While Jenkins promotes the idea that America’s youth retreating to the net for their correspondence has all these great aspects, which admittedly they do. They at the same time are distancing people in terms of face-to-face contact. Our world is moving towards a more globalized and connected world though the net but it should not be your main form of socialization. With sites like facebook and myspace, many people will spend hours a day posting on friends pages and looking at other peoples profiles. It is things like these that I believe could be partly at fault for the deterioration of many social connections and attributing to social anxieties that many people may have in regards to face-to-face social contact.
3 comments:
I agree that this new idea of communicating via technology effects the way people deal with face to face interaction, but I don't think it is something that will lead to the 'degradation of society'. As we read in one of the articles, the point is that kids are not being educated to the uses of technology, something that may very well be more valuabe in 10 years that arithmatic. I think that instead of dreading the changes in communication due to more technological interaction, we need to develop and educate the upcoming generation of the new social norms and rules of communicating. We've learned how to communicate differently between different groups in soceity, why can't we also learn to manage the differences in communiting via technology versus face to face.
I agree with what jvcesena stated. As we become more connected it seems that we are at the same time becoming more disconnected. It seems that people are spending way too much time doing everything but physical interaction. Many people work in front of a computer 8 hours a day, then go home to watch tv or browse the web for a couple more hours. This happens to not only adults but kids as well. Instead of hanging out with each other face-face, they interact with each other virtually. This will lead to a lack of social skills which in turn will lead to as jvcesena pointed out degradation of society. Society must find the happy median to physical interaction as well as virtual interaction.
I understand the reasoning behind worries of social degradation, but to be honest, don't see real cause for panic. MySpace, Facebook, and Friendster are all products of our [peoples'] need to socially network. An extremely large amount of data put on these social sites is the constituency of our social lives. Almost everywhere you look, MySpace, Facebook, and Friendster sites are inundated with the social escapades of its users, be it party pictures, vacation, etc.
I firmly believe, if face-to-face contact and physical interaction was dying out, social network sites would not have the user base they do. These networking sites are all about connections with other people, not breaking them.
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