In order to evaluate the state of Social networking as it stands in 2011 I first need to establish what issues have arisen and been most prominent in the news over the last 3 months. In doing this I can assess what the future is for social networking, what factors may lead to its continued growth or eventual fall and what factors have changed the way people respond and interact with a medium I believe is possibly the most important new development of the last 10 years. Facebook and Twitter have been the main focus of this blog, partly because they are two of the world’s leading social networking websites so they generate a lot of development and news which is of interest to an academic analysis of the medium but also because they are websites which I am a user of and therefore a vested interest in. (In fact I am nearly always signed into them whilst writing this blog.) Different social network websites popular in other countries have contributed to the wider debate but they hold less prominence in westernized culture. It is also important to look at new social networks such as Google + in order to understand the direction in which the medium may move in 2012 and beyond.
The issues and debates I have raised in my blog range from social networks being used as a place for online bullying and a way for employers to remove undesirable employees to a tool for civil unrest and rioting and advertisers monopolising users sharing details. The many debates and news stories covered may seem varied and unlinked however the issue that does resonate within all of them and has come up time and time again when looking at different arguments and angles is how much social networking sites such as Facebook are and should infiltrate main stream society and when they do how the world we live in is affected by the infiltration. If we take the example of the England Riots in August a critic of the effect social networks had would be hard pushed to say that the unrest would have not taken place at all in a pre-social networking world. This is because if nothing else for the fact that it was widely reported that the Blackberry messenger feature was as big as if not bigger way that perpetrators arranged the riots locally (although it could be argued that BBM is another form of social networking) but also because the reason for rioting was surely a lot bigger than people getting caught in a mob culture due to posts on sites such as Facebook.
However as relevant as this argument may be anyone would find it difficult to say that social networking wasn’t a huge factor in the eventual scale and length of the riots. Without the medium it is likely that the unrest would have be sectioned to a small number of people who not only believed that their cause of action was appropriate but were also connected in prior knowing of each other. It is also likely that there would have been far fewer riots because people would not have discussed it in such a public way and to so many people and encouragement to get involved would have been spread to far fewer people. It is undeniably true that the outreach a single person has on Facebook having so many ‘friends’ causes a mob culture in some cases and influences people to get involved in something they wouldn’t know enough about or be interested in without it. Overall, it is undeniable that social media has become a powerful enabler for boosting personal organization whether it be for good in the case of the middle east democratic protests or for bad in the case of the England riots in the summer.
The issue of social networking sites being called into question by employers is also an interesting one to look at in terms of how the infiltration of such sites it affecting main stream society. As social networking becomes ever popular people are beginning to question whether freedom of speech is such a positive thing when doing so could cost you something as important as your job. Posting opinions on websites might seem harmless enough but when it is combined with stating where you work an ever increasing amount of people are learning the hard way that expressing an opinion which is less than favorable to a future or current employer can damage your and a company’s reputation and that company more often that not will prioritise that reputation over their employees. Websites like Facebook encourage users to connect with people by sharing information such as where they work so if the outcome to doing so is the possible loss of work is this issue their fault or is it up to the responsibility of the individual to be careful about what they post. I think ultimately the issue is that as Christine Rosen writes in Virtual friendship and the new narcissism ‘Social networkers, particularly younger users are often naïve or ill-informed about the amount of detail they are making publicly available’ and when users realise the risk they are running to their lives they may begin to be less inclined to share information. This may however be at the detriment of social networks because the overall purpose of them is to ‘connect people.’
The other major issue raised in my blog which I think has and will have an impact on the popularity and reputation of social networking is the is the growing amount of importance many websites are putting on advertising in order to generate profit. Facebook in particular has recently added to their advertising space on the website by introducing the ‘timeline’ which features companies that users have liked or are using through Facebook such as the music company Spotify. They also feature these users in sponsored ads to promote products to their online friends. As well as this new social networking site Google + uses advertising heavily to generate profit. This increasing trend is prompting loyal users to question the integrity of such sites, sites that like to promote the idea that they are first and foremost websites designed to allow users to connect with friends and share things without having their privacy invaded. Sites such as Facebook have always been very proud of the fact that their services are free to anyone who wishes to join but can they really claim that anymore? Yes, we don’t physically have to hand over our credit card details every time we log on but the fact that advertising increasingly takes up so much space on these websites could be seen as another way to make us pay for the privilege, even if it is in a more subliminal way.
The rise of advertising means that social networking sites themselves, as well as companies are constantly learning more and more about users likes and dislikes and this has started questions about privacy and the amount of control people are handing over without even knowing it. This is one the key issues related to this topic and could potentially be a driving force in the down turn of certain times of social networking. What makes pricacy issues more difficult is whether your online persona can be in anyway copyrighted. Zizi Papacharissi writes in A Networked Self ‘If indeed Identity presented online becomes a performance to what extent can that performance be protected or exploited?’(Papacharissi, 2011:315) Perhaps the social networking generation need to accept that what they put online cannot be truly theirs to own and is therefore vulnerable to exploitation.
By discussing my findings over the course of writing this blog what has become most apparent is that social networks have become a huge part of people’s everyday lives and have changed the way we look at and react to politics, human interaction and consumerism among many other things. As Barabasi writes in Introduction and keynote to a networked self ‘Social systems are one of the most powerful example of networks because we understand and relate to them in an everyday fashion’ (Barabasi, 2011:2) They can be immensely powerful tool in giving people across the world a voice and connecting them to each other in a way that was never possible before and have in some circumstances done so to hugely positive effect. In other cases the growing addiction with sharing information on social networks has been a great detriment to work, personal lives and sometimes even societies to name just a few things. It may be that too much is expressed through the internet world and that it has brought upon the neglecting of true human interaction. We may start to see a downturn in the enormous popularity of social networking in years to come as people struggle to gain an understanding of what is appropriate to share with the world through the internet. The rise of ‘in your face’ advertising could also leave users desperate to escape the constant barrage of capitalism. However I believe that for now at least, as technology continues to get quicker, cleverer and more user friendly there’s still a whole lot more tweets, likes and tags to come.
