 Debate in Parallel The new social networks: What do they mean for trust and the way our societies evolve? FRIDAY 12 OCTOBER 2007
Should we fear or embrace the exponential growth of new social networks? Will the virtual world replace the real one? These huge questions were impossible to answer in an hour and a half but the outlook was cautiously positive. Perhaps this was to be expected in a room full of people surreptitiously tapping away at their cell phones, Blackberries and PDAs. Indian ethnographer and blogger Dina Mehta gave her experience during the December 2004 tsunami as a positive example of social networks’ potential. She and friends set up a blog to collect information the day after the catastrophe. Land phone lines were down, and transport paralysed, but not mobile phones. “People down there started sending us text messages and we were immediately able to disseminate these eyewitness accounts on our blog. Within 24 hours we had hundreds of people from all over the world offering their help and skills,” she said. She then replicated the experience half way across the world in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. Participants emphasised that in some ways developing countries were moving even more quickly towards ubiquitous networking capabilities because their device of choice was the mobile phone, not the computer. This is proving extremely empowering in places like Kenya, where rural and impoverished populations excluded from banking have begun lending amongst themselves through a payment system via cell phone. In many less developed countries such as India fishermen and farmers are using mobile phones to call ahead to market sites to determine where they can sell at the best price. Anne Lange noted that new networks were also transforming participative democracy, citing the European Union’s use of e-petitions allowing citizens to express adherence or opposition to proposals online. Maria Livanos Cattaui added that in her home country of Switzerland, citizens could even vote online. Jean-Louis Costanza said that in most highly-wired countries Internet time has surpassed TV time in people’s lives or will soon. Seventy-five percent of young people polled said they would give up TV and keep Internet if they had to choose, he said. Social networks like Facebook take up much of their Internet time. The site now has 70 million users, and in France alone use is rising by 3% per week, he noted. What does this mean for our societies? For one, Costanza said, networks like Facebook and the virtual reality game Second Life allow young people to try on different identities and personalities, regardless of their social backgrounds, at an age when their sense of self is not fixed. Bruno Giussani noted that though the common perception is that most users of such sites are “kids in pyjamas in their bedrooms talking to kids in pyjamas in other bedrooms,” in reality they are much more diverse. “Adults use these as much as kids but for other purposes,” often business-related, he said, noting that 49% of users were over the age of 35. The question of the very nature of gender is raised by such networks. Giussani pointed out that in Second Life, players invent their avatar, or virtual self, and often choose one of the opposite sex. He cited one thought-provoking study that revealed that the behavior and views of female avatars of male players mirrored exactly the behaviour of females playing as avatars of their own gender. Susan Kish declared it likely more and more people would be tempted to “migrate” to the virtual world because of its promise of “greater opportunities and more and deeper relationships” than in real life. This prospect is frightening to some, who fear that people will cease to distinguish between real life and its virtual facsimile. But Mehta argued that like so many aspects of today’s online networks, children can show the way forward. “This distinction between real and virtual worlds doesn’t even cross kids’ minds,” she said. “They move seamlessly from one to the other, and they know which is which.” Giussani then conducted a playful survey of the audience, asking them who during the past fifteen minutes of the debate had sent or consulted messages on their mobile devices. Twelve, or about 20%, confessed. “So you see, you’re perfectly able to move back and forth between your real and virtual worlds,” he said. __________________________________________ |