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Antisocial networking - how technology makes social life unhuman

December 12, 2007

Antisocial networking - how technology makes social life unhuman

Adam Greenfield argues, on his Speedbird blog, that “technically-mediated social networking at any level beyond very simple, local applications is fundamentally, and probably persistently, a bad idea.”
In his essay, Greenfield surfaces such networks as Facebook, Friendster and digs into the complexity of XFN, which stands for XHTML Friends Network.
His basic argument is that technology cannot be used to reflect the complexity of human feelings and social behavior. In XFN, for example, Greenfield sees a mere attempt to categorize human feelings, which, by default, is impossible, and leads into the danger of oversimplifying the matter. And social networks, in Greendfield’s view, are inadequte for real-time human social interaction.
“[H]aving to declare the degree of intimacy you’re willing to grant each friend,” the author says, “whether in public and for all to see or simply so that they see it, is a state of affairs I’ve described, in comments elsewhere, as ‘frankly autistic.’”
Picture: Flickr

Written by mockebird · Filed Under World, E-society