Diving Into the Bitstream

Chapter 6 Questions

Exploring your opinions

  1. Chapter 6 begins with two quotes. What does the second one mean to you? Is the first one true whether or not you have a quality message? Is the hype surrounding the benefits and popularity of social media to be believed?
  1. The term “friends” is used loose and fast in today’s world. Some say it has lost its true meaning. What does “friends” mean to you? How about “friending” someone? What kinds of friends do you have? How did they come to be your friends?
  1. Whether or not social networks are socially broadening or isolating continues to be a contentious issue. Where do you stand? Why? Is it time to redefine what it means to be social?
  1. Which social networks are you engaged with? What do you use them for? Are there overlaps? Do you focus on one or two even if you belong to several?

Over the last few years, have you joined more, dropped some, or stayed about the same? Has the time you spend participating shifted among them? How about the overall time you spend on them?

  1. How long could you comfortably go without participating in any online social network? How would you feel if you were forced to extend that time significantly?

Suppose online social networks didn’t exist. What do you think you would do with the time you now spend on them?

  1. Social networks have been successfully used in coordinating uprisings among several autocratic regimes, Libya, Tunisia, and Egypt being notable examples. What has happened in those countries since the revolts concluded? What does that say about the role of social networks?
  1. To maintain their regimes, tightly controlled countries have taken different paths. Some are diligent about restricting access to online sources deemed to be threatening to their rule. Others have loosened some restrictions to placate the populace. Still others have taken the military crackdown route. Under each of those scenarios, what have been the roles, uses, and views of information technology from the regime side and from the populace side? Specific examples will help your answers.
  1. It is not only in totalitarian countries that we find limits placed on access and restrictions on acceptable use of social and other information technology based networks. Do you think that’s appropriate? Should the so-called free democracies eschew any limits? Support your position.
  2. Social networking has proven to be revolutionary. It is hard to imagine going back to a world without them. New networking sites and capabilities will continue to be rolled out. What would you like to see that doesn’t exist now? What kinds of protections against abuse are appropriate?
  1. No laggards in collecting personal information of their members, social networks continue to accumulate mountains of data about us, one more way that our privacy can be at risk. What kinds of control over your data would you like to see? What about the tendency of sites to make finding and actuating various privacy settings cumbersome, to say the least?

Stimulating your thinking

Our growing participation in social media and other forms of digital communication has come with the price of trading away considerable privacy for convenience and ease, and some amount of face-to-face intimacy for virtual friendships. It’s not uncommon to derive a measure of status from how many “friends” we’ve collected, how many “likes” we’ve received, how many comments we’ve posted, how many photos we’ve circulated. As virtual replaces physical, what has changed in the way you perceive and conduct your life, both in large and small contexts?

As it says at the end of the chapter:

“…social networking is not just about technology, it is mostly about us. We choose to use those IT tools as reflections of ourselves and as curtains to hide behind, to develop our true social circles and to surround ourselves with minions of casual contacts, to play games and to organize demonstrations, for social good and social evil.”

How do you strike a balance?