opinion is pretty much the same as my opinion of a hammer, or a keyboard. Yeah, ok, it exists. It’s a tool. I think the pink and flowered hammers they came up with so us little wimmin could feel comfortable wielding a tool of nail destruction are silly. I think some of the high-end gaming keyboards are sort of a waste of time for anyone who doesn’t game for a living – sheesh, what’s wrong with just stretching your hands once in a while, huh? But those are just opinions, that’s all.

I’ve got accounts on MySpace (rarely used), Facebook (Research, plus I get a kick out of some of the games), Twitter (work-related stuff), and Flickr (photography – see my Flickr applet to the right). They all have their purposes. They’re all a little silly. They all take some effort to distinguish the signal from the noise.

I can understand why people are reticent to join social sites – they don’t take the place of sending an email to someone, much less sitting down with them for lunch or coffee. They take up time that most people really can’t spare. And they’re designed for people who don’t really have to think about separating personal from professional selves – high school or college kids. While people in their 30s and up are adopting them rapidly, they’re still designed in such a way that on one profile, you can have parents, aunts, cousins, friends, partners, and work colleagues all reading your updates. And the old way of thinking is that you don’t offer your work colleagues access to your weekend party pictures.

The new way of thinking, I think, is that it’s incumbent on those work colleagues to look for and draw out the information about you that they might care about from these sites. And, in a wider picture, the new way of thinking is that it’s not the responsibility of the content creator to provide only that information which will be useful, but the job of the content consumer to be able to filter the data for that which pertains to him or her.

This represents a new way of thinking about information, but I think it’s still too soon to predict its ascendency or failure.

And wow, you can tell I was raised by a former english teacher in this post.