The growth of ambient intimacy can seem like modern narcissism taken to a new, supermetabolic extreme — the ultimate expression of a generation of celebrity-addled youths who believe their every utterance is fascinating and ought to be shared with the world.
Is that so bad? ;-)
Read Clive’s, “Brave New World of Digital Intimacy,” for context and an interesting take on social networking.
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There is value in staying ignorant.
But it depends on your goals. Go read the context.
And that’s when it hit me: some people — arguably the majority of the human race — form “social networks” in an entirely different way than the infinitesimal segment of us Web 2.0-focused geeks do. In real life, it seems, these social networks are actually formed in person.
No, I’m serious.
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Want to know what your friends are doing? Go to Spokeo.
Spokeo automatically searches social networking sites for the e-mail addresses in your contact list and reports any available activity. If you don’t trust Spokeo with your e-mail login information, you can manually add “friends” to your Spokeo account.
Your contacts won’t know you’re spying on them. ‘Course, they could be doing the same thing to you…
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I have a MySpace account. As my tagline says, I’m “increasing the average age on MySpace.” I don’t have a lot of MySpace friends, but it’s one more way to watch my kids online. Yeah, I know, they could be sending messages that I would never see…
I’ve always hated the True.com dating service ads. Now, thanks to Firefox, GreaseMonkey and Ad Slicer for MySpace, I don’t have put up with True.com anymore. Sweet bliss. ;)
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Interesting sites from today’s reading:
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Barack Obama steps in it when he stomps on a fan’s MySpace. Maybe he’s not so wired, after all.
Well, he’s getting some buzz now. ;-)
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I added networking links for the declared presidential candidates on my Election 2008 page.
The Democrats have more networking links than the Republicans, averaging 3.0 links per Democrat compared with 1.7 links per Republican. I only counted links to Facebook, Flickr, Meetup, MySpace, and YouTube. A couple of the Democrats also had PartyBuilder; I didn’t count those links. If I had, it would only increase this disparity.
For some unknown reasons, the Republicans also make it harder to find their networking links. Duncan Hunter, in an apparent effort to maintain a consistent color theme, camouflaged the networking links in the right column; I found them only after returning to the site for a second time. John McCain hid his networking links two menus down in a press release, and even then they are just text links. Ever the maverick, McCain also posts his videos on veoh.com and reference what appears to be his one and only answer on answers.yahoo.com.
It’s not just the second (or third) tier Republican candidates not trying to do the “networking thing.” Rudy Giuliani (I’ll learn to spell his name before this campaign is over) has exactly zero networking links.
Are networking links necessary? One could argue not. After all, the Internet didn’t propel Howard Dean into the victory circle. Yet, I think that argument is a few years out of date. There’s nothing better than getting buzz going in the voters at virtually no cost. (And there’s probably one thing they’d like to avoid: getting unfavorable posts written about them, like this one…)
So will the networking gap affect my vote? Of course not. My vote will come down to the issues, not whether a candidate is my friend on MySpace or whether I can see pictures of her dog on Flickr.
After watching this, I’m reminded of Mark Cuban’s recent blog entry, “You are what your search results return and so are your kids.”
Okay, I’m also reminded of my freshman year in Grainger Hall. ;-)
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