Networking in the social network
Friday, October 2, 2009 by cfaa004
With the advent of Facebook, Bebo, MySpace and most recently Twitter, people have found more efficient and creative ways to stay in touch. Dunbar referred to this as 'social grooming' whereby people use "language, especially gossip" as a function of social grooming. Dunbar says that people need to be able to keep track of ever changing relationships, and what better way to do this than Facebook. With constant news feeds about relationship changes, picture uploads and status updates, we're almost overloaded with information about the people that we are connected with.
Social networking sites have provided an excellent means of staying in touch with people in and around our circle of friends. Twitter is the most recent and prevalent example of this, it's not a network to stay in touch but rather to build a fan base of followers. Putnam suggests that people network to increase their "social capital", and that happiness is linked to the breadth and depth of one's social connections. From this angle, I would suggest that Twitter has also become an enabler for the somewhat egotistical society that we are now living in. The overload of information is more often than not people sharing banal details of their every day lives. Maybe it is the domino effect, celebrities were doing it, and in the pop-culture society that we live in, fans were sure to follow. What better way to feel "connected" to your idol than to follow their every move.
The idea of happiness as a direct result of social capital might give some insight into the reason why people would want to share these details with strangers as on Twitter or why you would add somebody who is a friend of a friend despite the fact that you don't know them like on Facebook. It would seem that while Social networking sites do provide an excellent forum for reconnection and communication, they are also sites through which we can cater to our self-absorbed desire to tell the world the most intimate details of our lives without a second thought.
Social networking sites have provided an excellent means of staying in touch with people in and around our circle of friends. Twitter is the most recent and prevalent example of this, it's not a network to stay in touch but rather to build a fan base of followers. Putnam suggests that people network to increase their "social capital", and that happiness is linked to the breadth and depth of one's social connections. From this angle, I would suggest that Twitter has also become an enabler for the somewhat egotistical society that we are now living in. The overload of information is more often than not people sharing banal details of their every day lives. Maybe it is the domino effect, celebrities were doing it, and in the pop-culture society that we live in, fans were sure to follow. What better way to feel "connected" to your idol than to follow their every move.
The idea of happiness as a direct result of social capital might give some insight into the reason why people would want to share these details with strangers as on Twitter or why you would add somebody who is a friend of a friend despite the fact that you don't know them like on Facebook. It would seem that while Social networking sites do provide an excellent forum for reconnection and communication, they are also sites through which we can cater to our self-absorbed desire to tell the world the most intimate details of our lives without a second thought.