No need for architecture, we’ve got Facebook now Edwin Gardner
Edwin Gardner thinks through how social networking via, for example, Facebook is changing how we construct our identities. Who is your Google you? He argues that virtual social spaces are revealing glimpses of new spatial experiences.
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that you would drift through life, going from new relation to new relation, that’s very new. It’s just the 20th century.’3 This brings us to consider how these new virtual social spaces work and how individual identities are constructed within them. The problem here is that it’s hard to convey an experience about what this new so cial space feels like if you’re not in it. To the outsider upto-the-minute updates on what other people are doing seem pointless. Why would you want to know that ‘I have a hangover from last night’s party’ or that ‘I am reading this or that book’ or that ‘I’m giving in to my chocolate addiction once again’? Why would you broad cast this information and why would you follow other people’s snippets of what they’re doing and thinking? Social scientists call this continuous online interac tion: ‘ambient awareness’. Ambient awareness is like being physically near to someone and picking up on his or her mood through the little things he or she does – body language, sighs, stray comments – out of the cor ner of your eye. Clive Thompson: ‘This is the paradox of ambient awareness. Each little update – each individual bit of social informa tion – is insignificant on its own, even supremely mundane. But taken together, over time, the little snippets coalesce into a surprisingly sophistica ted portrait of your friends’ and family members’ lives, like thousands of dots making a pointillist painting. This was never before possible, because in the real world, no friend would bother to call you up and detail the sandwiches she was eating. The ambient information becomes like “a type of Extra Sensory Perception”, as Haley described
Volume 19
Do you have a Facebook profile or a profile on any other social network? Do you have a Twitter account or any other microblogging account? How do you represent yourself on the web? Do you represent yourself on the web? Perhaps more importantly: are you in control of how you are represented on the web? Do you like what you see when you Google your name? Is that you? One of internet’s early merits was to be able to participate anonymously or reinvent your identity all to gether. Today it’s turning into a village where we all know each other; it’s becoming the truly global village McLuhan talked about.1 Yet the global village isn’t nec essarily cosmopolitan and it certainly doesn’t mean that one can comfortably disappear in the crowd as we can do in the metropolis. Zeynep Tufekci, a sociologist at the University of Maryland, describes the digital social ex perience of social networks: ‘It’s just like living in a vil lage where it’s actually hard to lie because everybody knows the truth already.’2 The explosion of social net working sites is in a sense the reincarnation of the small town where social cohesion is back with a vengeance. Where one could regard the anonymity of the city as lib erating, it is more often experienced as one of the psy chological burdens of modern life. Urbanites suffer from collective amnesia about the lion’s share of its inhabit ants. The loneliest people often live in the most crowded of places; it’s easy to forget someone when there are so many people. But social networks are helping us fight the social amnesia that comes with a disconnected life. Tufekci: ‘The current generation is never unconnected. They’re never losing touch with their friends. So we’re going back to a more normal place, historically. If you look at human history, the idea
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