Are you my public?
I enjoyed the discussion about what is public and the different types of publics in the article "Why Youth (Hear) Social Network Sites: The Role of Networked Publics in Teenage Social Life".
If we talk about A public, it is possible to recognize that there are different collections of people depending on the particular situation. Talking about A public also implies that there must be multiple PUBLICS separated by social contexts.
Putting things in the context of Facebook, it would seem to me that everyone is part of the same public. It is surreal and mildly horrifying to me that my personal and professional lives would come together in ways I would not have thought of. I find myself being public to things that I wish I didn't.
A few days ago, I had to give a training session to new TAs on the CUMC campus, aka, a client. As it turns out, I also friends in that department. I was browsing through the profile page of one of these friends, and as I continued being click-happy through that and other pages, I suddenly stumbled on the page of one such TA. Now suddenly, I know her sun sign, her favorite flower and her favorite movie (which, it turns out, I can't stand).
I don't know what she might think if she's discovers that I visited her page, but I feel a little violated for having found her page to begin with.
The reason I bring up this incident is because of the line "Talking about a public also implies that there must be multiple publics separated by social contexts.", which is immediately followed by...
What then constitutes the boundaries of a given public?
In my opinion, the question should be rephrased to "What boundaries??!!" It would seem that Facebook and Orkut, my social-networking poisons of choice appear to have LARGELY done away with any differentiation between friends and acquaintances and "total stranger in the same network".
So what is the solution? I don't think there is one if you decide to stick to just one social-networking site. Since their inception, they appear to have show a bigger interest in setting everyone on the same playing field than categorizing them in any way. So I will continue sticking to what I have been doing all along...different networking sites for different types of people. Clean and effective.
I haven't quite figured out a place for this in my final, mostly because I still think that the notion of public in the context of education does not really leave room for differentiation, since such a site would assume that everyone affiliated with it has the same exact interest.
If we talk about A public, it is possible to recognize that there are different collections of people depending on the particular situation. Talking about A public also implies that there must be multiple PUBLICS separated by social contexts.
Putting things in the context of Facebook, it would seem to me that everyone is part of the same public. It is surreal and mildly horrifying to me that my personal and professional lives would come together in ways I would not have thought of. I find myself being public to things that I wish I didn't.
A few days ago, I had to give a training session to new TAs on the CUMC campus, aka, a client. As it turns out, I also friends in that department. I was browsing through the profile page of one of these friends, and as I continued being click-happy through that and other pages, I suddenly stumbled on the page of one such TA. Now suddenly, I know her sun sign, her favorite flower and her favorite movie (which, it turns out, I can't stand).
I don't know what she might think if she's discovers that I visited her page, but I feel a little violated for having found her page to begin with.
The reason I bring up this incident is because of the line "Talking about a public also implies that there must be multiple publics separated by social contexts.", which is immediately followed by...
What then constitutes the boundaries of a given public?
In my opinion, the question should be rephrased to "What boundaries??!!" It would seem that Facebook and Orkut, my social-networking poisons of choice appear to have LARGELY done away with any differentiation between friends and acquaintances and "total stranger in the same network".
So what is the solution? I don't think there is one if you decide to stick to just one social-networking site. Since their inception, they appear to have show a bigger interest in setting everyone on the same playing field than categorizing them in any way. So I will continue sticking to what I have been doing all along...different networking sites for different types of people. Clean and effective.
I haven't quite figured out a place for this in my final, mostly because I still think that the notion of public in the context of education does not really leave room for differentiation, since such a site would assume that everyone affiliated with it has the same exact interest.
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