As Eric Dewhirst commented, these new technologies are allowing us to connect in previously inconceivable ways, and we need to focus on the implications of these changes in enhancing our social structures rather than sensationalizing and fearing change itself.

While I agree to an extent, I also see McLuhan’s POV to be valid.

Technology allows us to connect in the manner with which it works. And by using it, we rearrange parts of ourselves to conform to that specific technology. IE, share in 140 characters on twitter, choose our top 8 friends on myspace, choose to reveal ourselves to certain people, as a certain personality through Facebook wall posts.

While we have different values than previous generations, the manner in which we are able to express them, technology, definetely shapes our ideas of how to express them. And, in turn, I think that can drastically reshape us as human beings.

For instance, the amount of time we spend looking into the details of other people’s lives via Facebook. 10 years ago, this would have been perceived as creepy, an activity of stalkers. Today, we can gain the same insight by looking at our Facebook news feed. In this case, the technology has essentially legitimized this deep level of attention on the lives of others. And as generations grow up accustomed to this, the creepiness will seem foreign.

I agree. Especially in relation to the kinds of social issues linked to social media and social networking. As a teacher of young adults and youth, I do observe a lot of attention seeking and disinhibition in their online expression. That said, those behaviours are characteristic of adolescent and young adult social development so they are not particular to social media.

In terms of the larger systemic picture, I think we all ought to start talking about social media in relation to social life, society and socialistion – and all the factors that influence who and what we are at this particular moment. Politically, socially, culturally and otherwise.

Our youth are bombarded by the most aggressive marketing of any generation and I see them maxing out their credit cards to keep up with a contrived and classist “cool” many of them simply cannot afford. Combine this with the crude social darwinism so transparent in corporate cultural production (most reality tv), which tells them life is just one big competition with winners, losers and judges.

Competition, cruelty, consumerism, status, wealth, popularity. These are the themes of corporate culture, not people culture. If the youth are acting like sociopaths we ought to look at where they’re getting it.

While I do believe that the design of social tools can contribute to some of this (i.e., “followers” not “community”), what happens in an online social space is just a mirror of the behaviours and ideas they’ve already internalised from our toxic culture.

“It is hard to see how living this way on a daily basis will not result in brains, or rather minds, different from those of previous generations. We know that the human brain is exquisitely sensitive to the outside world.”

I found this quite amusing, as she appears to be railing against the brain’s wonderful plasticity, and our ability to adapt to changing conditions. This is the beauty of evolution, surely, that we can evolve just as rapidly as our cultural/technological context changes.

In any case, it’s well known that one of the major reasons children are resorting to digital playgrounds is because many parents in Western countries are no longer allowed to socialiase in physical spaces without parental control. No moral panic about that going on yet though, which I think is rather telling.

“On the other hand, the generation that is ubiquitously connected and therefore pervasively proximate…”

I have to object to this characterization. It would be valid only under the assumption that human bandwidth is effectively infinite – which assumption obviously fails. A more correct characterization would indicate that non local connections can now occur in a much wider variety of contexts – but our total socialization opportunities are still limited by time and attention, if no longer strictly by space. They structure somewhat differently, that’s all.

And, I completely fail to see the any necessary conceptual connections between mobile communications on the one hand and looping causal paradigms and ideologies of abundance on the other.

Mark – if it is the same Mark, also makes a later post appearing to criticize various flavors of the “media addiction” paradigm.

I’m curious that TV addiction was left out. This is completely real. I can’t have a TV in my home, because, if I let myself, I can get completely sucked into the programming to the exclusion of doing anything constructive. Sure, not everybody has such a problem, just like not everybody is a compulsive gambler or video gamer. But for those who do – it is very real.

-Steve

People clearly use these lists for wide varieties of different purposes. Sometimes this is made explicit. “This profile is for people I actually know – add me at this other profile if you are a fan, or wish to network professionally, etc.”

At least on MySpace, there are minimal or no tools to allow the user fine controls over kinds of “friends”. And so, especially for people who have any kind of public or semi-public visibility, the friends list can get badly out of control – leading to announced or unannounced mass deletions. Supposedly Facebook has a more nuanced setup, which appears to be evolving almost daily. I don’t participate there so I can’t comment.

The really interesting thing to me is to view the friends list issue through the lens of “continuous versus discrete”, or in cyber-language “analog versus digital”.

Real world associations have the quality that they can be almost infinitely nuanced, and those nuances can change continuously – “on the fly”. I recall when I was young I constantly puzzled over questions like what exactly does it mean to be “going steady”. As an Asperger’s Syndrome victim, I sought formal categories for everything. What I eventually figured out, years later, is that nobody actually uses a set of rules to determine what “going steady” means. Such things are infinitely nuanced.

(And I really think there is some merit to the muted but persistent criticism that digital culture has been designed disproportionately by and for those with various varieties of Autistic Spectrum Disorders (ASD) and this has resulted in an autistic “flavor” to cyber-culture that affects even those who have no biological predisposition toward ASD).

But, that aside, I think we are already taking a conceptual risk by even attempting to formalize categories of relationships in the course of doing social research and social theory. In the words of the immortal Firesign Theater “They’ve got in taken apart, stacked up, and labeled!”. (Quote is from Don’t Crush that Dwarf, Hand Me the Pliers.) Meaning that once you make a living system stand still long enough to categorize, you are now studying something dead.

But at least social theorists and social researchers are (in principle) professionally trained to be aware of such conceptual risks and minimize the inevitable distortions of knowledge that are created. (Folk wisdom calls this “taking it with a grain of salt”). SNS designers, in contrast have no such restraint. They plunge blindly forward into the thicket of trying to digitize the infinitely fluid.

It almost puts me in mind of Ptolemaic epicycles. Ptolemy, for those who might not know the story, was an influential pre-Copernican astronomical theorist who tried to define planetary paths entirely in terms of circular motion. Whenever he and his school came up with an observation that couldn’t be fitted into their scheme, they would invent a set of smaller circles (“epicycles”) to superimpose over their existing model to generate a closer fit to reality. Since it is now known that planetary orbits are elliptical, it’s clear that they could have refined their model indefinitely.

So, with the SNS sites and their quest to create a digital map of the brawling fluxing chaos that is actual human interaction. They can refine their model to the point of total user interface gridlock (And Facebook may be headed there), and they still will never create a system that lets users express the kind of relationships that actually exist – because infinitely nuanced phenomena can’t be expressed algorithmically. Period, end of story.

(If you infer from this that I view the strong AI hypothesis askance, you have much to go on).

Just a thought,
-Steve

From your many thoughtful points, I particularly liked this one: “I would argue that we’re addicted to our friends, not the computer. When the computer lets us get access to our friends, we look like we’re addicted to the computer.” You are entirely correct. From my early days of dial up and life on AOL 2.0, I didn’t spend hours trying to get a connection because I liked the sounds of my modem kicking into gear, but because it was an access point for fantastic conversation with so many different kinds of people (friends and strangers) with different ideas to share.

Thanks for your insight! You’re an incredibly valuable and important voice in this field!

We are only at the beginning of what will be and the naysayers need to look beyond fearing the change and look for what positive outcomes can come of it.

Thanks for voicing your thoughts on this issue danah.

Cheers – Eric

I would support such wild accusations if they led to more research. Heck, as much as it bugged me when Clinton said video games could be hurting our children, her solution was to fund research. I think we can take as a given that Facebook (Twitter, etc.) is changing the way young people think. Which is a great reason to fund–as MacArthur is already doing–research on how digital technologies are changing the way young people think with social technologies.

A colleague about ten years ago was interviewed by a local tv reporter, who asked him “The Internet: good? or bad?” The changes to kids heads are just that: changes. We should do more to understand them, because it may be that we can make their experiences richer, to their individual betterment and the progress of society. But until we know what those changes are–in some detail–it’s impossible to guide them to better outcomes.

Finally, I think there is a lot of fear not just among the general fogey group, but more academic fogies to. Some psychologists seem to happily playing into the the most recent moral panic (Twitter means you have a poor self concept!) because it gives them a chance–ironically–to feel as if they are relevant.