The Impact of Social Networking on Society

Anonymous Pingu writes "The latest edition of New Scientist has a series of features on social networking. These include an analysis of the impact on our social attitudes by Sherry Turkle, a feature on the possible privacy implications of using sites like MySpace and Friendster, and a short science fiction piece by Bruce Sterling. It's certainly interesting that so many people post very revealing stuff about themselves on these sites."

Comments

The Social Stigma

[eldavojohn]

Interesting articles but I have a very basic question: Where do we get the social stigma associated with "meeting someone online"?

We're humans. We're a gregarious species. Whenever something arises that allows us to interact with people, it's usually a good thing. But tell your parents that you met someone online and you're dating them -- hell tell anyone -- that and more often than not, they'll disapprove.

Why? What causes this? Even the summary said it's amazing how much personal stuff people are willing to put online, isn't this a good thing if you're trying to get to know someone?

I've heard people say that only weird people are online and that you're taking serious risks ... but I've also seen percentages that show you're just as likely to meet a deviant at a bar as on MySpace or Friendster.

The only possible explanation I can find for this is the "it's different so it's wrong" approach a lot of people take to new things. I don't know if it's an ultra conservative viewpoint or just fear of the unknown that drives this social stigma against meeting people online.

Re:The Social Stigma

[Billosaur]

Interesting articles but I have a very basic question: Where do we get the social stigma associated with "meeting someone online"?

The Media. Let's face it: for as many positive stories you will find about the power of the Internet, you will find 5 times as many stories about things wrong with the Internet (phishing, privacy issues, child molesters, social repression, odd personal behavior, pornography, data loss, etc.). So "meeting someone online" carries the connotation that anyone you meet through some online medium must be tainted, somehow crazed or weird or just odd. When in fact, the subset of humanity we put in those categories is probably no greater on the Internet than it is in the global population.

Social networking is just an enhancement of your neighborhood, with global reach. And just like their may be "weirdoes" on your block you know nothing of, the same can be said of the Internet.

Re:The Social Stigma

[eln]

I think it has to do with the role that computers have traditionally played in our lives. Traditionally, the "normal" people spend their leisure time going out and hanging out with their friends, while the pimply faced nerds sit at home all day and night on their computers chatting online.

As the Internet has become more mainstream, the stigma of meeting people online has faded significantly. These days, it's more of a curiosity than something that's looked down on. Although, meeting people on dating sites still has the same stigma (for now) as meeting people through the newspaper personal ads. But I think that's because many people consider those types of sites (or ads) as a last-ditch act of desperation for people who haven't been able to get a date any other way.

Re:The Social Stigma

[milgr]

The stigma of meeting people online comes from the few nut cases and preditors out there. On the Net, it is difficult to tell anything about the entities with whom you communicate. Is the entity who he says s/he is, is it really a bot, a 13-year old boy pretending to be a 25 year old girl, a sexual preditor pretending to be a 16 year old boy?

That being said, I do know people who have developed long term real-life relationships with people they met on the Net. My sister met the man whom whe married on Bitnet. When they met, she made sure it was in a public location.

Re:The Social Stigma

[jizziknight]

True, but that sort of thing is much easier to do and much easier to get away with online, especially when you can pretend to be someone completely different. In person, it's much more difficult, since your bodly language will often give away your false "face". It's not that you can do these sorts of things online, it's how easy it is to do them when compared to meeting someone in person.

Text of Short Story

[necro81]

For those of you who don't want to register (even for free) to newscientist.com.

I Saw The Best Minds of My Generation Destroyed by Google
by Bruce Sterling

Los Angeles, 2026

Ted got busted because we do graffiti. Losing Ted was a big setback, as Ted was the only guy in our gang who knew how to steal aerosol spray cans. As potent instruments of teenage social networking, aerosol spray cans have "high abuse potential". So spray cans are among the many things us teenagers can't buy, like handguns, birth control, alcohol, cigarettes and music with curse words.

I tried hard to buy us another spray can. I'm a street poet, so really, I tried. I walked up to the mall-store register, disguised in my Dad's business jacket, with cash in hand. They're cheap, aerosol spray cans. Beautiful colours of paint, just screaming to get sprayed someplace public where everybody has to see what's on our minds. The store wouldn't sell me the can. The e-commerce system simply would not allow that transaction. The screen just went gray and stayed gray.

That creepy "differential permissioning" sure saves a lot of trouble for grown-ups. Increasing chunks of the world are just... magically off limits. It's a weird new regime where every mall and every school and every bus and train and jet is tagged and tracked and ambient and pervasive and ubiquitous and geolocative... Jesus, I love those words... Where was I?

Right. We teenagers have to live in "controlled spaces". Radio-frequency ID tags, real-time locative systems, global positioning systems, smart doorways, security videocams. They "protect" us kids, from imaginary satanic drug dealer terrorist mafia predators. We're "secured". We're juvenile delinquents with always-on cellphone nannies in our pockets. There's no way to turn them off. The internet was designed without an off-switch.

So my pal Ted, who stupidly loved to tag his own name on the walls, got sent to reform school, where the security is insanely great. Me, I had a much higher grade-point average than Ted, but with no handy Ted to steal spray cans, the words of the prophet have vanished from the subway walls. So much for my campaign to cover the town with graffiti street-stencils of my favourite teen pop stars: George Orwell and Aldous Huxley.

And Shakespeare. I used to hate Shakespeare, because the teachers would park us in front of the webcam terminals, turn on the Shakespeare lessons and leave the building. But then, somehow, they showed us Macbeth, a play which actually MEANS something to us. Grown-ups don't understand that (or they wouldn't be teaching it) but Macbeth is the true authentic story of my generation. This is Macbeth's world, and us teenagers just live in it. Dig this: those "Three Weird Sisters", who mysteriously know everything? They can foretell anything, instantly, like Google? Plus, the witches make it all sound really great - only, in real life, it totally sucks? Well, those "Three Weird Sisters" are the "Internet of Things", they're "Ubiquitous Computation", they're "Ambient Findability". The truth is written all over the page (or the screen - my school can't afford to give us any "pages"). Just read that awesome part where they're boiling pseudocode in their witch-cauldron! They talk like web designers! "The words of the prophet have vanished from the subway walls"

Macbeth stumbles around seeing ghosts and virtual-reality daggers. That sure makes sense. Every day of my life, I see people with cellphones yelling eerie gibberish in public. The world of Macbeth is totally haunted and paranoid! You can't get one minute's privacy, even inside your own bed!

So, I did my class report about Macbeth, and every kid in my English class instantly agreed with me. I'm not the most popular guy in school, but they started CHEERING me. And Debbie, this wacky Goth chick in my class who identifies with Lady Macbeth... After my class report, Debbie sleep-walked out of the classroom and pretended to hang herself! Of cour

Re:Text of Short Story

[Jerf]

soulless internet replacing good ol' natural hobbies.

In your zeal to dismiss the story, you missed the point. It's not about the Internet "replacing" natural hobbies, it's about the ubiquitous and automated surveillance enabled by pervasive networking (not really what you're thinking of as "the Internet") destroying natural hobbies.

My personal phrase for it is inhuman justice. I wrote that at least four years ago and it hasn't gotten any less true. Bruce here applies it particularly to teenagers, but you could take Bruce's implicit universe and write an equally angsty story about any number of adults.

Anachronism, FUD

[sielwolf]

FTA:
What kind of responsibility are they ducking?

Summer 2006 finds the world enmeshed in multiple wars and genocidal campaigns. It finds the world incapable of calling a halt to environmental destruction. Yet, with all of this, people seem above all to be fascinated by novel technologies. On college campuses there is less interest in asking questions about the state of the world than in refining one's presence on Facebook or MySpace. Technology pundits may talk in glowing terms about new forms of social life, but the jury is out on whether virtual self-expression will translate into collective action.

Ok, that's bullshit. First off it is not true: look at the rise of Netroots (in politics, in activism, in terrorism) and all of that sort of action that disproves her very own observation. People are using online communities to get involved (for good or ill). Of course if you narrow your focus down like she does to just Facebook and Myspace (two sites designed for fulltime student aged demographics) *shock* people are just using them for social networking.

Second, her statement has the implication that in the great golden times before Teh Intarnetz that people where autonomous self-actualized ubermensch that got involved all the time with important social issues and where immune to peer pressure. That's pure BS. For all the supposed young folk getting active in the 60's, a good part of them took getting active to mean as a way to pick up chicks. Joni Mitchell talked about how all the talk of free love was just a scam. That's no different than it is now. Your average college kid is thinking of two things on a Thursday night: how to get drunk and how to get laid. That hasn't changed in forty years. And the author ignores the fact that the US population was mostly positive about Vietnam and it took the draft for most Americans to finally have a stake and for the tide to turn against that war. It wasn't due to folks now caving to instant peer pressure. The term Silent Majority was coined in that very era.

This article has all the makings of Media Studies masturbation: it has no social, historical, psychological or political context. It just has posed hypothetical examples and a lot of incestuous jargon. It does not approach it's own biases with skepticism or try to study the issue from an antithetical perspective (e.g. "Maybe social networking has no effect"). Colbert would call this East Coast Ivy League crap. And this is exactly the sort of thing you could break out in a party when trying to siddle up to some young filly. "Girl, we're so alone in this darkness... here, put your head in my lap."