Comment on: Tim Mansfield

de.mi — Sun, 07 Oct 2007 15:57:36 +0000

I have just commented on Tim Mansfield’s “The primary goal of social networks is *not* communication“, writing:
Excellent! You’re right, I guess many people have been mistaken about this and a lot probably still are. When I had my first encounter with things like Facebook, myspace and the like, I was too paranoid about disclosing whom I know and in the end, whom I did not know (!). Did I really want my friends to be listed like on an account statement? I was horrified; I saw it as the perfect intrusion of market mechanisms into the social fabric. I figured that the omnipresence of the database, the logic of the list and the entity-relationship modelling, was somehow about to replace the linear cultural logic of texts and stories. Furthermore enhancing the compatibility of our daily lifes, our immediate humanness with the mechanisms of the machine. Your friends as capital, relationship capital. I hesitated, lurking to see the big implosion of privacy, the complete collapse of the subject into the collective. To my surprise it didn’t happen. More and more of my acquaintances increased the pressure on me to participate on various platforms and I realized that most of them weren’t my best and most intimate friends. On the contrary, to a large extend they were basically people that I met in passing. People that would have given me their business card instead. So Lev Maninov might be right about the logic of the database and its opposition to the narrative, however, as you say social networks and its mapping with database driven social software technologies, doesn’t seem to have much to do with actual communication. What it does provide, however, is an omnipresent access to people and information, the immediate availability of people their potentials.

transagency.org

Comment on: Tim Mansfield