My Boring-Ass Titles: The Social Web and Structuralism
In my literary criticism class, we studied the artistic movement and philosophy of structuralism, which states that a structure (think abstract) defines a system, which then spawns interactions.
I was thinking about YouTube specifically, and Web 2.0 social interaction sites in general, and I think, with the prevalence of computers, our tool for building systems and structures, we have created a social structure from which we hope (and this is the basis of a good social website) interactions will spout. It seems funny that we’ve been doing it this way. I think historically, systems evolved from the interactions, and perhaps with YouTube and Facebook, etc., we’re seeing the system dictating the interactions more so than anytime before. Perhaps it isn’t a complete reversal, certainly not: Facebook users can still protest, YouTube users or users of any site can misuse or ignore features of the site, features of the system, thereby changing the real world shape the model was supposed to be projected as. I guess.
Tagged as criticism, facebook, school, social web, structuralism, thinking, web 2.0, youtube + Categorized as Philosophy