Individualism and Communities

Cultural inversion - online societies, self expression at freewill, without constraints

Examples of communities:
facebook, twitter, flickr, bebo, youtube, rottentomatoes, tumblr

youtube.com - able to watch and comment on uploads, people tht you do not know, the site is universally known, anonymous as you are only a screen name. This allows for a new type of communication, people are able to be as vulgar, cruel and aggressive as they like without fear of consequences, for example, in real life it is unlikely that someone would unexpectedly start an argument with another person because of a difference of opinion, but in an online situation there isn't the same chance of looking like an idiot or being physically harmed. The idea of an alias allows users to become another person aswell.


facebook.com - communication with 'friends' that you choose to communicate with, varying degrees of privacy allow the individual to choose what they want people to see, for example, you can choose for someone you do not know and are not 'friends' with to not be able to view your profile. This shows that the site is totally different to youtube, it is designed so that only people who know each other are able to communicate. The power of facebook - http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/jan/04/faceboook-mark-zuckerberg-googlehttp://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/jan/04/faceboook-mark-zuckerberg-google

Independence and Relationships
Here is an article from the New York Times on the impact of Facebook and Twitter, they have managed to explain it a lot more effectively and eloquently:

Social scientists have a name for this sort of incessant online contact. They call it “ambient awareness.” It is, they say, very much like being physically near someone and picking up on his mood through the little things he does — body language, sighs, stray comments — out of the corner of your eye. Facebook is no longer alone in offering this sort of interaction online. In the last year, there has been a boom in tools for “microblogging”: posting frequent tiny updates on what you’re doing. The phenomenon is quite different from what we normally think of as blogging, because a blog post is usually a written piece, sometimes quite long: a statement of opinion, a story, an analysis. But these new updates are something different. They’re far shorter, far more frequent and less carefully considered. One of the most popular new tools is Twitter, a Web site and messaging service that allows its two-million-plus users to broadcast to their friends haiku-length updates — limited to 140 characters, as brief as a mobile-phone text message — on what they’re doing. There are other services for reporting where you’re traveling (Dopplr) or for quickly tossing online a stream of the pictures, videos or Web sites you’re looking at (Tumblr). And there are even tools that give your location. When the new iPhone, with built-in tracking, was introduced in July, one million people began using Loopt, a piece of software that automatically tells all your friends exactly where you are.
This is the paradox of ambient awareness. Each little update — each individual bit of social information — is insignificant on its own, even supremely mundane. But taken together, over time, the little snippets coalesce into a surprisingly sophisticated portrait of your friends’ and family members’ lives, like thousands of dots making a pointillist painting. This was never before possible, because in the real world, no friend would bother to call you up and detail the sandwiches she was eating. The ambient information becomes like “a type of E.S.P.,” as Haley described it to me, an invisible dimension floating over everyday life. 

Do relationships flourish online?
Sometimes it removes barriers like embarrassment, people are able to be more expressive, but in reality it removes tone and sometimes the meaning of what you are trying to express, phatic expression is lost, also misunderstandings are easily made, sarcasm can be a difficulty. For sites like facebook etc.
For sites like youtube friendships are rare as there is a lack f meaningful conversation as it is often opinion based and argumentative.