“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.