Social Networking Sites and the Changing Nature of Community

Some of you may be aware of new social networking sites on the Internet, like Facebook and MySpace, which allow users to publicly develop and display their social connections.

Users create a personal profile in which they may express their own interests and values, and then invite other users to become “friends” with them. These “friends lists” can include a user’s real life friends and family just as often as they can include Hollywood celebrities, rock bands, and presidential candidates. The ease with which these “friendships” co-exist suggests that young Americans are amenable to the “thinning” or personal relationships and “thickening” of ties to public figure which were previously encountered only through mass media. Similarly, “friends lists” reinforce the contemporary experience of “pseudo-community,” the impression of a relationship that media audiences feel with celebrities.

In addition, these sites demonstrate how physical location has acquired a reduced importance in the way many Americans think about their social lives; in other words, local community is no longer as meaningful. Instead, people are beginning to understand community in terms of systems of friends and contacts that span time and place and are centered on one self. Contemporary sociability is “networked individualism” – overlapping networks of social ties with individuals at the center of each.

Original article appeared in the Spring 2008 issue of Culture, and was written by Felicia Su Wong.

(Quelle: Communitarian Letter #22)