Me media
There was a very interesting article in last week's New Yorker, titled Me Media. It's taken me a while to write about it but then again, that seems to be a recurring theme in the last several posts, so bare with me. I will catch up eventually.
Anyway, the article was about social networking sites such as Facebook, Friendster and MySpace. The piece was mostly about Facebook and how it is different from those other ones. Blah blah blah blah. Social networking sites have never been that interesting to me so that's not what impressed me about the article. I was, however, rather intrigued by something that Facebook's 21-year-old founder and CEO, Mark Zuckerberg said, "People on the internet are not doing anything they are not doing offline. They are just doing it more efficiently." He was talking mostly about social network sites and, yes, I am paraphrasing. Now, clearly, I have no reasons to think that I have a better grasp of online communication patterns than little big CEO Mr. Zuckerberg (whose business card, by the way, reads "I'm CEO...Bitch"). However, I do disagree with his understanding of how people's social behavior is being affected by the internet.
True, information technologies have made it easier for people to communicate. The internet does lower the cost of obtaining and disseminating information. It saves both time and effort. However, saying that the internet is no different from other media of communication sounds way too simple to me. By the same logic, you could say that driving is more efficient than walking because it saves you time and effort. But does that make any sense? There are qualitative differences between socializing online and offline. These differences have consequences that go way beyond "doing things more efficiently." Does the ease of access to social networking sites make people more likely to talk more to people they already know? Does it make them talk to a larger number of people? How are these interactions different from what they could have been offline? If people are interacting online with people they already know offline, is the online-offline distinction as meaningful as it used to be? Come to think of it, was it EVER meaningful? It seems to me that Mr. Zuckerberg is giving himself a little less credit than he deserves.
I am sorry I am kind of just ranting about this, it's obvious that I have no actual point to make. I guess I am just getting a bit tired of hearing people compare social network sites and such to hanging out and checking people out in the mall. I am particularly annoyed when a smart magazine such as the New Yorker takes such explanations seriously.
What do you guys think? What do YOU think of your online existence? Is it an extension of your life offline or is it an entirely separate thing? Is doing stuff on internet another way of doing the same ole thing, but more efficiently?
***
I wasn't able to find a permanent link to the article. Please let me know if you do so that I could add it to the text above. Thanks, peeps!
Anyway, the article was about social networking sites such as Facebook, Friendster and MySpace. The piece was mostly about Facebook and how it is different from those other ones. Blah blah blah blah. Social networking sites have never been that interesting to me so that's not what impressed me about the article. I was, however, rather intrigued by something that Facebook's 21-year-old founder and CEO, Mark Zuckerberg said, "People on the internet are not doing anything they are not doing offline. They are just doing it more efficiently." He was talking mostly about social network sites and, yes, I am paraphrasing. Now, clearly, I have no reasons to think that I have a better grasp of online communication patterns than little big CEO Mr. Zuckerberg (whose business card, by the way, reads "I'm CEO...Bitch"). However, I do disagree with his understanding of how people's social behavior is being affected by the internet.
True, information technologies have made it easier for people to communicate. The internet does lower the cost of obtaining and disseminating information. It saves both time and effort. However, saying that the internet is no different from other media of communication sounds way too simple to me. By the same logic, you could say that driving is more efficient than walking because it saves you time and effort. But does that make any sense? There are qualitative differences between socializing online and offline. These differences have consequences that go way beyond "doing things more efficiently." Does the ease of access to social networking sites make people more likely to talk more to people they already know? Does it make them talk to a larger number of people? How are these interactions different from what they could have been offline? If people are interacting online with people they already know offline, is the online-offline distinction as meaningful as it used to be? Come to think of it, was it EVER meaningful? It seems to me that Mr. Zuckerberg is giving himself a little less credit than he deserves.
I am sorry I am kind of just ranting about this, it's obvious that I have no actual point to make. I guess I am just getting a bit tired of hearing people compare social network sites and such to hanging out and checking people out in the mall. I am particularly annoyed when a smart magazine such as the New Yorker takes such explanations seriously.
What do you guys think? What do YOU think of your online existence? Is it an extension of your life offline or is it an entirely separate thing? Is doing stuff on internet another way of doing the same ole thing, but more efficiently?
***
I wasn't able to find a permanent link to the article. Please let me know if you do so that I could add it to the text above. Thanks, peeps!
7 Comments:
The online-offline connection is more interesting to me when the realm of online moves offline. I met my boyfriend over the internet. (Hehe, my great grandparents mets "online" so to speak.) That's what really interests me about the whole medium... That people with something in common will communicate in the real world, given that they most likely wouldn't have met in real life.
You know, I think it's pretty amazing how fast people have welcomed some types of communications technologies into their lives. I remember a time when my parents used to be super-paranoid about my talking to complete strangers online.
Seriously though, if you are right that the internet allows people who would most probably never meet in real life (and I am totally with you on this one), then I guess we should say that being online is a lot more than doing the same things you do in your "real life" online. It's not the same if you are doing things you wouldn't otherwise do. Meeting a certain kind of person is a good example of that. That's precisely what my critique of the article was.
oh, i forgot to ask, how did your great grandparents meet? and how did you and your boyfriend meet? :)
Bryan had webspace through his grad school, and I stumbled across it one day, thought it was funny, e-mailed him a comment, we started talking over AIM pretty frequently. Three months or so later, we met in real life, and that was a little more than two years ago. He was working on his MA about two hours away from where I lived, and then right around the time I came to Penn State, he took a job a couple of hours from here. So it's still long-distance and I don't get to see him as often as I'd like, but it's not as bad as others have it.
Hehe, the story about my great grandparents is awesome and it came out when my grandma was HORRIFIED that my mom "let" me go see this boy. My grumpa piped up that his parents sort of met through an online medium. My great-grandmother was a telegraph operator in Iowa, and my great-grandfather was a telegraph operator in Buffalo around the turn of the twentieth century. They met through work and began to interact that way, and eventually she moved east to marry him. :) Awwwwww, so cute.
oh my god! this is the sweetest, awesomest story ever! aaaw's all around!!!! you know what they say, like father like son or...something like that.
i would just like to add that in real life i tent to not talk to people whom i don't know (yes, this kinda limits the number of people i know in general), whereas on the internet, i talk to all sorts of people...
i think i'm the same way. also, it's easier to multi-task online than it is otherwise. sometimes i'm online talking to five people about five different things, checking out all kinds of websites. i couldn't possibly do that offline. or anything close to it, for that matter.
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