In this article, published this month in the RSA Journal, I grapple with the (in)ability of online social networks to support and produce real-world social action. I spent a lot of time on the arguments in this article, as it translated so much of my theoretical thinking to a more public audience: how can online social networks like Facebook and LinkedIn contribute to offline social capital? Does the online capital accrued through actions and identity development actually mean anything? How might the diffusion of responsibility, click-activism and social posturing found in online social networks thanks to their perpetuity, their first-person narratives of identity and their articulated friendship trees actually diffuse social action rather than facilitate it?
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Social Networks Cause Death To Our Children - let the (un-substantiated) backlash begin
Wednesday February 25, 2009 @ 11:08 PM (UTC)This post was originally published on socialsim.
I’m only going to comment on this story to say four things:
1) Hitwise_UK has demonstrated that the average age of a Facebook user is 26 and a Twitter (and other microblogging application) user is 31. Facebook is by far the most popular social networking site in the UK. Where are the children?
2) Web-use is not binary: you can go online and you can come offline too. Engaging with the internet does not mean you drop out of society. On the contrary, there is substantial evidence that Web users are more politically and socially engaged that non-users because the medium facilitates connection and collaboration. Further, the trend of Web2.0 is to connect people online for interaction offline.
3) Television is a passive medium. The Web is a participatory medium. Television makes us drones, the internet and other participatory media encourage active learning. We use our brains more online, not less.
4) Read The Internet Paradox Revisited (pdf). It’s a re-analysis of the 1998 paper The Internet Paradox (pdf), which argued that people become more depressed, isolated and lonely when they go online. In the later study – conducted by the same team and with the same sample as the original – the effects of the original disappeared. Instead, it indicated that social circles increase by an average of six people, rather than decrease. The researchers argued that the first study suffered because the Web was relatively new; its use wasn’t widespread. Now it is.
I’m done. I’ve said it on various social networks, and now I’ve documented my feelings here. If you want more, read Ben Goldacre’s piece.
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