When Stefan meets The Netherlands, the smart and serious student went bad… He shouldn’t have been friend with Jackson- the fish or the girl?

Nowadays, it’s rare – almost impossible – to find someone who has never be in contact with an online social network. Some people are member of one network and don’t spend a lot of time connected, others spend a big part of their life on one of more networks, switching from one virtual identity to another. Some people first create an account “just to see what is was about”, other would pinpoint the advantage these kind of network bring them, some other will use them for professional reason, and other will maybe admit they just wanted to do like everybody.

… But in the end why do we (almost) all feel the need of being a part of these parallel lives, these virtual worlds?

The first social networks were first of all means to be connected to other people, to be able to interact with them. Users use it nowadays to share information about themselve, and to gather private (transformed as public) information about the other.

The first aim of the social network Facebook for instance was to help people to find old, almost forgotten friends… but who uses it today mainly to find other people? Online, a lot of users seem to forget the concept of intimacy… Do they (do we) still feel a need of intimacy, respect of private life?

It has been calculated that Facebook users are connected on average during 20 min a day. We spend 2h20 a week to look at pictures, posts, comment, groups, status of people we often barely know! What for if not just to discover and collect information about people…?

Are social network today something else than a way to meet a need of exhibitionism and/or voyeurism?

“Internet : new heaven of voyeurism”

We use the term Web 2.0 to refer to the technologies and use of the World Wide Web that didn’t exist in the beginning. The term first appears in 2003, and imposes itself since 2007.
To clearly understand what the Web 2.0 is, we need to compare it to what is now called the Web 1.0. At the origin, Internet was made of statics pages, rarely or never updated. It was only a tool to spread and read information.
But with the Web 2.0, the potential of creation, storage and spreading is amazingly bigger than before. However, what is really different between the 1.0 and the 2.0 is the place they offer to the user. The net surfer and its relations with the other are now in the center of this “new web”. It gives to users without any technical knowledge the means to interact with the content, the appearance of the web, and with each other, creating some kind of social networks. Nowadays, the net surfer is an actor of the web. By writing this post, I am changing the web, by leaving a comment you will do the same.

By acting local, we are changing the global, worldwide web. Everybody on earth can have an access to my local situation. This is another important characteristic of the 2.0, it mixes the local with the global.

Without this evolution, the “social” web, every kind of online social networks wouldn’t be possible.

What’s Twitter??

Twitter is a social network born in 2006, which offer to people a space to express in 140 characters “What’s happening?” People can follow and be followed by other users, who then can read their “tweets”. Twitter is an “asymmetric “social network. It means that you can follow the news of a lot of people, without being followed by them (it’s the case of a lot of celebrities, who give more information than follow their fans).

But is it really, as Twitter describes itself, “without a doubt the best way to share and discover what is happening right now”?
It has happened that hot information were first released and spread on twitter, before being discussed in traditional media. In other case, Twitter just spread information first released in another media, reaching faster a larger audience. Users share, transfer, forward information faster than never before. Celebrities also quickly saw the advantage Twitter offered them : by writing themselves what’s happening, they do not encounter the risk of having their words distorted by paparazzi for instance.

So YES, Twitter is a valuable way to communicate. But like for every new technology, the most important is not the potential it offers, but the way people use it.
If thanks to Twitter people can communicate to a large audience easily, the real issue here is HOW they use this tool, WHAT they use it FOR, what are they communicate ABOUT? An “important” or “actual” information can be spread easily and quickly, but what about the hundreds of thousands of Tweet about non interesting, private or even false things people write on this website?

A funny, critical video found on Youtube