It Looks Like You're Writing a Community

In “Why Youth (Heart) Social Network Sites,” danah boyd (whose name, mysteriously, is never capitalized) discusses the phenomenon of private interactions (“Are we still gonna go paintballing?”) in the public space of social networking sites. By posting personal conversations on their friends’ Walls, she writes, “teens are taking social interactions between friends into the public sphere for others to witness” (7). But, we ask, how much of this “public” is actually taking the time to do the witnessing, to sift through this mass of information posted on the Walls of Friends? Some people, in fact, get so many posts that they can’t even keep track of their own, let alone anyone else’s.

boyd frames these networked publics as boundless communities that allow for the “persistence” and “searchability” of social interactions. But the sheer size of the “information mountain” on MySpace or Facebook (like Fuller’s “feature mountain”) is so overwhelming that most of this social information becomes essentially invisible to the community as a whole. The only person reading all of these might just be the ethnographer, boyd herself. boyd believes that social networking sites possess added functionalities that take them beyond the scope of RL social interaction, but, in the end, the two worlds don’t behave that differently.

As an added note, we think there’s an interesting comparison between the “blogosphere” (as web 2.0 would have us call it) and social networking sites. Everyone can have their own blog, talk about whatever they want, share it with friends (and other anonymous viewers), and receive comments. But, as with social networking sites, there’s so much information that it is virtually impossible to wade through it all. The network of blogs is essentially a social networking site without the actual central site.

- Charles Crandon, Ben Hyman