Social Networking

 Just like computers have becomes a inescapable corner stone of modern life, so too has social media dominated the cultural norms of even the most basic communications. Where once hubs like Twitter and Facebook were purely platforms used for informal social entertainment, it is hard now to imagine a legitimate business or public entity without a presence on at least one (but more often, multiple) social networking platforms. These systems are no longer just for teens and young adults, they have become a marker of legitimacy and now everyone has an account from Beyonce to Denny's. An article published in the New York Times discusses how former President Barak Obama used social networking to overwhelmingly successful effect during his 2007 campaign.

But what makes social networking technology beneficial? For one thing, it provides an easy and accessible means to reach and organize a large number of people that need not account for spacial or temporal constraints.  In How Obama Tapped Into Social Networks’ Power, David Carr writes that "by bolting together social networking applications under the banner of a movement, they [the Obama campaign] created an unforeseen force to raise money, organize locally, fight smear campaigns and get out the vote".

Social Network has the ability to build community, by creating a feeling of connection between the users. A sense of -- to borrow the phrased used by Clive Thompson in his NYTimes article -- "digital intimacy". Thompson's article, in fact, delves deep into this sense of connection that social networking connects; the feeling that you are more in tune with the lives of the people you follow digitally, even if you are not physically present with them. It it is to the benefit of social networking that it lends itself to creativity, if not outright demands it in order to be engaging, and is therefore both more digestible and expressive than sometimes even face-to-face encounters can be. Part of the fact is the social networking can give the illusion of being in real time, despite the fact that it usually is not. For example, a person can live tweet about something going on in their lives, however that tweet has still be edited, thought over, and carefully constructed in a way that is mostly divorced from the instant reaction of in-person exchanges. Through social networking, therefore, we are able to tailor the way we communicate who we are and what we think to our community.

None of this, however, is without drawbacks. There are questions of privacy and issues of permanency. Social medial is intimate, often times even moreso than we initially or voluntarily mean it to be. And it's medium (digital & web) means that what occurs on a social network takes on a life that becomes divorced from our control the instant we hit send. Deleting a tweet or a status update does not guarantee is disappearance from the platform. Particularly not in a world where the most tech savvy users are lasciviously gleeful about the "gotcha" screenshot. There is also the risk, as explored in Hilary Stout's article, Antisocial Networking?, of social media completely replacing physical interaction, particularly among the younger generation of users who have not grown up external to social networking's cultural dominance.


Citations
"How Obama Tapped Into Social Networks’ Power," by David Carr, The New York Times. November 10, 2008; at http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/10/business/media/10carr.html
"Brave New World of Digital Intimacy " by Clive Thompson, NY Times, Sept 7, 2008 http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/07/magazine/07awareness-t.html
Antisocial Networking? by Hilary Stout, New York Times, May 2, 2010, p. ST1. Available at http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/02/fashion/02BEST.html