Pros and Cons - Debbie Newman, Ben Woolgar 2014

Social networking has improved our lives
Section H. Health, science and technology

It is a tribute to the speed of the rise of the online social network that, when this book’s last edition was published in 1999, it is arguable that not a single social network existed. Early context-specific social networks like Friends Reunited and Classmates emerged in 2000, followed by more general ones such as Myspace, Bebo and Friendster in 2002 and 2003. But perhaps equally telling is that a teenager using Facebook today may well not even have heard of the above, let alone used them, because Facebook and Twitter, founded in 2004 and 2006 respectively, have swept through all competition, and become the all-consuming means of online communication. This debate understandably focuses on them.

Pros

[1] Social networking allows unprecedented ability to communicate at high speed in many different forms, across huge distances. The ability to contact friends on the other side of the world allows for the maintenance of cross-border friendships, while the flexibility of communication is a huge advantage; ’Events’ allow us to organise parties, while ’Groups’ allow us to create communities for a specific purpose, in a much easier way than anything we have seen before.

[2] Social networks allow rapid political campaigning over issues, connecting people who would otherwise never be able to meet to rally together. Hashtags on Twitter allow us to attach a message to a particular issue, so that like-minded people can get a range of views. This also makes youth a powerful political constituency, as politicians and campaigners check social networks to observe their opinions and capture votes.

[3] Social networks allow us to have greater control over our identities. We can let others know more precisely what our preferences are by ’liking’ the relevant movies, bands or brands. We can post quotations which express our political or philosophical views. All of this allows us to cultivate a personality that goes beyond a few short personal meetings, and also to seek out like-minded people more easily; we do not need to have an initial conversation with them, because we know they share our interests from their online presence.

[4] Social networks are only ’coercive’ in the sense that they provide us with huge benefits, which we typically accept, but there is nothing about them that restricts our liberty; we can choose to opt out if we so wish. Moreover, as long as we are careful in protecting our data, social networks do not own anything damaging.

Cons

[1] This speed of communication is present, but disastrous. Face-to-face interaction has died; we no longer make time to catch up with friends because we always know their news anyway. Moreover, we are under constant stress to convey the right social media ’presence’; it is oppressive to feel the need to ’check in’ at every location we go to or answer messages in seconds.

[2] This kind of campaigning is pointless talk, and encourages a ’slacktivist’ mentality, with a superficial understanding of issues and no actual intention of pressuring politicians for change; for example, hundreds of millions of people shared the Kony 2012 video which demanded action on the crimes of warlords by the end of 2012 — the deadline passed, and no one cared.

[3] This is an unhelpful way to think about identity. We should live naturally, and let our identities be expressed through our actions, rather than requiring a hugely contrived set of publicly available ways of portraying ourselves.

[4] Social networks coerce us into joining; it is virtually impossible not to be a member of one, and so we do not exercise meaningful choice over whether we use it to run our lives. Once we do, they control all our data, in an invasive way.

Possible motions

This House believes that social networking has made us better off.

This House ’likes’ Facebook.