Social Networking Sites: Then and Now

     I have only ever had one Social Networking Site (SNS) profile. This included the wildly popular Facebook. I skipped right over MySpace although many of my peers used the website. I am of a younger generation (I am currently only 20), and we don't have much to go on in terms of knowing when and how former SNS'd developed (and declined). So the Boyd and Ellison article "Social Network Sites: Definition, History, and Scholarship" was very helpful. When I was in 9th grade, my friend told me I had to look at the gossip about so and so "immediately!" After she kept having to give me the lates gossip via phone calls or AOL Instant Messenger chat I reluctantly crumbled and created a Facebook. The annoying part of it in my opinion was having to fill out all those little boxes. My name? Okay this is easy... further along and after I had already wandered into the kitchen to take a snack break I had to write about my interests. Uhhhh. Talking? Walking? Breathing? What was I supposed to put here? If I was really going to be friends online with my friends in real life then they would know my interests... right?
     Well, wrong. SNS's have become so much more than a place to just look through photos of friends and family. It has become a world of a mish mash of people all interested in different things, looking for others who share those interests. And they work well! SNS's have become so popular because they give people a place to be the version of themselves that they would like to be, with people that they want to be with. In my opinion it is a little dangerous to have such successful SNS's out there because people may never leave their computer desks! But, that's where Twitter came to the rescue. It has outdated and outpaced the traditional idea of linking people who share interests and has instead made itself into a sort of international  rapid media and news sharing social monstrosity of information. Also, it is less personal. People don't specifically "friend" each other but they "follow" one another. And so you can choose who to subscribe to. Which is good because there is no intensely intimate information about any person's life on their page.
     Personally, I would prefer to cut out all of these 'online middlemen' if you will and have one webpage where I can connect to anyone, at any time anywhere and that would also include my e-mail, contacts, news and photo album storage. Of course that would put way too much power in the hands of one website instead of distributing it among many, but it would just be so much easier! Mix Gmail with Twitter with Dropbox with Facebook and voilà! That's a site that I would love to use every day! Alas, that is maybe in store for the future but certainly not now. In the meantime, I'm going to go update my status: "finally finished all 4 media class blogposts. Sweeeeeet!"