Get Social

I'm not sure if any of you have heard about or followed the Google vs. China censorship stuff that has been in the news since late March. For those of you who haven't, Google shut down its search engine services to China (google.cn) due to the country's strict laws on and enforcement of censorship. Quoted from the New York Times 'Google vs. China' linked article above:

Google’s move represents a powerful rejection of Beijing’s censorship but also a risky ploy in which Google, a global technology powerhouse, will essentially turn its back on the world’s largest Internet market, with nearly 400 million Web users.

“Figuring out how to make good on our promise to stop censoring search on google.cn has been hard,” David Drummond, Google’s chief legal officer, wrote in the blog post. “The Chinese government has been crystal clear throughout our discussions that self-censorship is a nonnegotiable legal requirement."

In last Sunday's New York Times, there was this article, which talked about how Chinese youth spend most of their free and social time on the internet. Quoted from the 'this article' linked above:

Frustrated with media censorship, bland programming on state-run television and limits on the number of foreign films allowed to be shown in China each year, young people are logging onto the Web and downloading alternatives. Homegrown Web sites like Baidu, Tencent and Sina.com have captured millions of Chinese youths obsessed with online games, pirated movies and music, the raising of virtual vegetables, microblogging and instant messaging.

Mr. Li, the Shanghai Maritime University student, says he surfs the Web to find or build his own community. A shy person with no siblings, he now has 300 online buddies, and says he turns to the Web to find what he cannot find anywhere else, particularly on state-run TV, which banned some Korean shows years ago.

After reading both of these articles, I couldn't stop thinking about the unique and positive role that the internet--and the access it provides to various forms of media--is playing in the lives of Chinese youth in the face of their struggles with and against their government's imposed censorship: especially since the past weeks have been spent discussing safety concerns in general and how they apply to popular social media sites like Facebook. But then I also began to think about the above-mentioned student and his sense of community online: I could just picture him sitting in his room at his computer for hours communicating with friends and surfing the internet. In the article, it says that he is an only child and is somewhat shy, though he does has 300 friends online and communicates with them regularly. Looking at this situation realistically though, he is still somewhat disconnected from these friends because even though all this regular socializing and communication is going on, he's still at his desk behind his computer being an isolated and shy only child. Are his online friends the same as his friends at school? Does he have any friends at school since he's busy spending so much of his free time socializing on the internet instead of meeting up with friends at a coffeehouse or club? Clearly I don't know any more details about his life beyond what's mentioned in the article, but it makes me wonder.

Socializing online behind one's computer is quite different from socializing face to face with another person or a group of people. And it's this difference between these two forms of socializing that always raises questions and concerns for me when it comes to singing the praises for social networking. Social networking provides you with instant information and access to your friends, allowing you to message them, comment on the material they have posted to their personal pages, and even allowing you to text chat with them live if they are online at the same time that you are. But even with all this access to different forms of communication thanks to social networking, it can and never will be the same kind of socializing that one experiences in real life. I'm not saying that the purpose of social networking is to replace actual real life socialization, but I think that many times people--including young adults--can become so reliant and consumed with the ease and availability of social networking that they don't make an effort to physically get together and connect or communicate in different ways, such as picking up the phone and actually talking to that person instead of posting a quick "Hey, how ya doing' on their wall. And that's something I always wonder, and I guess worry about, when looking at how much time young adults and adults spend communicating with and relaying on social networking. Like many of the other issues we've discussed concerning media and youth in this class, I think it's important present a balance and complete view of the situation: to not only encourage the use of social networking but to also encourage young adults to get off the computer, grab some friends, go outside, and just all around live!