A More Personal Social Network

In recent news, we have seen how protestors in Tunisia, Egypt, and Jordan have used the networking site Twitter to organize political protests and democratize their government. Networking sites like Facebook and Twitter serve to provide an unlimited deterritorialized communication in a new kind of space that allows for citizens to organize democratic political power. As a result of the organized riots on Twitter, the authoritarian government in Egypt has stepped down. This is one modern example of how the deterritoriailzing feature of network technologies has been seen as a positive for societies. If looking at the Internet from a neutral perspective and understanding that there is always a possibility for flaw we can examine some of the negative attributes of an unlimited communication network.

After reading “Network Technology” I came across an article for a new more personal social network called Path. Founders of Path thought that the characteristic of over-sharing with an army of friends, as seen with Facebook, took away from your close circle of friends (path limits your friends to 50) in which you maintain a more personal relationship with. Dave Morin, who previously helped build the Facebook platform, says Path is not another social network but rather a personal network.

This relates to Barney’s work since Morin saw a flaw in maintaining unlimited relationships and sought to limit them. Therefore, it can be said that not everybody is always looking to share information about him or her with every single acquaintance they are friends with on the Internet, but rather only those they are close to. Path has been available as an IPhone app since November 2010. I was unaware of Path until I recently came across it. I wonder if one day it will be just as commonly used as Facebook? Is society more interested in sharing information with a ton of friends rather than sharing information with those close to us? From a social constructivist perspective it will be the interaction between the technology itself and the relationships of people utilizing it that will construct how we use network technology in the end.