11-17-2010, 05:07 PM
Douglas Rushkoff actually talks a bit about this aspect of social networking in his new book, "Program or Be Programmed" (I reviewed it here). The value of social networking as a prefiguring of social memory is to see possibilities that arised from massively networked information, instead of making a one-to-one equivalency between the two phenomena. In the parlance of Rushkoff, for instance, it would be important to tease out which biases are intrinsic to social memory and which are biases of our computer proxies to it.
For instance, the bias towards transparency and lack of privacy is probably an accurate prefiguring of social memory that is provided by social networking. However, the ability to achieve anonymity is probably a bias of the platform, as in a social memory situation nobody is really anonymous (or, perhaps, everybody is anonymous in that the group mind becomes the "I").
For instance, the bias towards transparency and lack of privacy is probably an accurate prefiguring of social memory that is provided by social networking. However, the ability to achieve anonymity is probably a bias of the platform, as in a social memory situation nobody is really anonymous (or, perhaps, everybody is anonymous in that the group mind becomes the "I").