The Effect of Online Societies IRL, Part Three

Facebook has morphed into a virtual journal for many, with the addition of a pool of people who can each act as your personal therapist.  In this way, Facebook is changing the way that we live our lives.  We share more, express more, and communicate more frequently with people than we would otherwise.  Facebook has helped shape our offline society into a more open one, and perhaps one that is thoroughly dependent on the Internet in order to function.

            I know what you’re thinking.  You have this idea in your head that the way our offline society functions is barely affected by the web.  If the Internet were to shut down today, nothing much would change.  I disagree.  As I’ve already mentioned, users of social networking sites like Facebook use these sites to express their emotions to others.  This isn’t only on an individual basis, though.  When individuals share a belief or an idea and express it over social networks, change is almost certainly on the way.  Take the “STOP SOPA” movement of earlier this year.  When it was announced that legislation was being considered that would significantly limit the freedom of Internet users, millions of people mobilized on social networks and demanded that the legislation be shelved (blog.seattlepi.com).  The world heard the uproar, and dozens of websites blacked out on a single day to protest, and the legislation was shelved.  Social networks aren’t simply a cool place to connect with friends online; they are increasingly becoming the hubs for our collective consciousness.

E-commerce

            Now that we’ve briefly covered social networks, let us examine one of the biggest online societies in existence today; consumers.  Once people realized that the Internet was going to be around for a while and could reach millions of people, entrepreneurs began to set up virtual businesses that could maximize their reach into the global market while minimizing their need to do anything else than sitting in a chair behind a computer.  Eventually, this “dot com bubble” burst, but e-commerce has never faded entirely, and in today’s market, internet retailers account for hundreds of billions of dollars of sales globally (usa.usembassy.de).  Before the rise of e-commerce sites like Amazon.com, if you couldn’t get to a brick and mortar store, it was almost impossible for you to buy certain products.  Once these sites became widely known, however, even the most rural areas could order just about any product they desired, giving companies new markets in which to advertise. This new use of the Internet for commerce also gave rise to companies like eBay.com that makes the majority of its profit from sales between customers.  These online auction houses are hugely popular for collectors, people who want to maximize their market for garage sales, and consumers looking for inexpensive goods. E-commerce has been a huge advantage for indie artists and very small companies as well.  Thanks to millions of like-minded individuals, creative society sites have popped up everywhere to give artists with small budgets a place to market their wares.  Etsy.com gives craft makers an outlet to advertise and sell their handmade items, Society6.com is a massive outlet for painters, graphic designers, and photographers, and Threadless.com puts user-made art on t-shirts and sells them on their online store.  These do-it-yourself artists have come together to form immeasurably rich societies around what they create and the people who buy it.

The Effect of Online Societies IRL, Part Two

I believe that the creation and population of online societies was an inevitable consequence of the modern era.  David Bell argues that three processes greatly helped to pave the way for this phenomenon (Bell 95).  These processes are detraditionalization, disembedding, and globalization.  Essentially, because of our push for a “post-traditionalist” society in which we have very few ties to the past, we disembed ourselves from our parents and relatives on an intellectual basis in favor of the pursuit of our own brand of truth and personality.  When this is paired with globalization that has “made the world smaller”, the result is that there is a huge population of people looking for something.  The Internet gave them a place to do that, and online societies were born.

Social Networks

            Now that we’ve taken a brief look at how online societies got their start, it’s time to examine the various forms of online societies and then try to understand how they are affecting us even when we aren’t logged on.      I will be taking a close look at four different categories of online societies.  These are social networks, e-commerce sites, and entertainment.  Every category has a number of popular sites within it that I will briefly cover examine how they have contributed to offline change in major ways.

            The first social network that we are going to take a look at is arguably the most prevalent and certainly the most popular site, Facebook.  In 2004, 19-year old Harvard student Mark Zuckerberg launched Facebook, a virtual network intended to help students at Harvard get to know each other.  By late 2005, all US universities and high schools were able to register their students for the site.  A year later, the site opened its virtual doors to anyone with an email address, turning Facebook into a completely open network of individuals (guardian.co.uk).  Today, Facebook has well over 500 million daily users and is a billion-dollar company (mashable.com).  It isn’t just for individuals anymore, either.  Pages have been created for businesses and charities, and new companies have been formed that market almost exclusively to Facebook users through content like games and applications of all sorts.

            Facebook is a shining example of how a virtual society can heavily impact life offline.  Mark Zuckerberg is the ultimate example of this.  He took a simple idea and made it into a billion-dollar company in less than a decade.  Economist.com reports that the site has nearly 3,000 employees, each with an average income of 1.2 million dollars annually (economist.com).  Facebook.com is churning out millionaires through purely virtual networking.  For those of us who aren’t employees, however, the impact on our real lives is still extremely deep.  Millions of users log on to the site daily, and when they’re logged on, they regularly post content that describes their feelings about goings-on in their lives and about new relationships and so on.  For a nosy person, Facebook is like paradise.  If I am having a bad day, there is a good chance that I will post a status update about it on the site, allowing my entire list of friends to weigh in on my feelings.  I like to say that Facebook is often used as a sort of crowd sourced therapy session.  Journaling is a tool used by people all over the world as a way to relieve stress and help them work through problems. 

The Effect of Online Societies IRL, Part One

Introduction

            Let’s talk about the Internet.  According to Internet World Statistics, over 2.2 billion people spend some amount of time online.  That is nearly one third of the world’s total population.  The Internet is by far the largest outlet of socialization in the world today.  Online interactions have become more and more complex, moving from the most basic transfer of information through emails and  text-only pages to extremely intricate online communities.  These communities aren’t only in the form of social networks like Facebook; they also exist in other, more specialized areas like business, homegrown artistry, and music. 

            Something strange has happened because of this new tool of socialization.  What originally was merely some intangible construct has, most certainly, begun to leak into the real world.  People with small ideas forge mighty corporate entities that yield millions of dollars in profits and yet don’t actually exist anywhere else but on the Internet. Virtual relationships become real life marriages, artists showcase and sell their work all over the world without ever leaving their house, and revolutions spring up in virtual space that cripple despotic regimes.  The power of the Internet lies in the power of ideas.  It doesn’t matter who your parents were or what college you went to or the size of your paycheck.  This, I believe, is why we flock to virtual space day in and day out.

            The Internet is becoming more than just a collection of ideas on a computer screen.  It is more than our Facebook profiles, our YouTube subscriptions, and our news feeds.  The Internet defines us as a society in powerful ways.  The once intangible becomes a real and in your face culture.  As we spend more and more time online, it’s inevitable that our minds will be shaped by what we experience.  In this paper, we will seek to understand the effects that these online communities have on our offline lives and look at ways that our culture has been forever changed by the Internet.

The Rise of Online Societies

            In his famous work Politics, Aristotle makes the statement that “Man is a social animal”.  It makes complete sense therefore, that once the Internet was established and made available to the public that people would begin to seek out other individuals like themselves and form the first online societies.  Most academics are firmly versed in what constitutes a society or the more intimate community.  The idea is simple enough; coming from the Latin word societas, a society is a community, nation, or broad grouping of people having common traditions, institutions, and collective activities and interests (Mirriam-Webster).  This definition lends itself well to using the word “society” to identify more specialized groups rather than the large scale usually associated with the term.  With this in mind, I will be using the term “society” throughout this paper instead of “community”, as I feel that the connotations of a society fit more closely with online groups.

            From the definition provided by Mirriam-Webster, we know that societies are formed when people start seeking out others like themselves.  When I find someone who is interested in similar things, I naturally want to associate myself with that person and interact with them using our mutual interests as a catalyst for a deeper relationship.  Would you be surprised if I told you that the same thing regularly happens between people sitting in front of computers that are often hundreds or thousands of miles away from each other?  In this respect, the Internet is a sort of long-distance relationship enabler.  Living in Tinytown, USA doesn’t afford me a wide variety of people to interact with, but joining a social network like Facebook or playing an online game like World of Warcraft might. 

The Purpose.

What is change?

What does it mean?

What does it accomplish?

Why does it happen?

Can it happen differently in different places?

Is change inevitable?

As a recent college graduate with a degree that somewhat resembles a Sociology degree (more on that at a later date), I often find myself asking questions like those you read above.  Of course, the textbooks that we read tell us that change is 'to make a shift from one to the other' (http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/change).

I'm dissatisfied with this definition.  It's too clinical, too cold.  But then again, when a sociologist says 'change', it's quite often a loaded term.  As someone versed in the world of liberal arts academia and modern Christian thinking, when I say 'change', I actually mean 'social change'.  Social change is different. It isn't cold and clinical. Social change sets captives free. Social change brings light into the world's darkest places. It finds injustice, confronts it, and forces good to prevail....sometimes. Seemingly more so now than ever, there is a general outcry against injustice and poverty. Students on college campuses all over the world come together to protest against despotic regimes that exist thousands of miles away and aid is sent across the globe from rich to poor in order to stem the constant tide of hunger and disease (Remind me to come back to that in later posts).

I hope that my idealism isn't coming across too obviously.

I digress.  

The title of this post is 'The Purpose', and I suppose that this is about the time when I should actually be getting to that part of my little monologue.  I have written many blog posts on several blogs which all eventually fail due to my lack of interest in keeping up with postings and the simple issue of time. This blog will not suffer the same fate.

With this blog, I really want to share my ideas, insights, questions, and occasional rants about 'change'.  I have what some would consider radical ideas about how to try to eliminate poverty and stabilize certain global regions (don't fret, nothing genocidal).  I am fascinated by popular culture in the developed world and how technology has and continues to shape the way we live.  

But you don't get away that easily!

This isn't meant to be a one-way blog.  I deeply want to foster dialogue about these topics and more, so don't be shy.  This is a safe place for the expression of ideas about social change, where we come from, and where we are going.  I will endeavor to post something new each week to start, and then answer questions in a timely manner.  

I hope to hear from you.

Adam