While reading
Social Graph-iti and
Clive Thompson on Real-World Social Networks vs. Facebook, it only further deepened my concern for people losing their will to communicate with one another in person.
Thompson talks about how scientists are using "reality mining" (Reality Mining defines the collection of machine-sensed environmental data pertaining to human social behavior. -MIT Media Lab) in order to accurately deduce when/how people are going to gather their information and then bring it back to the table to discuss it with others.
Scientists track what you are doing via your cellphone and other technologies in order to predict when you are going to sit down and have a chat with another person...
They called this socialization method the "pulsing star pattern" because "[people] fan out to gather information, then regroup" (
Thompson July 2008).
Anyway, besides the interesting scientific part of this article, it really just creeped me out even more. The fact that the government, scientists, and my peers can track what I am doing at any given moment because of the internet and this new technology is freaky.
One of my friends attended a conference about social networking and the future. She told me that this one think tank predicts that in the future there could be these special "glasses" that you could wear and any time you see a person, who also has these glasses, you can see all of their information surrounding them.
Imagine a facebook chart about the person pops up in your "glasses". In return, you could customize different phrases such as "I'm lonely say hi to me" or "practicing spanish, speak to me" so that if someone looked at you, they would know what you were thinking.
When she told me this...I was astounded that someone was trying to create this. How in the world is this remotely okay?
This brings me to the next article I read,
Social Graph-iti. If people are going even further with this social networking techonolgy craze, I would analyze how many people now are getting sick of the facebook/myspace invasion. In this article there was this one paragraph that really stood out in my mind.
"But unlike other networks, social networks lose value once they go beyond a certain size. 'The value of a social network is defined not only by who's on it, but by who's excluded,' says Paul Saffo, a Silicon Valley forecaster. "
Facebook, MySpace, etc. are having this problem and I know more and more of my friends are being turned off by it. Facebook was supposed to be a way to network with people from college and now it's open to anyone and their mothers.
All in all, it's crazy to think about the expansion of social networking and technology in our daily lives past just my computer screen. More so because people I know are livid with it already.
Can't we just revert back to mailing letters? What happened to face-to-face communication?
Twitter is a very interesting tool. I have yet to come to terms with my feelings for it. I don't understand still why there is an importance for it especially since, as of right now, it doesn't seem as popular, or could be as popular, as something like a Facebook.
