Shirky 7-9

Throughout Clay Shirky’s chapters seven through nine I found some interesting points and definitely things I can relate to. Shirky brings up many examples from his personal life concerning social networking sites and his experiences with them. He gives insight into social networking sites and explains the intensity of the fact they have really changed the way people communicate with eachother.
Social Networking sites such as Facebook and Myspace have changed the way we communicate with others, reconnect with people and the way we connect with new people. Shirky shares a few situations where these technologies introduce him to friends of friends. He calls this “Friend of a friend networking” Known as FOAF networking. Sites such as Facebook do just this, Facebook makes it a point to introduce friends of friends to each other. They provide you with a page of people who you may know, that are coincidentally friends with your friends. Shirky states, “As more people adopt simple social tools, and as those tools allow increasingly rapid communication, the speed of group action also increases, and just as more is different, faster is different”(161). We always used to communicate through the fun to find out about each others lives, and now we at the click of a button we can communicate and explore each others lives as much as the other person is willing to share. We have become faster in our technology and with our social tools that has enhanced the way we communicate with others.