Cyber is a culture?

For me, the most important social or cultural effect of technology just has to be the creation of online shopping!!
I’m kidding, of course. I actually detest shopping because it requires the spending of money, which I also detest. So, honestly, the most important social implications of useful technology for me are networking and advertising. If I couldn’t contact my friends and family regularly through IMing, e-mailing, or texting, I’d be totally lost! Who can afford international calling plans or plane tickets these days, anyway? I know I can’t! And I’d be jobless without advertising. For me, I pursued an advertising career because I love the combination of art and journalism. And, from the reading, it’s apparent that social networks and websites that fail to follow advertising models fail miserably. It’s a must!! But, I’m sure there are still plenty of internet addicts out there who would argue that the most important cultural effect of technology is the means to complete everyday tasks online, like shopping, gambling, porn surfing . . .
The most disturbing social and cultural aspects of technology have to be privacy, anonymity, and addiction. Privacy, because anything I do online can be tracked or stolen by anyone interested enough to try. Anonymity, because there are some seriously shady folks out there who feel the need to be someone else online instead of themselves. And addiction because, even though I never truly considered technology as promoting self-destruction, all the literature we read proves it can be a debilitating disease for those affected.
The article A Review of Research on Internet Addiction by Chou, Condron, and Belland talks more about anonymity and also outlined some interesting information about gender differences among internet users. The authors point out that the two pathological uses of the internet are interactivity and anonymity. While I get why users prefer interactivity (because who really doesn’t want to get involved, and be part of something, you know?) I never would have considered anonymity a motivator to get online. I suppose it has to do partly with self-confidence and personal happiness, and partly with shady people who are just up to no good!
In regard to gender differences, “Young (1998) observed that men tend to seek out dominant activities or content online. Those interactive online games that rely particularly on power, dominance, control, and/or violence attract more men than women. Women, on the other hand, seek out close friendships and prefer anonymous communication in which they can hide their appearance(s). Virtual communities give women a sense of belonging and the ability to share their feelings and emotions in private and convenient ways. Whereas men tend to explore sexual fantasies online, women tend to look for romance in cyberspace, (p. 371).” That’s kinda creepy, really.
Purusing the Center for Internet Addiction website, netaddiction.com, was like a dramedy unfolding. It was a total shocker for me. I suppose by some standards I could even be considered a net addict . . . after all I have to check my personal e-mail (I have five accounts) and myspace a zillion times a day. Not to mention the other social networks of which I’m a member that I check about once a week. But, I’m pretty sure after surfing the addiction site that I’d be diagnosed with only a mild affliction. I never really considered before the masses of internet users who are truly addicts. Porn, gambling, or just net surfing to the extreme just do not sound "pleasurable" to me . . .
I started the reading with the article by Molly Holzschlag, Integrated Web Design: Social Networking - The Relationship Between Humans and Computers is Coming of Age. While most of the article seemed to be more a review of what I’ve heard before (it was published in 2004), the link to the FOAF project, which stands for friend of a friend, caught my attention.
According to its website, “FOAF is an experimental linked information system, exploring some interconnected applications of the Semantic Web. These pages are currently under developed. FOAF documents are, in essence, machine-readable home pages. FOAF-related news, articles and discussion can be found here at foaf-project.org.”
Is anyone familiar with FOAF? My first impression was that it was a simple, dated method of networking created as a test system. But the more I read about it, and tried it out, the cooler the concept seemed. Using FOAF, you can write code to paste into your own homepages that link all your personal pages (personal, work, school, etc.) together with links to everyone else’s who’ve used FOAF. Kinda cool, really.
I’ll close with Zuckerberg, Facebook, and News Feeds . . . I never realized they were so revolutionary. Holy schmackers!! A 23-year-old billionaire who gets categorized with Steve Jobs and Bill Gates for launching a social networking site for college students? That’s impressive. And for Netscape co-founder Marc Andreessen to call Facebook's transformation "an amazing achievement — one of the most significant milestones in the technology industry in this decade," WOW.