Home
Todd Suomela's Library tagged → View Popular, Search in Google
"Go to any social gathering in your neighborhood and you will notice that people interact mostly with others who are similar in terms of age, gender, race, attributes, and behaviors. This tendency of people to have similar friends—known as homophily—is one of the most pervasive features of social networks (1). A key question is how much of the homophily in behavior can be attributed to social diffusion, that is, direct causal influence of one person on another through social ties (2, 3). Results from two clever Internet experiments reported by Centola last year (4) and on page 1269 of this issue (5) shed light on how the particular arrangement of social ties promotes social diffusion."
-
Does that model increase the ambiguity of online relationships, changing the definition of "friend"? Not necessarily—as Baym says, the ambiguity has always been there, the internet just forces us to negotiate it. Instead, Google+ and the rest of the web are changing the definition of "stranger." In the past, a stranger was someone you'd never seen or spoken to. That's murkier now, which may not be such a bad thing. "Google+ kind of reduces the barrier," says Chesire. "You don’t have to approach the person you've kind of wanted to know because you can follow them on Google+ or Twitter, no harm done there. And that’s a sort of cool innovation."
-
The "sociality" of language, writes Deming, "brings up close the issue of ethics" (14). In a way, it is no surprise that Ralph Waldo Emerson figures prominently in such a project. "I do then with my friends as I do with my books," Emerson said,<!--[if !supportFootnotes]-->[1]<!--[endif]--> and he meant it. For Emerson, reading and writing are the paradigm of all human life, and Deming does Emerson no violence in looking to him for an "ethics of reading," that is, to find guidance in our practices of attentive reading for how to treat people.
-
Deming, then, does see the darker side of sociality, but he tends to treat competitiveness and rivalry as a pathology to be eliminated rather than as part of the very structure of the "dialectic of mutual recognition." Perhaps the desire to make recognition possible without requiring struggle is a noble one. Nevertheless, this desire seems to distort Deming's discussion of Herman Melville's struggles to free himself from Nathaniel Hawthorne's precedence
Critics of commercial societies complain that the free-market system of property rights and freedom of contract tends to commodify relationships, thus eroding the bonds of personal and civic friendship. I argue that this thesis rests on a misunderstanding of both markets and friendship. As voluntary, reciprocal relationships, market relationships and friendship share important properties. Like all relations and activities that exercise important human capacities and play an important role in a meaningful life, market relations and activities are essentially structured and supported by ethical norms and, in turn, support these norms. The so-called norms of the market, such as instrumentality and fungibility, come in varying degrees and characterize not only market, but also nonmarket, relationships, including friendship. Furthermore, although market relationships are primarily instrumental, the individuals involved are not. The virtues of markets have their counterparts in friendship, as do their vices. For these and other reasons, market societies are not only not inimical to friendship, they create a more secure matrix for civic and personal friendship, as well as for other important values such as art, science, or philosophy, than any other developed form of society.
Paper by danah boyd on social networking sites like myspace, etc.
Selected Tags
Related Tags
Top Contributors
Groups interested in friendship
-
Aromatherapy Lavender Gifts
The one stop shop to buy gif...
Items: 1 | Visits: 8
Created by: seasoned woman
-
Social.Sharing
Items: 100 | Visits: 137
Created by: GrandFather B.
-
Friends Rock: Friendship Day
Resources to support a prima...
Items: 8 | Visits: 3
Created by: Katie Day
Highlighter, Sticky notes, Tagging, Groups and Network: integrated suite dramatically boosting research productivity. Learn more »
Join Diigo