Comment by Joël Versin on April 27, 2011 at 13:37

From my point of view, youngsters keep contact online, but make contacts in real live. Never underestimate the power of a face to face conversation and overestimate the internet for them. They make friends but mostely it also are real friends (in real live not only virtual) or it are friends of friends, but not intermediares from schools, youthwork,... Youngsters speak a different language and don't like would-be-youngsters to chitchat on their personal problems.

Comment by Marc Husband on May 24, 2011 at 14:20

Hi Azzam

I really liked this example and it highlights many things that concern me about youth work via these means. Im not sure if you saw Adam Curtis's excellent http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b011k45f/All_Watched_Over_by_M...documentry last night on BBC 2 however it touched on some of the issues. It gave a quotation from a  from a former, pioneer and champion of online community.

i have seen many people spill their guts on-line, and i did so myself until, at last, i began to see that i had commodified myself. commodification means that you turn something into a product which has a money-value. in the nineteenth century, commodities were made in factories, which karl marx called “the means of production.” capitalists were people who owned the means of production, and the commodities were made by workers who were mostly exploited. i created my interior thoughts as a means of production for the corporation that owned the board i was posting to, and that commodity was being sold to other commodity/consumer entities as entertainment. that means that i sold my soul like a tennis shoe and i derived no profit from the sale of my soul.

and she illustrated it with some examples from WELL history that tore the place apart. For example:

in october of 1994, couples topic 163 was opened. in this topic, user Z came on to discuss her marital problems, which involved a daughter who was emotionally disturbed. it began in a very ordinary way for this type of thing, with the woman asking for and receiving advice about what to do. in just a few days, though, the situation escalated, and the woman put another voice on the wire, who was alleged to be her daughter, X. the alleged daughter exposed her problems and expressed her feelings about them, and the problems appeared to be life-threatening. this seemed to set something off within the conference, and a real orgy began as voices began to appear to express their identification with the mysterious and troubled daughter X. the nature of the identifications and the tone of the posts became stranger and stranger and finally user Z set the frightening crown upon the whole situation by posting a twistedly lyrical monologue of maternal comfort and consolation directed at the virtual Inner Children who had appeared to take refuge within her soft, enveloping arms. the more that the Inner Children wept, the more that the Virtual Mommy lyricized and comforted. this spectacle, which horrified more than one trained mental health professional who read it on the WELL, went on and on for several days and was discussed privately in several places in disbelieving tones. when the topic imploded, the Virtual Mommy withdrew reluctantly insisting that only a barbarian would believe that she would commodify her own tragedy.

…Couples 163 was killed. that means it was destroyed, and does not exist at all anymore, except on back- up tape or in the hard disks of those persons (like me) who downloaded it for their own reasons. what i am getting at here is that electronic community is a commercial enterprise that dovetails nicely with the increasing trend towards dehumanization in our society: it wants to commodify human interaction, enjoy the spectacle regardless of the human cost. if and when the spectacle proves incovenient or alarming, it engages in creative history like, like any good banana republic.

 

I would like to point out that I am by no means technophobic; I use digital technologies on a daily basis, however I am a big believer that technologies should be used as tools. The ways in which these tools are used should be critically considered or the tools will start to use us.Sorry this is so long.

Add a Comment