Wednesday, March 16, 2011

Summary of Presentation - Self.info II: Friends

Hello, everyone. We are going to present on the topic of “Friends”.

There is a close relationship between human and machine since most of us would communicate with others through social networking. We are now living in Web 2.0 era, social network sites are popular platforms to connect with others, such as Facebook and MySpace. Social network sites are served as publics as they allow publics to gather and interact. With mediating technologies, there are mediated publics, even the networked publics, since the scale of the public has changed. Invisible audience consists in the mediated environment.

On the other hand, the emergence of internet lead to the blurring boundaries between public and private as the context is hard to maintain. When developing the social identity, people would perform, interpret and adjust their behaviours. This process is called impression management. In mediated environments, people can only indicate their identities through the profiles as their bodies are invisible. The creation of profile publicly articulates oneself and writes oneself into being as a precondition of social participation. Teens are longing for the privacy, so they would like to gain privacy through social network sites. However, in mediated society, it is difficult to have actual privacy since they are participating in public areas.

Here comes some issues for discussion.
Do you think social network sites would influence the social relationship?
Do you think people can gain privacy in mediated environment?
Do you agree the friends in social network sites are real friends?
Do you think social network sites can help people to maintain friendship?

Please feel free to talk about them during the tutorial.
See you tomorrow.

By
Annie Cheng
Christy Cho

4 comments:

  1. The topic is really close to us in nowadays. coz we are always communicating with friends by using different social network sites, such as Facebook, as you have mentioned. Of coz it is influencing the social relationship, as it did help us to make new friends or chatting with some old fiends.

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  2. In fact, the social network can help us to maintain or meet new friends and it is important in nowadays, but it also let our privacy to be public and everyone have chance to know about us . Therefore, it is difficult for us to protect our privacy and we need to post our information or photos in internet carefully.

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  3. Yes, the emergence of the social network sites provide platforms to develop or maintain friendship. It is convenient to communicate with others around the world. However, it leads to an issue that some teenagers just interact with others in virtual publics as an increasing amount of teens rely on internet for communication and lack face-to-face interaction. It is hard to determine whether they meet their friends in public or private sphere.

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  4. I think social network can definitely influence social relationship, people are no longer be limited by time and distance. The flow of time has been shortening on cyberspace. People can contact other people through virtual space. Which means, this medium: internet, has influence social relationship in a tremendous way.
    On the other hand, privacy is no longer like how it used to be, before internet exists. Now people can guess, or interpret from photos people share online. Hence I do not think people can gain privacy in mediated environment. Instead, internet provides us a fragmented privacy, which mean, even though people can limit their profile or their online album for viewers. But people can still find a way to hack into those systems and take a look at your private life.

    - Rebecca

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