“All liberation depends on the consciousness of servitude” - Marcuse

In the past half-year it has occurred to me that the economic strategy of sites such as Myspace and Friendster as well as Blogger not only depend on voluntary self-disclosure but thrive on it. I have had multiple discussions, both within and outside classes, which have revolved around the topic of social networking sites sociological function. These discussions have brought up the realization that social networking sites serve as efficient tools in the maintenance of strong ties through the creation of self-disclosing social environments. This purpose is even expressed in the title of social networking sites. Names such as LiveJournal and Myspace imply the very purpose of the voluntary revealing of personal information.

This observation immediately sets off a red flag to me in the sense that social networking sites make revealing personal information not just a popular, but social networking sites make it recreational to reveal personal information in a proprietary domain. The very existence of the social networking phenomenon has emerged out of a proprietary capitalist system owned by a handful of powerful economic interests. Sites such as Myspace, valued in the billions of dollars, wield much economic power. What is extremely problematic about this fact becomes the notion that the same powerful interests who own social networking sites also implicitly encourage self-disclosure in their property space. Furthermore there interests take a power advantage through their ability to have the informational advantage.

Before I go on, I wanted to make a distinction and point out that personal information is NOT private information. Even if this is the case, the social acceptance of self-disclosing of personal information in a forum that is public does effect the line of what is socially considered private and what s socially considered public.

I have stated that sites, such as Myspace, are implicitly encouraging the revealing of private information as a recreational activity. Not only is the broadcast of self-disclosures popular perceived as recreational, but the self-disclosure practices on Myspace is a integrate part of the social network culture.

Bringing in the idea of culture into social networks, the idea of tradition also sets in. By bringing up tradition, I am referring to repeated cultural patterns of practice or belief. A less appealing definition would include a set of general, and often unconscience, cultural habits.

The skeletal structure of social networking sites has been erected, but who generates the content? Who habitually creates the meat of Myspace, or Friendster, or Blogger? It is the users. I find this incredibly interesting since the emergence of user-generated sites, the broad majority of the users seem to lack the criticism dealing with user-generated information. If I was to bring this observation up to a user, I would speculate that they would generally understand my point but have not thought critically about it before.

Because of a lack of awareness, the users, or more descriptively the produsers*, are at a disadvantage when if comes to issues like control and power. In the mind of the creators and owners of social networking sites, to withhold the social awareness that there sites are user-generated is crucial. The amazing thing the administrators of social networking sites have realized is that social networks are cultures themselves. What is additionally amazing is that these owners have used the cultural traditions as an exploitive device against the participants’ privacy interests. What seems to be happening in this case is the exploitive pitting of the consumers against themselves. The consumers are duly acting as the employees, collecting data on themselves, and posting it in a organized and digital environment, owned by a business interested in data collection. Even if this is the case, I don’t think that the labor issues involved is exploitive. There is a trade-off: The users get a new tool to maintain interpersonal ties for their labor of placing the content. What I feel is the exploitive practice lies in the consistantcy in the underlying site structures themselves. The administrators of these sites set rules forcing users to submit information within the easily aggregatable site structure. The hegemonic methods implemented in social networking site administrators, not only generate cultural acceptance of broadcasting potentially private information in a public setting, but exploit the use of the consumers themselves as part of the mechanism of the surveillance structure, namely a structure which caters towards efficient data aggregation by anonymous parties. It is here where cultural pressure, user privacy unawareness, and 3rd party agency to collect data coverges. At this vulnerable spot, the privacy of social networking site users compromised.

* “Produsers” - a neologism coined by Dr. Axel Bruns to describe the phenomenon of users acting as their own content producers.

Posted: August 31st, 2007 under Privacy, Social Networking.
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I was thinking today about the relationship of individuals social network site profiles to other individual profiles and I could not shake off the Hofstadter’s term “implicasphere.” I know that other ideas such as Habermas’ public sphere or people such as Barry Wellman could better illustrate the structure of a social network in different ways, but for some reason I really wanted to see if I could inject another model.

When Douglas Hofstadter coined the term “implicasphere” in Metamagical Themas, he was referring to the radii of associations which encircle each ‘word’ passing through the imagination. Therefore, if I was to speak to you the word ‘green’, you might readily think of money, or envy, or trees. Each of these associations closely encircle the word green within it’s implicasphere. Common adjectives such as colors have enormous implicaspheres mainly because the number corresponding associations. More specifically, nouns such as ‘parrot’ usually have smaller implicaspheres due to the lack of close idea associations. Hence in an implicasphere, the word, idea, or speech act, represent the focus, and the distance the associated word, idea, or speech act away from the focus represents the closeness of association. Thinking about Barthes and Semiotics, it almost seems like one could derive an equation for the length of the radius based on the number of common signifiers in both of the ‘words’.

Interestingly enough, it seems to become a common practice for an artist to reach for a specific speech acts with have few associative signifiers, yet remain within the same implicasphere when composing a work. less common associative signifiers in their visual arrangement of speech acts. It is here where an artist’s creativity reaches into the hyper-implicasphere to find workable solutions.

Comedians also seem to practice the same exploration of the hyper-implicasphere. Why are riddles funny?? Because the punch lines are barely associated with the set-up, riding on the threshold in-between making sense and not making sense!! Why do ducks have webbed feet?? To stamp out forest fires!! What’s the difference between Picasso and Smurfette?? They both have blue periods!!

But I’ve digressed…

If we look at individual profile within a social network and if we look at the links, sub-networks, etc. present on the profile, a different type of implicasphere emerges. This cultural implicasphere, centered around the individual contains multiple spheres of associations. From the readily accessible direct links from the profile to discriminating and cultural terms which requires an external search engine to find links, the cultural implicasphere starts to accumulate strange associative complexities. So in this sense, social networking profiles can be seen a conglomerate of associated cultural terms, hyperlinks, and keywords.

Anyway during today’s internet derive I came across something quite interesting: an implicasphere ‘game’ named Human Brain Cloud. Basically what it is…here, I will directly quota Kyle Gabler, the creator of the game: “The Human Brain Cloud is a massively multiplayer word association “game” or experiment … or something. The idea is that given a word, a player types in the first thing that comes to mind and the results are combined into a giant network.” Personally, I think the links between word association webs (implicaspheres) and social networks are interesting and speak directly about the culture in which they are associated.

Posted: August 30th, 2007 under Social Networking.
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