Trends in Social Networking
In today’s trendwatching podcast, Cathi Bond talks about the possible future for Diaspora, the social networking service due out this summer. It’s the brainchild of a group of NYC students, and aims to be an answer to Facebook, by allowing users to hold onto their data. What do you think? Would you use it? Is the technical benchmark too high for most users? (via Gizmag)
Nora Young mentions this thought-provoking post at Tomorrow Museum. How about you? Are you an online extrovert/real world introvert? Or vice versa?
Tags: Diaspora, extroverts, introverts, social networking
June 5th, 2010 at 6:37 am
I also follow Cathi’s “grandparent” rule. I believe that we all live in a kind of digital Sweden, in which anyone can look up anyone else’s personal information by going to the digital public library and asking to see the tax records. But I participate in twitter, in facebook, and in an all-public weblog on livejournal, as well as more other sites than one could shake many dowsing rods at. I believe that it’s silly to talk about the impending death of privacy, because the corpse is exquisitely past death and well into decay (or remix, if one prefers). If one is liberated from the need for privacy, then one can create the best kind of privacy-the privacy of not writing one’s every stray thought and intimacy into a proprietary cloud for friends and strangers to read.
These discussions of “on line introvert” make me hum “Eleanor Rigby” in my mind. The internet gives rise to wonderful connections. I’ve met people and kindred spirits and charlatans and saints via the internet.
I’ve discovered that insanity comes in more flavours than frozen yogurt.
Yet I would not want to return to a time when only geographic good fortune enabled one to meet people who shared one’s tastes and dreams.
As for twitter, I hope that I never figure it out well enough to call myself an expert at it, because expertise in twitter apparently causes flu-like symptoms in which one sneezes out catch phrases from “Think and Grow Rich” and coughs up the charming but cloying verse of Alexander Pope (usually uncredited).
I love, though, that I live in a world in which I need to know the Dutch phrase for “normal voice’ and I can ask my twitter friend Karin Ramaker, who lives in the Hague and whom I’ve never met in person, if “normaal stem” is idiomatic for “normal voice” and get promptly the correction that it should be normale (for normal) rather than normaal (i.e., straight, heterosexual). This form of connection is worthwhile, thanks to the kindness of a Dutchwoman I’ve never met. I was able to name my song
idiomatically and send it via sendthisfile to Amsterdam to another friend.
In 1975, I would have imagined that if we all had skype, with free phone service throughout the world, we would all speak by phone to folks all over the world. Yet my experience and that of others I know is that skype is used more like a phone and less like an easy network device. Perhaps a skype phone is surprisingly analog and “real’ in ways IMs cannot be.
June 9th, 2010 at 7:10 pm
I’m generally of the ‘grandparents’ school myself. I’ve probably gone on about this in the past on thesniffer, but the one thing that bothers me about it, is the sort of ‘brand you’ aspect of it. While I try to maintain a presence that’s both honest, but also somewhat professional (it is kind of an extension of my job), I feel like we are at risk of packaging and marketing ourselves to death. Not that I think that’s what Cathi’s doing. As far as I can tell, she’s who she really is on FB, but just the ’she’ who might be attending a family gathering.
June 12th, 2010 at 8:10 pm
It’s funny you know. As I spend more and more time on FB, thanks to the stupid high speed now being at the farm, I find myself increasingly concerned about privacy. For instance, the other day I shot a bunch of videos of the farm. Short ones of the house and the field and three gardens. I nearly posted them on FB but then I thought, “Do I really want everyone knowing where I live?”
I started wondering about being robbed or stalked and had all sorts of paranoid thoughts. Nora I know that you’ll say “the phone book” but the phone book doesn’t offer pics of the land and the interior of your house and all that stuff. That’s what’s super creepy about Google earth maps I think. What a great way to stalk people you knew in the past or scope out potential places to rob. EEK!!!!!
And let’s be honest…Who doesn’t stalk through their past looking for photos of friends etc you haven’t seen in kadzillion years?