Society and the `Net
It seems as though every time I open my favourite news sites or turn on a technology strand on TV, someone is talking about social network sites. They are usually declaring their evils, claiming them to be the haunts of pedophiles and criminals, or just pointing out the amount of time employees waste on them every day when they should be doing some form of paid work.
Social networking sites only seem have to have popped onto the mainstream radar over the last eighteen months or two years. Most commentators talk as though they`re entirely new things, invented with the creation of Facebook and unheard of before.
I take that claim with a pinch of salt. My first introduction to the Internet was the discovery of message boards when I was hunting for some information on a new TV show that I had just discovered, Buffy the Vampire Slayer. In fact, I stumbled on the message board on the official website. It was called the Bronze (after a nightclub in the show) and it was a place for fans to meet, chat and socialise. When the show moved to a different network and the original site was shut down, the Bronze migrated to The Bronze Beta. It didn`t have all the bells and whistles of Facebook or MySpace, but the key elements (connecting people on-line through similar interests, creating a network of friends) were all there. That first trip into the Bronze was in 1999, around the same time that LiveJournal (one of the biggest and earliest social networking sites) began.
Things are more sophisticated now. The interfaces are more polished (one no longer needs to know HTML in order to post a simple message at most social networking sites, for example!) with better archiving and organisation possibilities. The back-ends are much more complicated and often more stable (although some LJ users might disagree at times). The purpose hasn`t changed, though.
The Internet is an amazing resource if you want to know something, but for me it has always been about communication and connecting with people. I check out my LiveJournal and Ravelry account most days to catch up with the friends that I have met through fandom and knitting and see what`s going on in the various communities I contribute to. I pop into Facebook a couple of times a week to see how friends from school and previous employments are doing and read their gossip. If I see a post in a community that looks interesting, I`ll click through to see what else that person has said or done and possibily find a new friend.
The mechanics are different from those early days on the Bronze, but nothing fundamental has changed. The social Internet has been around for far longer than any of those commentators will admit, the only difference is that it is now discussed on the BBC and CNN rather than whispered about in industry conventions.