Chapter 12: Exploring Technology and Communication Units 1 & 2
Area of Study 2 Technology & Communication
Living online: This is your space
IF THE web was once an enormous library, it is now a vast conversation. Transmitting
information from one person to another has never been easier. Everyone can participate. Young
people now communicate more through social networking websites than through email. Instead of
keeping diaries, they keep blogs; instead of photo albums, they have Flickr.
While older adults go online to find information, the younger crowd go online to live. The
boundaries between private and public and between offline and online are blurring, and there is a
widening generation gap between adolescents growing up with social technology and adults who
find it foreign and unsettling. Welcome to the MySpace generation.
It all happened remarkably quickly. The first social networking websites were born just three
years ago, aimed at providing online forums where friends could connect. A year later online
social networking was a fully fledged phenomenon. Today it is the face of the internet. Social
networking websites have evolved from something to visit in your spare time to an integral part of
daily life that many today cannot imagine living without.
If you’re unconvinced, take a look at the numbers. Friendster, one of the pioneers of online social
networking, now has more than 30 million members. Bebo, launched only last July, has 25 million
members and is the number one social networking site in the UK. Then there is the mother of all
networking sites, MySpace. Purchased last July by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation for $580
million, MySpace has just registered its 100 millionth member. In July it was ranked number one
website among US internet users, receiving more hits in a one-week period than even Google.
These figures suggest that online social networking cannot be dismissed as a passing trend.
Socialisation, rather than information, has emerged as the primary use of the internet.
What does it all involve? On a typical networking site like MySpace, you create an individual
profile detailing your age, location, whether you are single or in a relationship, gay or straight,
plus your general interests, favourite music, movies and books. You might upload photographs of
yourself and
write daily journal entries. You build up a set of online friends, each of whom will have their own
set of friends, and so on. On Friendster, when you view someone’s profile the website shows you
how you are linked to each other: Bob is a friend of Jane who is a friend of Mark who is your
friend. Through varying degrees of separation you are soon connected with hundreds, thousands,
even millions of people. Users can communicate with each other in many ways. On MySpace
many people post messages on a ‘bulletin board’ that is automatically sent to everyone in their
network, or they can post a personalised comment on someone's profile, which is displayed for
everyone to read. For one-on-one conversation, they can send direct messages through an internal
email system, or chat in real time via instant messaging.
Another kind of online social networking environment is the so-called blogosphere. Blogs are web
pages where individuals regularly post their personal views, like a personal journal or, depending
on the blogger, a newspaper column. For teens, the most popular place to blog is a site called
LiveJournal, where people keep online diaries for others to read. It has 10.8 million users from all
over the world, most of them females around the ages 17 to 19.
Blogging extends well beyond teen diaries, however ... according to a website called Technorati,
which monitors the blogosphere. It says it is currently tracking 51.3 million blogs worldwide, and
claims that 75,000 new blogs are created every day – that’s almost one per second. The
blogosphere is 100 times bigger than it was three years ago, a doubling in size roughly every six
months.
The blogosphere is a good example of how interactive the internet has become. On most blogs you
will find what’s called a blogroll – a list of links to other related blogs. Through these links blogs
form clusters, or communities, based on shared topics and readership. Conversations develop
within and between blogs as readers post comments on what others have written – a phenomenon
of huge interest to researchers who study how ideas and information spread among internet users.
A new technology called trackback has made the inter-blog network more visible by alerting
bloggers every time another blogger creates a link to their site. A blog’s importance in the overall
network is gauged not in terms of traffic to the site but in the number of inbound and outbound
links. For instance, the political blog
Insight English for Year 11 CD-ROM Resources
© Insight Publications 2006Chapter 12: Exploring Technology and Communication Units 1 & 2
Area of Study 2 Technology & Communication
The Huffington Post is ranked number four by Technorati, with 63,918 links from 13,151 other
blogs.
Online social networking, it seems, is penetrating all areas of life and all age groups, even if it is
most prevalent among the under- 25s. So with people spending so much time communicating
online, how is this changing real-life social behaviour? Recent studies have drawn contradictory
conclusions. Some claim that individuals who socialise online become more social, extrovert and
happy, while others claim that such people draw away from their family and friends, break social
ties and become isolated and depressed. So which is it? ‘The difference between ‘real’ and
online is no longer clear-cut’
The distinction between ‘real life’ and online is no longer clear-cut. The original social websites,
such as chatrooms and online games, drew in people who wanted to escape their daily lives, if
momentarily, to interact with strangers or to play a fantasy role. They used anonymous screen
names and were often represented by avatars or cartoon-like characters. This has changed. Users
of social- networking websites are no longer anonymous – they have real names, jobs and
relationships. They are represented by photographs. Young people using sites like MySpace
switch easily from their real world to their virtual one, and the people they interact with are
largely the same.
Despite the media hype, young people on social networking sites are interacting for the most part
not with strangers, but with friends from their real life. Thus their online social life doesn’t detract
from their real one, as the two are simply different manifestations of the same network of friends.
Online socialisation is just an extension of the kind of interactions that people have daily by phone,
text message and email, so the line between what is real and what is virtual is beginning to fade.
That line will fade even more as our internet portals go mobile. It is beginning to happen already,
and in just a few years the idea of having to sit in front of a computer to access your social
network will seem archaic. For instance, a new mobile device called Helio – a phone, camera,
video camera, MP3 player and internet browser rolled into one – features ‘mobile MySpace’ that
lets you keep in constant contact with your social network.
Last year, Google purchased the mobile social network service Dodgeball, which ‘uses technology
to facilitate serendipity’. Dodgeball members can send text messages to the site announcing their
location – ‘I'm at the coffee shop on 5th street’ – whereupon the service finds any friends in that
user’s network who happen to be in a 10-block radius and sends them a message suggesting they
stop by for an impromptu coffee.
Entire cities, including Philadelphia and San Francisco, are transforming themselves into Wi- Fi
hotspots, and as wireless devices get better and cheaper, you’ll be able to carry your entire social
network with you all the time. All of this gives rise to the inevitable existential question: will we
be able to have real-life ‘experiences’ if the network isn’t watching?
Social networking is not just about friends and recreation – it’s also starting to affect professional
life. Take science. Scientists have used interactive sites such as newsgroups and online bulletin
boards since the early 1990s, but the new generation of networking tools is taking that further.
Many scientists now use blogs, and the number of science blogs is on the rise – Technorati listed
3329 at the end of August. Science blogs serve a dual purpose. First, they connect scientists to
other scientists, serving as modern-day intellectual salons. Formal scientific papers are now even
beginning to cite blogs as references. Second, they connect scientists to the general public,
offering a behind-the-scenes look at how science progresses.
Meanwhile, other kinds of social networking sites for scientists are emerging. A website called
Siphs provides a forum for collaboration and information exchange to around 200 biology and
biomedical researchers in 30 countries. If you log on to the site you’ll find posts like, ‘Does
anyone know of a good tool that will predict active sites in a protein of interest given an amino
acid sequence?’ (It seems a world away from MySpace posts like, ‘Has anyone seen Ashlee
Simpson's new nose? Smokin!’) Although Siphs is still small, it looks like the beginning of a
growing trend: science is fundamentally a collaborative endeavour and online networking is
bound to play a major role.
Another technology set to transform scientific research is social bookmarking. Look, for example,
at Connotea, created by the publishing group behind the journal Nature, which you can add to the
toolbar of your web
Insight English for Year 11 CD-ROM Resources
© Insight Publications 2006
Chapter 12: Exploring Technology and Communication Units 1 & 2
Area of Study 2 Technology & Communication
browser. When you come across an interesting reference, Connotea saves the link. You then tag
your references with keywords, which lets you share your bookmark library or just a few
references with colleagues.
Where will social networking go from here? We can get an idea by looking at some of the latest
networking websites, which focus on a specific area of users’ lives as a point of common interest.
Facebook, launched in early 2004, is specifically for students, and has about 8 million members,
two-thirds of whom visit the site every day. LinkedIn is for job networking, and then there’s
LibraryThing, the ‘MySpace for bookworms’. Here, your profile is your entire book collection,
and you can check out who shares the same books and link to their bookshelves.
MySpace connects individuals through friends, Facebook through schools, LinkedIn through
professions, and LibraryThing through books. A single individual could be a member of all four
sites and many more. It seems inevitable that a meta-network linking together all the various
social networking sites will emerge – and an individual’s full identity, shown from all sides, will
live online. We will carry this meta-network with us in small wireless devices so that our virtual
identities become seamlessly integrated with the real world.
We will be more autonomous and mobile than ever, and at the same time discover an
unprecedented form of collectivism. For the MySpace generation, this won’t seem strange at all.
Amanda Gafter New Scientist 16 September 2006