socialnotesRecently, I have been staying up until the wee hours of the morning reading everything I can on social networking and giving other people’s blogs and inboxes lots of love. So, this is the start of collecting those messages and adding them to my blog.

I spent some of tonight on Networked Publics. A very cool blog sponsored by The Annenberg Center for Communication at The University of Southern California. The topic was “Is MySpace a place?” There were other comments before mine. In response to those and the original topic I had to say:

I love all this talk about something I do every day, something I have grown up doing: hanging out on mySpace, facebook, AIM or a chat room.

MySpaces is a space. It is a “space” because that is the word my generation uses to refer to the concept you are debating. Remember, we look at things different. If I like a band, I can be that band’s friend, if I like Al Gore’s new movie I can be friends with it on mySpace. These things (movies, bands, political movements, people) are just ideas and concepts that we think are cool enough (in mySpace terms) to friend.

Reputation: How you fill your space tells who you are and what you care about (marketers love this); or more likely, how you would like to be seen. Who would you let hang out in your space?

I think as more and more employers do Google searches, etc of potential employees, how you fill these spaces becomes very important. This is good for me. I take it as healthy pressure to do the right thing. After all, even if I don’t post those pictures of me chugging beers and running around naked, someone else might and they will probably tag my face to my name.

What is the bad side? The fear of being watched can leading people/kids to take on secondary identities; going by an alias, or many. Generally this is not bad. People do this indirectly in the real world all the time. However, I would theorize that being void of all pressure is not a good thing. Especially for already repressed youth. What would you do if you were invisible?

I’m very interested in discussing these topics. I see so much potential for good, such as using the excitement and addiction of social networks to increased communication within teams and teach online collaboration. Creating a social classroom, if I knew my work could be seen by my peers I might want to do a better job, because even if I don’t care what my teacher thinks, I probably care what my peers think.

Any thoughts from the 20+ people that visit my blog but never comment? :)