More than one hundred years ago, E. M. Forster wrote ”The Machine Stops,” a story about a world where machine assisted contact was the only human contact. The atmosphere is toxic but isolation fed by “The Machine” becomes the norm. People who reject technology become “social outcasts.” In this story, Vashti knows several thousand people but discourages personal contact even from her son because it is “contrary to the spirit of the age.” Her friends, her food, her diversions, her work all come to her by way of the Machine. There is a button to push for each of her needs. Her son, Kuno, wants a personal visit. Travel is discouraged by law and by culture; Vashti would rather not visit, but Kuno cannot be the one to travel “….Because at any moment something tremendous might happen.” How absurd that anything would happen. Nothing ever happens. Vashti has had little contact with Kuno. The Machine had assigned him to a room on the other end of the earth when he was just an infant. There are rumors but Vashti and her friends are not yet concerned. “’ The Machine is stopping?' her friend replied. 'What does that mean? The phrase conveys nothing to me.' 'Nor to me.' 'He does not refer, I suppose, to the trouble there has been lately with the music?' 'Oh no, of course not. Let us talk about music.' “ But that is just a story written at the beginning of the Twentieth Century. Let’s not stroll down the road to catastrophe. The internet has not ground to a halt.
Believe it or not, I can suggest ancient and emerging applications even in Social Networking. Homer’s epic poems are written using epithets. The epics, consisting of hundreds of equivalent pages of written text. They were recited by bards, performers who would commit the entire stories to memory and recite them to groups (or networks). The bards would use stock phrases like “the rosy-fingered Dawn” or “Nestor, the Gerenian charioteer” as mnemonics to assist their taxed memories (LOL). Barn raising on the prairie was a social event that brought together people from distant parts of a county or territory to erect a barn in a single day. It was a commercial enterprise in the sense that labor was exchanged by many farmers who would need barns of their own. It was a social event in that entire families were engaged in not just the building of a barn but the feeding of the volunteer crew. Barn-raising were frequently followed by a party. Some were commemorated by the sewing of a quilt- this might be thought of as pictures on Facebook. Before satellite communications and transmission towers bypassed the need for landlines supported by hardwired connections, amateur radio also called HAM radio gave a few trained hobbyists access to the airways. Using both Morse Code and voice communication, they communicated with other HAM operators (when the weather permitted) to socialize but also to provide social and emergency communications otherwise unavailable. During my military service, the only way to contact home while aboard ship was through the Ham operator who could “patch” your call through another HAM operator in the US. The state-side HAM could them connect your call to the public telephone network. This contact with home was so psychologically important, I suppose, that I still remember the call letters of the shipboard operator: WHISKEY-ALPHA-FIVE-YANKEE-ZANZIBAR-BRAVO. So we find ancient applications that introduce us to communication that introduced… Communication using a kind of fast and useful shorthand in Homeric epithets. Social connections involving people living over relatively great distances some of which even resulted in images that could be tacked up on a “wall.” and Individualized and personalized electronic communication via the HAM operator.
Danah Boyd says that social networking has four characteristics: It is “persistent” because it is permanent. Records of the dialogs are stored just as any digital conversation is stored. It may be saved voluntarily by the user, but, if not, it is stored involuntarily by the network. Secondly, social networks are “searchable.” Access to a large number of records is available by entering just a few keystrokes. Perhaps the single greatest factor in the success of Facebook is the ability to reconnect with lost friends via searches that are effortless and speedy. “Closely coupled” links extend the grasp of social networks to even larger and more complete databases of facts and music, for example. Time lost in logging in and out are minimized by links extending outside of the social network. Thirdly, digital social networking media is “replicable” and modular. A non-technical user can create a digital display of information and then move or copy it onto other social networking platforms. Thus additional copies can be enhanced or altered for specific social contexts. This allows a user to may an individualized consistent “look and feel” for his or her pages on Facebook, MySpace, Blogger and Twitter. Finally, social networking offers an extended, even unknown “invisible audience.” This invisible audience consists of actual acquaintances and “virtual” acquaintances, like Facebook-only “friends.” But it also offers the opportunity to broadcast your thoughts to millions whose existence was unknown to you. In this way you might find a buyer in Moosejaw for your collection of Smurf paraphernalia or identify a fellow-sufferer with an atypical side effect to a medication. Anthropologist Matthew Trevett-Smith uses Second Life to transport his students at St. Lawrence University to far-off cultures. One of Dr. Trevett-Smith’s students wrote: "I spent a semester abroad in France in real life, and I visited many tourist hotspots, many of which I was able to teleport back to in Second Life, which was a very exciting experience. But what amazed me even more was how accurate the landscape was.” Another’s journal said: "I visited the Estonian Embassy where I learned more about the country in 15 minutes than I ever have in 15 years.” Today’s students are more prone to use digital information than ask a question. Second Life offers that kind of personal exploration but in an enriched, multi-sensory environment. This “student-centered learning” brings together virtual information in a less-than-completely-virtual reality. This is a perfect setting to teach problem-solving and decision-making. The consequences of inappropriate decisions can be played-out to a logical conclusion. Reports even show that learning and practicing meditation in Second Life results in real physical benefits. Digital social media offers a framework then that assists casual users of technology to publish print, graphic images and music without any particular expertise or training. This is the ultimate statement of the democratization of entertainment and publishing media. There are few barriers of training, equipment or capital to prevent full participation in the digital world. Kaveri Subrahmanyam and Patricia M. Greenfield, psychologists at Cal State and UCLA respectively, said: “ … people who study relationships believe, because close childhood friendships help kids build trust in people outside their families and consequently help lay the groundwork for healthy adult relationships. Th ese good, close relationships we can ’t allow them to wilt away. They are essential to allowing kids to develop poise and allowing kids to play with their emotions, express emotions, all the functions of support that go with adult relationships… ” (Stout).
There has been widespread concern about the educational impact of cyber living on “Generation I.” The Pew Research Center reported that of American teens ages twelve through seventeen… 50% send 50 or more text messages each day. 33% send more than 100. 67% are more likely to text than to call friends. 54% text friends daily. 33% talk to their friends face-to-face daily. Students use terms normally associated with addiction when discussing withdrawal from digital networking. They use terms like “ in withdrawal, frantically craving, very anxious, extremely antsy, miserable, jittery, crazy .” One said:” I felt quite alone and secluded from my life”(Ford). This suggests that his life is something that occurs outside of the student. Meanwhile the Kaiser Family Foundation reported that those 8 and 18 spent an average of 7 1/2 hours a day using electronic devices. Jeffrey Parker of the University of Alabama is studying the effects of electronic friendships. He suspects that friendships like these are less emotional and intense than conventional friendships. But there is no foregone conclusion to the study. It might also be true that this more frequent contacts even electronic might make for more supportive friendships. Concerns about social repercussions have centered on the darker side of online interactions, like cyber-bullying or texting sexually explicit messages. There is also a social paradox about the information created for the cyber-world. Much of the data like blogs, homepages and, to some extent, Wikipedia is unedited, unverified and therefore unreliable. The paradox is that while unauthenticated, the musings you post to Facebook or Twitter are subject to monitoring and censorship as no media in the history of humankind has ever been. Both terrorists and government surveillance became interested in social networks before and after 9/11 respectively. It has been called a “snoop’s dream” by Paul Marks. Peer to peer surveillance on social networking sites is an approach embraced by government and industrial espionage and intelligence organizations. Big Brother is watching.
Cyber-dangers are broader than the social context. There are real physical and economic dangers out there too. Malware (malicious software) and spyware that steals data about your transactions are nothing new. In the year 2000, a virus titled “The Love Bug” infected 45 million Windows users between May 4th and 5th. Ironically, 15% of all viruses invade PCs through phony and free anti-virus protection. Sometimes the invasion of privacy is benign. A vendor wants to sell you a product by knowing what sites you visit, what you buy, and what your interests are. At other times, malware, spyware and phishing for personal information is conducted for identity theft o for a variety of malicious purposes. Google’s corporate motto is “Do no evil.” That’s nice, but the fact remains that Google retains information about every search your computer has ever processed. If you have ever researched al Qaeda by visiting a website, you might appear suspicious to law enforcement agencies. Big companies are purchased all the time. AT&T, Lucent Technologies, The Wall Street Journal have all changed hands. We have no guarantee that search data will always be protected from scrutiny. Cyber-evil is surfacing in unexpected places too. Underworld predators are selling Facebook Friends lists. They use false identities to collect demographic and sell the information gathered. One offender operating as “krillos” sells account data for those with 10 or fewer friends for $10. More friends accounts nets $45. Investigators at iDefense, a cyber intelligence research organization, report one attempt to sell 1.5 million Facebook accounts on the black-market. One common ploy has been to send messages to friend lists with urgent requests for money. The predator claims the Facebook user is stranded away from home and requests that small sums be wired to them.
