Life in the Network

My roommate's puppy, Jonesy, is a little over 5 months old now. I live with four other guys, so Jonesy gets more than enough attention, and maybe gets too much. In any case, he alternates between extremely active and totally lazy. This picture is as close as I can get to showing how crazy he can get. For some reason, he really loves playing with another roommate's keys...he's a little weird!

Like another poster, my Cyberliteracy book hasn't arrived yet. Regardless, it is clear that the advent of sites such as Flickr and deli.cio.us marks an era of deeper and broader user involvement. Although many people might be spending more and more time on the computer nowadays (and spending less time interacting face-to-face with their friends/family/etc.), I think that ideas like Flickr can help people retain or even build a sense of community. People can find others with similar interests in a new way, and the visual medium can bring more life or a sense of reality to those who wish it. Not only that, but photos can transport us to literally anywhere in seconds--anywhere is a tag away. If people want to compare styles of...shopping malls, let's say...the pictures can be found instantly if the tags are consistent.

That brings me to the other point I wanted to make: some language is specific to a culture or generation, as we all know. Since the most common tags are the ones that are shown first for a specific search, this might limit search results to a specific country or age group--but I cannot imagine that this limitation would be common. This could actually be an interesting topic to study, since I know that younger teens chatting online had useful code (like typing "6" to indicate that a parent was in the room--then the other teen would know to stop talking about certain topics). It would not be surprising if something similar happened with tags for websites of interest to young teens. I can imagine young teens using tags similar to shorthand text (like "hawt"). Cross-culturally, there exists the problem of different words for the same thing (British English: boot=American English: trunk). Perhaps this would spark adoption of other cultures' dialects, or even of learning about the other culture. This is very exciting to me.