I & K Social Net

The Olympics 2008 have finished and now it will be the turn for London 2012. I’m convinced that the Olympics in the UK will be very succesful and that Europe will support these games as European games. Otherwise it will be very hard to reach the high level achieved by the chinese organizers. These have been the most expensive games of the history and also the most luxurious ones. It sounds strange to think that China, a copmmunist country has organized these luxurious games. This subvertes all the beliefs that many people had on the expectations on China.

Before the games and during the games we’ve seen many protesters asking for freedom in Tibet and, at the same time, for the chinese population. We heard also about the unsustainable polluted air of Beijing and than we’ve realized that sportmen have reached the highest number of records in these Olympic games.

Many people wanted to boicott these games, but at the end the media have showed all kind of happy meetings between locals and visitors to the olympic venues and cities.

We have to admit, the Olympics are the biggest event in the world and it puts together people in such a way that all the problems seems to vanish. Happyness and illusion are spread over the venues and the media give from the games all kind of positive images. There’s a lot of economic interest in this event.

The reunion of so many sportmen, journalisis, voluntaries, tourists, etc., creates a network that is ready to disseminate information and kneowledge all over the world. These have been the most commented Olympic games on the Internet. On Twitterm on facebook, on the bvlogs, in the social networks and obviously on the digital editions of any media, Beijing and China have been on the spot.

China has done it’s biggest possible promotional advertizing and it will be for sure a new era for China after these games. I’m convinced too that these games will push social changes inside China though it’ll be hard and it’ll take a while, but by opening China to the world, it will not only mean entrance of money and investments, but also entrance of new ideas and free thinking. It’s just physycs.

It’s sexteen years now from the Olympics in Barcelona, and the city has changed so much, the country, Spain, has also changed so much, that I’m convinced that this effect will be stronger in China.

It would be interesting to see what networks have been created between chinese and people from the rest of the world. It will be also interesting to see how Internet traffic from and to China to the rest of the world will increase in the next years.

The games are the major networking event of the world too.

Last week I got through the EDGE newsletter to know about the talk given by Clay Shirky at the Web 2.0 Expo held in San Francisco (CA) last April 2008. In his talk titled: GIN, TELEVISION, AND COGNITIVE SURPLUS Clay explains what he believes is the ooportunity wwe have to take advantage of the existingf Cognitive Surplus, we’ve realized it exists afteer decades of beeing passive in front of our TV sets.

The opportunity he talks about is exemplified by a girls who was watching a video on TV and after a while she jumpred in to the TV set and looked after something behind the screen, and finally she asked her dad “Where’s the mouse?”. Thus, interaction is the new paradigm of using the media.

Clay Shisrky referes all the time during his speech to the sceptical view of a journalist who still believes that the 20th century paradigm of the media will continue, and doesn’t trust clay when he states that we are facing a revolution as important as the industrial revolution.

It is worth to see Clay’s video here: http://blip.tv/play/AbTSFIa8DQ or to read the text in here: http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge255.html.

His final statement is something that all the people who are working and studying in the Network Society or the Information Society would probably support:

We’re going to look at every place that a reader or a listener or a viewer or a user has been locked out, has been served up passive or a fixed or a canned experience, and ask ourselves, “If we carve out a little bit of the cognitive surplus and deploy it here, could we make a good thing happen?” And I’m betting the answer is yes.

It often appears in some posts or messages on the net claiming about how we are assuming the wrong use of some terminology with much tolerance while scientist and academics have difficulty to spread out and convince to the public that the fair use of terminology is essential to build knowledge.

Social networks are now very attractive and everyone of us is realizing how many of our friends are subscribed to a “social network” in the Internet, while very few of them know exactly what it all is about social networks. It seems logical to differentiate between social networks, as a discipline that is used to study the relations in our society and “social networking platforms” or “social networking media” which are instruments to support social relations between people.

I plan to study the social network inside one of these platforms, but this does not mean that I will study the platform itself, but the relations and communication among the members of the platform, that can be seen as a coherent group, even as an organization, as it is in my case.

To help people to understand what SOCIAL NETWORK SITES are I strongly recommend to read the following post: http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol13/issue1/boyd.ellison.html