New Media, Networking, and Phatic Culture

By: Vincent Miller

I understand how Miller is trying to inform us that society has gone into a "networked society" where people are starting to record their daily activities and voice themselves and their emotions through the internet and media. He begins with blogging and within his opinion on blogging states "Because of the increasingly disembedded nature of late modern life, a major task of the individual is to continually rebuild and maintain social bonds, making individualization by its nature non-linear, open ended and highly ambibvalent (Beck and Beck Gernsheim, 2002)." This tells us that people have began using the blogs to express themselves and their emotions in ways they otherwise wouldn't be able to do. In social networking and database culture Andreas Wittel (2001) had come up with what he called "network sociality". I agree with his approach on this. "Instead of gaining security through "trust" and self disclosure within the late modern context of mobility and disembeddedness, network sociality is an instrumental or commodified form of social bonding based on the continual construction and reconstruction of personal networks or contacts." This is saying that people are now building socially within these social networks. They are networking and meeting their friends and possible business partners now online. I would say most people want to have as many friends as they can, also to have a great population to advertise their product to, or even just to feel more secure about having friends and people to talk to in time of need. I have facebook and it nice to voice that when I have had a bad day and post it up and open my facebook later on and see that people actually care and try to cheer me up. This would not happen otherwise because I am not a big phone talker and don't open up to just anyone. This leads to the next argument on microblogging, connectes presence and the ascendancy of phatic culture.

Miller argues that without the means to the products which allow us to communicate than there would be no means to network, there fore we have become dependent on these products. I liked how Miller describes how facebook, twitter, etc encourage phatic communication through social add-ons such as vamprie bites, farmville, and games like that etc. I think they do this not only to get the people hooked on the game which will get them hooked on the site but also to get the people to use these games to socialize with others. The only one I know of is facebook and on facebook these games allow you to play while interacting with other facebook friends. This may give the user a feelings of acceptance in some way.

Most of Millers points I agree on and there is nothing I do not understand in this article because he makes alot of valid points and backs them up.

I can relate this article to Coming of Age With the Internet By McMillan And Morrison because society is being taken to a whole new level when it comes to social networking, blogging, and using the internet. People are now becoming mroe adapated to their online social skills rather than their one on one personable skills.