Lecture 2- Social networking and identity : Part 1 and 2

Part: 1

A researcher on the Gothic subculture, Paul Hodgkinson, came in today to give a lecture on the role of social networking in the social identity. He talked about social networks where people are able to connect themselves with friends from different walks of lives and different places in the world. The use of Facebook has become a huge tool in people being able to take their private lives onto the web and share the everyday lives with other people.

I found this topic very interesting in that Paul touched on some topics and view points that I hadn’t thought about. The idea that online social networks are likened to the bedroom and the way in which we perceive our privacy and private lives. He focused on the generations of girls using their bedroom as a place where they find out who they are, develop their identities by experimenting with clothes, shoes, make-up and all the things that girls do. Before the use of Facebook and Myspace, the private space of a girl was in her bedroom where she could decide on who comes in or not, girls were not permitted to go out as much, if any, as boys were and so their room became their social playground. Now with technology, social networks have become the bedroom in which people are choosing who they want into their friend networks (bedroom) and choosing how they define their identity through posting their pictures on their profiles as they would put photographs on their walls in their bedrooms. I found this likeness very interesting because it’s true. With technology growing, it’s hard to define what you see as private. Is your profile really private, the conversations you have with your friends in your profile, as you would have the conversation behind closed doors. There is a moral question here of where do we each individually decide what we think or perceive as private and make the relevant decision to allow such a great amount of people and the social network itself into your bedroom and be apart of your life in much more a way than you would if the social site didn’t exist.

This lecture was really interesting and gave me another view point to consider in respect to social networks and their current roles in our lives.

Part 2:

As technology grows and changes, so does societies need to keep up. The result of this is us changing the way we do things like communicate with friends, colleagues and keep ourselves informed with what is going on in the world.

I personally have fallen victim to the use of Facebook, MySpace and Bebo. Even though I have set up accounts with all three, I find that I really don’t utilise them as much as others do. Although I do communicate with people I know in these networks I have not interacted with people I have never met before. That, I suppose, is a personal choice as I have never been interested to do so. It is too easy to be apart of an impersonal world making technology and your computer be your voice, where you can say anything to anyone and really not be accountable for it because for one, the person has never met you and who are you really at the end of that interaction. It is a different story when you know the person that you are communicating with because they know weather what you are saying about yourself and your thoughts is true or not, to a certain extent because of the ‘I know you’ factor. Making friends with a stranger, on the other hand, is a different story in that the difference in the way you would communicate with them would be different to the way you would communicate with your friends. You have a license to be who you want to be and say what you want to say with a stranger. Especially with the private inbox mail, it has no limitations.

After having said that, Communication’s ever increasing technologies have aided me a hugely in being able to communicate with my family and friends back home. Things like being able to get a picture delivered to my mobile from a moment that I am missing out on at home, and being able to appreciate that moment as if I were there. The Mobile phone technologies have made it simple to be in contact as the most intimate moments even though thousands of kilometres separate the two individuals. That is a communication technology that I would not be able to live without. I appreciate that growth in new communication technologies much more than I do for the other forms like Facebook and MySpace. It just makes life more tactile and real. Who knows what’s real on the net these days.

Realistic communications also come into play with the security of communication technologies, where you could be laying out your utter most private details (hopefully not credit card details) to that close friend whom you know would never tell your secrets, but who else is really listening. You just don’t know where your information is being replayed to on what server in which country. That si probably a fear that we all have to live with these days because it is in everything we do. Every form of communication we make is in jeopardy of not being private. It makes it all to complicated to even be apart of because of the full time awareness you have to be paying to what is going on. A mobile is not even safe with a simple mistake as leaving your Bluetooth on. I think people’s awareness of their privacy issues will soon become a conditioned motion to secure what ever communication technology it is you are using at that time. At the moment I find myself having to remind myself to check that what I think is private is really private and not open to a whole network of cyber hungry people. A technology grows, so will our conditioning grow and change as does our conditioning in society grow and change as the world changes.