Lol: breaking out and breaking down

New Media Networking and Phatic Culture by Vincent Miller
Summery and Quotes:

1.Individualization
A.Focus on self talk on blogs
B.Relationships based on trust based on self disclosure, intimacy, openness
C.Increasing need for self clarification, social validation and relationship development, all formed through online social bonds
D.Obious displays of emotion to manipulate self presentation
E.Examples
a.Facebook
b.Blogs
c.Reality tv
d.Tell all talk shows

2.Social relationships
a.Continual deconstruction and reconstruction of social bonds
b.“Networking” with people only so long as to get what you want
c.Social relations primarily informational and not narrative
d.No limit to relationships

3.Posting materials
a.No context for items- all on one page at that point in time
b.No progression or connection, each piece just as important as anything else
c.Importance not only on text but pix, videos, Farmville, etc.
d.Making a profile is essentially compiling an unconnected list
e.Friends are simply a commodity to be collected but not maintained
i.Large network= more secure individual
f.All about connections- not about conversations
g.No limit to materials

4.Phatic exchange
a.Communication not intended to carry information, but to mock communicative pattern
b.To keep lines of communication open but not say substantial things
c.Human relationships dependent on/replaced by objects
d.Exchange of words is superfluous, connection to other being is significant
e.Twitter is epitome of this type of exchange
f.Personal information easy to commodify

Questions/Disagreement
1. Wouldn't texting and the text lingo be the epitome of phatic exchange? lol, lmafo, bamf, gtg, ttyl, etc. we have developeda whole systme of communication based on the need to cut everything irrespective of grammer into the smallest and least effort to produce clips to tell people what we want them to know, and then send it to them via text, wholly impersonal. I love to text, i dont think i would be connectied to most of my friends, much less my mate, without it, but i feel like text speak undermines the legitimacy of a conversation, and i hate the transgressions on grammer, even though as we speak i have committed far too many to name

2. i would argue, and correct me if this is product of society speaking, that in the society we have created for ourselves we are so busy doing trying to fit 29 hours into a 24 hour period that clips and breif interactions have become intgral to maintaining relationships that would otherwise go forgotten. and so, where the feeling i get from the article is that this is a disintigration of proper scoeity that is a social problem, i feel like it is a logical reaction to the progression of communitation in the modern-day era we have created for ourselves

Connection: the rise of "Sexting"




Connection to texts:
Raby's five discourses
i think this causes a huge connection to the "at risk" category. teens, as demonstrated by the first article, are likly to have social network pages, are likly to post things like pictures, and even when they put restrictions on who views them it can;t be that hard to find "dirt" on other people. social networking sites make a whole lot of poeple's lives, from where they are to what they like to who they are with to what they were o what their schedule is availible for a very wide audience to see, from predators to ex's to future employers to future employees, even your own children. Teens are at risk of so many things becasue their lives are more exposed than ever- and that's a very scary phenomenon.