Social Networking=Social Database 09/09/09

Lol, 9-9-09.

For one of my grad school classes I have to create a wikipage about a topic discussed in the course. Currently I have my sights on social networking and here are some of my ideas.

Before Facebook and Myspace, way before the internet, if a person needed information about another person the only database which they could access was a phone book. Phone books were the first public social database. This is of course not counting permanent records at schools nor police and court records. Phone books were the first social database. A phone book told and still does tell a great deal about a person. Phone numbers and addresses of nearly every person in a community could be found in a phone book. Where a person lives can say a lot about them. From a phone book you could find where a person lives, go to their residence and judge them by their home and surrounding neighborhood.

Fastfoward to today where we have social networking. If I wanted to find information about a person, I can log onto Facebook or Myspace and search for him or her. If successful, I can network myself with the person and gain access to his profile. I then could learn a large number of things about that person, more than a phone book could tell me. Social networking does not limit me to my local phone book either. I could learn about a person on the other side of the globe.

My point is, I am not confident society realizes what it has contributed to nor the gravity of its contribution to social networking sites like Facebook, Myspace, Twitter, etc. Our pictures, personal information, blogs, status updates and tweets are an immense database of who we are, what we do, where we do things, how we do them, and why. Librarians, archivists, and historians have worked painstaking hours to preserve journals and letters from history. Libraries, archives and museums have truck loads of the personal history of many many people. Yet, in a few years the millions, if not billions, of users on social networking websites have probably matched the recovered records of history and contributed to the largest social database that exists.