camelism

I will aim to reflect on danah boyd’s post on The Economist Debate on the following proposition:
"Social networking technologies will bring large [positive] changes to
educational methods, in and out of the classroom"

On one hand she questions the educational potential of these sites, on the other hand she criticises those approaches which simply dismiss technologic tools without the attempt to discover advantages. I agree with her remarks and on stressing the power of the individual to be capable of interacting with technologies, rather than being ruled by them. This should actually be the approach we should aim for, to strengthen our personal capacity of shaping rather than being shaped.

… there is nothing good or bad about technology, it’s just as Marshall McLuhan argued in his technological determinist view ‘we shape our tools and they shape us’. Technology in a sense is neutral, it enables communication, what we have to consider is the way we are using these tools or new technologies.
As a matter of fact SNSs just touch upon how or society is structured, namely on growth, in a quantitative manner, because essentially this is what keeps our economy going… we permanently have to define and establish new structures, products and ideas, we permanently have to consume these structures, otherwise the effects would be horrible and the economy would simply break down….

Reconsidering social networking once more there remains so much more to be said and examined…
I want to be constructive this time… How can I befriend myself with SNSs?… I am trying to gather aspects, and I am trying to distance myself from apocalyptic world prognoses. (there might be the potential for destruction but there probably always was.. and weapons of mass destruction are definitely more dangerous and until this moment the world citizens were clever enough not to use them, so there is plenty of hope)
No, this world should be a happy place and the sun should always shine. And I should have faith in its citizens, and their rational reasoning… Social networking platforms can be good… if only we are conscious about the usability…
We have to identify it s actual benefit, and not only its ultimate stimulation... Chicken cottage might taste really great and it is sooo cheap but going a bit further with the examination we easily see that on the long run it is not particularly beneficial for our well-being and healthy nutrition…
So, without becoming to abstract now, the functionality of these platforms is tightly determined by what we expect from them. Do we want to establish new spheres of communication? Do we want to use SNSs to create a new (or a few) cyber personalities, do we want to redefine ourselves newly because we are unhappy with our real-life experiences? Can this new, subpersonality, or superpersonality be better than the real-life personality?
And like with everything in life, we can emphasise on the positive or the negative aspects. Is technology sociable? Can technology be sociable? It depends…
Experience is experience.. and there is no substitute for any experience… Viewing an art Gallery on Second Life is not the same as visiting an exhibition at the Whitechapel gallery. That doesn’t mean the Whitechapel is necessarily better than the cyber-experience, but it is not really comparable…
What does it mean to be sociable? When can something be seen as socially beneficial, or more beneficial than something else? Certainly an aspect would be that the experiences we have engage our personal activity within the situation, not to plainly and passively consume. At the same time this means, to experience something new, if an experience becomes a repetitive habit, than our own reactions are pretty defined anyway, we don’t expect to learn anything new out of an action.

So I guess we still and simply have to learn how to engage with SNSs in a responsible way. And since this technological phenomenon just emerged we are not capable of defining and realizing its potential yet- its communicative benefits. We are always on the edge of abusing it. In that sense, I think to integrate SNSs in institutionalized educational learning would be a reasonable approach of learning to use these technology effectively. We should learn how to shape, and how to use our voice, because our voice is important.