I don't need Myspace now that I got a girlfriend!!

I definitely think the most important social or cultural effect of technology is the influence and role it plays on identity.

After reading the articles and seeing social networking sites claiming numbers of members in the

 80 millions, I think it is hard to deny that people want/need an online identity.

The most disturbing or unsettling cultural/social effect of technology was touched upon in the textbook where the authors stated that the position in the media holds that “the Internet has negative consequences on the offline, real lives of those who use it” (Burnett & Marshall 2003, pp. 65).

I think there is a swing to value our online identities more than our offline ones. I think the reason an online identity can be valued more was best stated by Turkle when he wrote that we are “inventing ourselves as we go along” (Turkle 1995, pp. 10). Most people only have one offline identity- if you are unhappy with it, too bad. Online, people are able to assume and create any identity they wish- and even more than one.

Another negative effect of techno

logy is the digital divide. Cyberculture could possibly be described as affluent white culture.  I wonder what role does poverty play on the landscape of cyberculture? Will/is there a digital “melting pot”?

I found Social Networking 3.0 By Wade Roush a bit dated. Myspace had only been owned by Murdoch for a few months at that point. It was sort of nostalgic to look back on the predictions of social networking.

When Molly Holzschlag said “Some of us have a significant need to create community or—at the very least—some kind of shared experience” I disagree. I think we all have that need. And I think that many online entrepreneurs may have mistakenly interpreted the cure for this need as social networking sites. We don’t need them. Before these sites we had churches, bars, schools, clubs, etc. to fulfill the need. 

I agree with Zuckerberg where he stated that we already have our friends. I like how he eschewed the idea of creating a site that would allow people to expand thei

r friend base with other online identities but went for a model that recreated our offline life. 

“What [Facebook] needed to do was construct as accurate of a model as possible of the way the social graph looks in the world,” said Zuckerberg in Levey’s Facebook Grows Up.

When Fred Vogelstein said “there's no killer app for Facebook yet. But if someone can develop one, they will be sitting on a gold mine,” in How Mark Zuckerberg Turned Facebook Into the Web's Hottest Platform, I think he might have missed the point that Zuckerberg had already created that app as Facebook itself.

 

Lastly, I found the lack of self-awareness in the "Features" column for the Center for Internet Addiction a bit humorous...