Comments on: The BBC discovers cloudiness http://cultureby.com/2007/05/the_bbc_discove.html This Blog Sits At the Intersection of Anthropology and Economics Tue, 16 Mar 2010 02:54:55 -0400 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.8.6 hourly 1 By: Rose http://cultureby.com/2007/05/the_bbc_discove.html/comment-page-1#comment-2803 Rose Sun, 20 May 2007 20:29:12 +0000 http://grantmccracken.com/cco/http:/grantmccracken/page-title#comment-2803 <p>The explosion of social networking technologies allow people to do what they already do, but through different mediums and therefore it feels novel. People have always performed and presented themselves relatively unselfconsciously to friends and family in a physical location. </p> <p>Certain classes of us move around, and for maybe 600 million there's a wider social pool afforded by the Internet (although interactions are limited in range). That said, we use these technologies to present ourselves with as much or little nakedness and vulnerability as we used to in person. It's just a new medium, and therefore, in transition, we notice what we've always done and see it as new.</p> <p>I think mediated relationship-building is both richer and more impoverished than the face-to-face model. There's lower barrier to modeling new modes of being, so we can be eternal teenagers exploring avatars of ourselves. On the other hand, the disjointedness of this can cause loneliness and put us in closer contact with the question - Who are we, and why? </p> The explosion of social networking technologies allow people to do what they already do, but through different mediums and therefore it feels novel. People have always performed and presented themselves relatively unselfconsciously to friends and family in a physical location.

Certain classes of us move around, and for maybe 600 million there's a wider social pool afforded by the Internet (although interactions are limited in range). That said, we use these technologies to present ourselves with as much or little nakedness and vulnerability as we used to in person. It's just a new medium, and therefore, in transition, we notice what we've always done and see it as new.

I think mediated relationship-building is both richer and more impoverished than the face-to-face model. There's lower barrier to modeling new modes of being, so we can be eternal teenagers exploring avatars of ourselves. On the other hand, the disjointedness of this can cause loneliness and put us in closer contact with the question – Who are we, and why?

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