[iDC] another reference

Mon Dec 3 03:31:29 UTC 2007

Very interesting points.  Perhaps one "solution" will be for individuals to
join different networks to "showcase" different aspects of the self....or to
limit full access to profiles to those who can "really understand them."
For example, Robert Frank writes in the Wall Street Journal about a "MySpace
for Millionaires:"

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB119637905445308659.html

One can imagine the well-heeled only disclosing their participation in the
"best $100+ bottle of wine" app with those similarly situated.  Some aspects
of this segregation of online life are simultaneously amusing and alarming:

"It's very difficult to build a network based solely on wealth," says
Stephen Martiros, a managing director of CCC Alliance, a coalition of rich
families based in Boston. "You might start with a few wealthy people, but as
you grow it eventually reverts to the mean. And once that happens, the
[truly] wealthy leave."

A Geneva member [of aSmallWorld, another social network for the wealthy]
wrote: "One of my friends, a funny old-timer here, told me that the site has
lowered so much its level, that she has invited her maids."

The rise of such "gated communities" in cyberspace leads me to cast a
slightly skeptical eye on an insistence on autonomy in presenting the self.
Perhaps just as no person is a hero to his or her valet, the leveling
pressure to present one coherent self in cyberspace helps consolidate the
multiple selves we develop to deal with increasing levels of inequality and
social fragmentation.  I don't like the idea of a "cyberspace class
transvestite" jetsetting with pals from "aSmallWorld" while "keeping it
real" on MySpace.  As Thomas Frank suggests in Commodify Your Dissent, that
type of "chameleoning" works to disguise and perhaps even reinforce class
divisions, not to ameliorate them.

On the other hand, perhaps the pressure to consolidate a self on some
dominant social networking platform will intensify the artificiality of
presented personalities.  As Alessandra Stanley noted today in a sharp
column in the N.Y. Times on the "Classless Utopia of Reality TV," many
"principals [of reality TV], whose romances and kitchen quarrels furnish
plotlines, are not really actors, but neither are they ordinary people
exactly; they are a new hybrid of semiprofessional personalities who play
themselves on camera." I'm not saying that's terribly bad--it just exposes
the limits of online personality-crafting.

--Frank Pasquale
blogs @
concurringopinions.com
madisonian.net

On 12/2/07, David and Ellen Levy <levy at nyc.rr.com> wrote:
>
> You might take a look at today' s Week In Review about Facebook (by Alex
> Wright).  I have pasted it in after my name. Perhaps nothing profound here
> but nonetheless pertinent.
>
>
> All best,
>
> Ellen
>
> December 2, 2007
>
>
> Friending, Ancient or Otherwise
>
> By ALEX WRIGHT
>
> THE growing popularity of social networking sites like Facebook
> <
> http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/business/companies/facebook_inc/index.html?inline=nyt-org
> >,
> MySpace
> <
> http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/business/companies/myspace_com/index.html?inline=nyt-org
> >
> and Second Life has thrust many of us into a new world where we make
> "friends" with people we barely know, scrawl messages on each other's
> walls and project our identities using totem-like visual symbols.
>
> We're making up the rules as we go. But is this world as new as it seems?
>
> Academic researchers are starting to examine that question by taking an
> unusual tack: exploring the parallels between online social networks and
> tribal societies. In the collective patter of profile-surfing, messaging
> and "friending," they see the resurgence of ancient patterns of oral
> communication.
>
> "Orality is the base of all human experience," says Lance Strate, a
> communications professor at Fordham University
> <
> http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/f/fordham_university/index.html?inline=nyt-org
> >
> and devoted MySpace user. He says he is convinced that the popularity of
> social networks stems from their appeal to deep-seated, prehistoric
> patterns of human communication. "We evolved with speech," he says. "We
> didn't evolve with writing."
>
> The growth of social networks — and the Internet as a whole — stems
> largely from an outpouring of expression that often feels more like
> "talking" than writing: blog posts, comments, homemade videos and,
> lately, an outpouring of epigrammatic one-liners broadcast using
> services like Twitter and Facebook status updates (usually proving
> Gertrude Stein
> <
> http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/s/gertrude_stein/index.html?inline=nyt-per
> >'s
> maxim that "literature is not remarks").
>
> "If you examine the Web through the lens of orality, you can't help but
> see it everywhere," says Irwin Chen, a design instructor at Parsons who
> is developing a new course to explore the emergence of oral culture
> online. "Orality is participatory, interactive, communal and focused on
> the present. The Web is all of these things."
>
> An early student of electronic orality was the Rev. Walter J. Ong, a
> professor at St. Louis University and student of Marshall McLuhan who
> coined the term "secondary orality" in 1982 to describe the tendency of
> electronic media to echo the cadences of earlier oral cultures. The work
> of Father Ong, who died in 2003, seems especially prescient in light of
> the social-networking phenomenon. "Oral communication," as he put it,
> "unites people in groups."
>
> In other words, oral culture means more than just talking. There are
> subtler —and perhaps more important — social dynamics at work.
>
> Michael Wesch, who teaches cultural anthropology at Kansas State
> University
> <
> http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/k/kansas_state_university/index.html?inline=nyt-org
> >,
> spent two years living with a tribe in Papua New Guinea, studying how
> people forge social relationships in a purely oral culture. Now he
> applies the same ethnographic research methods to the rites and rituals
> of Facebook users.
>
> "In tribal cultures, your identity is completely wrapped up in the
> question of how people know you," he says. "When you look at Facebook,
> you can see the same pattern at work: people projecting their identities
> by demonstrating their relationships to each other. You define yourself
> in terms of who your friends are."
>
> In tribal societies, people routinely give each other jewelry, weapons
> and ritual objects to cement their social ties. On Facebook, people
> accomplish the same thing by trading symbolic sock monkeys, disco balls
> and hula girls.
>
> "It's reminiscent of how people exchange gifts in tribal cultures," says
> Dr. Strate, whose MySpace page lists his 1,335 "friends" along with his
> academic credentials and his predilection for "Battlestar Galactica."
>
> As intriguing as these parallels may be, they only stretch so far. There
> are big differences between real oral cultures and the virtual kind. In
> tribal societies, forging social bonds is a matter of survival; on the
> Internet, far less so. There is presumably no tribal antecedent for
> popular Facebook rituals like "poking," virtual sheep-tossing or
> drunk-dialing your friends.
>
> Then there's the question of who really counts as a "friend." In tribal
> societies, people develop bonds through direct, ongoing face-to-face
> contact. The Web eliminates that need for physical proximity, enabling
> people to declare friendships on the basis of otherwise flimsy
> connections.
>
> "With social networks, there's a fascination with intimacy because it
> simulates face-to-face communication," Dr. Wesch says. "But there's also
> this fundamental distance. That distance makes it safe for people to
> connect through weak ties where they can have the appearance of a
> connection because it's safe."
>
> And while tribal cultures typically engage in highly formalized rituals,
> social networks seem to encourage a level of casualness and familiarity
> that would be unthinkable in traditional oral cultures. "Secondary
> orality has a leveling effect," Dr. Strate says. "In a primary oral
> culture, you would probably refer to me as 'Dr. Strate,' but on MySpace,
> everyone calls me 'Lance.' "
>
> As more of us shepherd our social relationships online, will this
> leveling effect begin to shape the way we relate to each other in the
> offline world as well? Dr. Wesch, for one, says he worries that the rise
> of secondary orality may have a paradoxical consequence: "It may be
> gobbling up what's left of our real oral culture."
>
> The more time we spend "talking" online, the less time we spend, well,
> talking. And as we stretch the definition of a friend to encompass
> people we may never actually meet, will the strength of our real-world
> friendships grow diluted as we immerse ourselves in a lattice of
> hyperlinked "friends"?
>
> Still, the sheer popularity of social networking seems to suggest that
> for many, these environments strike a deep, perhaps even primal chord.
> "They fulfill our need to be recognized as human beings, and as members
> of a community," Dr. Strate says. "We all want to be told: You exist."
>
>
> >
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