I & K Social Net

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

I enjoy every day different services on the Internet that keep me connected with my friends and colleagues, albeit it takes me lots of time. Even on my Blackberry I have Twitter, Facebook, Yahoo, Google Mail, etc.  I use it because I feel I get much of it. But when I explain it to other friends who are not familiar with social networking on the net, they just smile and think I’m a jerk. I read a post today (http://www.thenetworkthinker.com/2008/07/twitter.html) with some reflections on using Twitter as a networking tool. It’s written by Valdis Krebs in his Blog. In this post I’ve found some recommendations on how people should use to post their short 140 charactare messages on Twitter.

Many friends just write about what they’re doing aor what they plan to do, and it may be funny, but useless if it’s not a relative or someone very closed to you. Instead if the people (friends and colleagues) you’r following on Twitter would tell you what they’ve seen that could be interesting to you, or if they’ve a thought that could stimulate some reflection on you, this would make much more sense.

Connecting with people has not to be serious and practical all the time, we also need warmth and personal insights, but we should be aware that others want to know from us interesting things. If we open our posts to everyone with no segmentations, then we should think on writing messages that have interest to everyone of our pals.

I was reading the announcement of J.G. Ballard’s exhibition at the CCCB in Barcelona “Autopsy of the new millenium” to run from July, 22, and I found myself watching the extraordinary videos on J.G. Ballard’s South Bank Show on YouTube. These are three chapters of a unique interview to this excellent science-fiction writer that go along his life and his novels and writings.

Listening to Basllard explaining his beliefs and what where his first dramatic experiences in life, under the Second World War, when he was in Shanghai, where he was born, I felt like overloaded with information and sensations. I asked myself how a man can survive after having been living so intensively every moment of the history. which he had to translate into a science-fiction novels and stories where he could overcome his internal nightmares like he had done with a Psychiatrist.
What I mean is that J.G. Ballard is a man that getting born in Shanghai, at that time a city melting pot of cultures and a city ready to disappear under bombs and devastation, was fortunate to be in a node of the big network of history that more than 50 years later is still in the centre of most dynamic changes. Ballard’s interpretation of most outstanding events in modern history become part of a networked interpretation of reality, so that he uses science-fiction to explain what really is happening to our society. Ballard is knitting a network and constructing a web that may upset many sceptics or provoke scandal to innocents, but he throws in our eyes the reality of man kind: violence, boredom, sex, passion and consumerism.

Networks are part of his intellectual construction by linking people with facts and showing a static condition of our own limitations as human beings.

If you had no chance to see these chapters of South Bank Show on TV, I invite you to watch them now. Just start with this first chapter.