Blog #2 - Response Post
Response to http://csmt11.posterous.com/csmt-blog1
I was drawn to this blog post, because I’ve recently become interested in looking at the internet on a global scale. This is partially because I spent an extended amount of time in another country, and was interested in the different technologies and ways of social media usage. By displacing yourself from your normal environment, it not only shows you what’s different, but highlights interesting things you regularly do and take for granted. At the time I while I was abroad, I didn’t realize, but in a way I was unofficially taking note of my own ethnographic ‘research’ (fascination) in which I observed and started conversations with people regarding their social media usage. The author of this blog posts discusses the different technology which is similar to Facebook, Renren. While the UK didn’t see to have much difference in websites from the US, I noticed some smaller differences in the way people used them. For example, I noticed that there was less of an inclination to ‘collect’ large quantities of friends and people. This assumes that they are less likely to casually friend an acquaintance, thus keeping their online presence and network more confined. While there are certainly people who did not fall into generalization, it was definitely something I noticed as somewhat of a trend. If I did a larger scale research project on this question, I’d be interested in attempting to find out the cultural contexts which lead this assumption to be true (or false). It’s also interesting to note that such subtleties are much easier found and recognized when you’re fully engaged with a social media site as opposed to merely ‘studying’ it. This example illuminated the point that social media isn’t all about the technology itself, but also how we use it which dictates its influence and relevance. In one of my current courses, my professor told us an anecdote about how there are some people in Africa who have developed a code which translates the specific number of calls and ring tones to a particular message/meaning in order to communicate in a way that avoids the traditional payment system of cell phones. People all over the world have cell phones, which in a way unites us, but that doesn’t necessarily mean we all use them in the same way to conduct our day-to-day lives. Each culture creates in a sense, their own discourse surrounding a particular technology.
I also took an ‘International Communications’ course while abroad where we took a more traditional, academic approach to studying communications, in which we understandably spent a lot of time examining internet usage. In the course we focused on how social media helps transcend space and time, thus creating networks that couldn’t necessarily have previously existed as easily. In my mind I almost built up an idealized view of social media, as the glue which brought together the people of the physical world via a ‘virtual’ one. While this is certainly not false, this vision didn’t necessarily take into account limitations of legal, technological, etc. variety. I don’t have the same access to someone in Beijing, if we’re not operating and conducting the majority of our social interactions on he same technological platforms. Similarly, sites like Twitter haven’t been available for as long. While there are ways around this, it has made me realize that the internet isn’t necessarily the ‘great equalizer’ if it’s not free to access and it’s not uniform across all users. This is just an observation as opposed to a criticism, because I simultaneously believe that not only should each country be allowed to set their own ‘terms’, but it would be seemingly impossible to get everyone on the ‘same page’.
I thought it was really interesting when the author mentioned how one of the prominent features of Renren is that visitors of your page leave a ‘footprint’ and that privacy is thus ‘intruded and exploited’. It would be interesting to see if this has any effect on how users use Renren in contrast to something similar like Facebook. Are people less likely to engage in casual, harmless ‘Facebook stalking’ if they know people will ‘see’ them? More importantly, what kind of larger impact does it have on friendships and connections? Are Renren users more conscious of their actions of they know they’re more monitored- how does this impact internet ‘identity’? Etc. Another set of questions raised by this discussion is that is it cultural practices that affect our need and use of technology or is it the other way around? Does technology dictate our cultural practices? I think it could be argued both ways and when it comes down to it, it’s probably a synthesis of these two theories.