Are social networks the new cities?

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Permalink Reply by GK/OD on May 30, 2008 at 0:14

I`ve always said that people create their own villages within citys` with their friends family colleagues at work etc and mostly ignore everyone else.

This site evidences that in itself and the groups it is creating

We are a gregarious species but we still have our evolutionary tendency`s to live in small groups and Cities are unnatural to us.

We humans are very adventurous thouh and there are plenty who break out from their old `villages`..or groups and form new ones for themselves

Biological evolution takes so long, hundreds of thousands of years if not millions. Social evolution obviously a hell of a lot less time. Technological evolution...`Wow`.

All three of these even though they work on different time scales all interact with each other.

Hugh...my answer is no they`re not. They are the villages that we create. If a site had enough members to be a City people would create their own villages within it

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Permalink Reply by GK/OD on May 30, 2008 at 0:22

On a lighter note you have to have a Cathedral to be a City....A virtual Cathedral...Now that would be something....Who`s to bet it won`t or isn`t already happening somewhere

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Permalink Reply by James Stewart on May 30, 2008 at 10:49

In a lot of cases people are creating "villages" within sites. If you look at the groups within, say, flickr or facebook you'll see a number of them have become fairly tight communities within the larger site. And as with most modern cities, those "villages" intersect and overlap in a variety of ways.

The blog entry that Hugh kindly linked to didn't really go into much depth as it was a quick response to a previous entry about a conference session, but there's definitely a lot more to say. There are a number of functions of cities that online social networking sites go some way to duplicating. A good example of that is providing a space for particular subcultures to congregate.

In the past there was a significant rite of passage for young people who have grown up somehow "different" in a small community who then move into a big city and are able to find others like them, as well as realising their subculture(s) are part of a much wider population of distinctive groups. Online you can find like-minded people without physically migrating and so some of that function of cities changes.

In general I'd say the question was wrongly stated. As with most things online, social networking sites aren't "the new" anything. They're a new medium that may replace old things, or may augment them. And they don't exist in isolation, but are part of a wide range of cultural changes. Online social networks aren't the new cities, but over time they may significantly change how cities operate and how we understand them.

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