Colliding Networks

Distributed Conversations  Distributed Communities  Colliding Networks Rettberg(2008). What these terms made me think when I started reading this article was yikes! This is exactly why I have always been slightly apprehensive about social networking. It requires a level of understanding and experience on the Web that a lot of people (I include myself in this group) using this facility do not have, yet. The access to knowledge and information and communication is fantastic, I may never have to visit a library again. I can find a long lost friend online in 10 minutes with minimum expense and reconnect with her. But….I can also just by linking to my sister in laws Facebook site then link to her teenage cousins’ Facebook site and read that she has posted a very detailed recount of her weekend activities. Seems really cool now but, I can suggest that a couple of years from now she will have wished she never mentioned it (and we all know now that “persistence” (boyd 2001) indicates that digital documents tend to stay around for a long time). The thing that leaves a bad taste in my mouth about this is the innocence of her actions, thinking that she is writing maybe for a few of her close friends, not a link to a link to a link to nobody that needs to know these kind of things about you. Might I suggest that in the real world this person (like the rest of us) would have sat in a coffee shop with a couple of close friends and had a quick look around the shop before lowering her voice to a hushed juicy whisper and then shared, but for some reason typing and publishing on the Web negates some peoples usual sense of social constraints. The Internet and Web are like an out of this world new ride at an amusement park with no ride attendant to give you the basic instructions to fasten your seat belts and keep your hands in the carriage. That part is up to you and your personality. Are you the type that reads instructions before operating machinery, click here or do you just like to wing it? If you are a wing dinger then be prepared, its hard to get to a final destination safely if you haven’t checked out the directions, weather forecast or don’t read the road signs. Like any new technology or tool I guess the onus is really on the individual to educate themselves about the safest and most efficient use. The problem with the Web is it is designed specifically to appeal to the masses and as such needed to be very user friendly, that is, so user friendly that anyone and everyone can use it, the friendly, the nasty , the innocent ,the ignorant, the cautious the uninhibited. They’re all out there in cyberspace.

I found this article regarding the pros and cons of social networking summed up a lot of the really great and really crappy things about social networking.