What is the Social in Social Media Response

"We can put such considerations into a larger, strategic context that the “social media question” poses. Do all these neatly administrated contacts and address books at some point spill over and leave the virtual realm, as the popularity of dating sites seems to suggest? Do we only share information, experiences, and emotions, or do we also conspire, as “social swarms,” to raid reality in order to create so-called real-world events? Will contacts mutate into comrades? It seems that social media solves the organizational problems that the suburban baby-boom generation faced fifty years ago: boredom, isolation, depression, and desire."

These few questions pose a threat to everything that prior generations based their lives off of before now.  There has been a complete 180 degree flip in how people interact.  At some point, in certain situations, these social interactions leave the virtual realm but what is the ratio of those who know all of their facebook friends in real life before adding them compared to meeting online.  The social etiquette to me for adding friends is to meet them in person, either a short meeting or an evening together and wait a day or two before adding them.  People don't want to seem too eager to become facebook friends.  They also don't want to be the first one to suggest being friends on facebook.  Most of my social group uses facebook and other social media websites to ENHANCE their social interaction rather than INITIATING it.

Interface, Access, Loss

This is an extremely complex article that addresses a multitude of topics.  One passage that stood out to me was
"Coming of age in the heyday of punk, it was clear were living at 29the end of something—of modernism, of the American dream, of the industrial economy, of a certain kind of urbanism. The
evidence was all around us in the ruins of the cities. […] Urban ruins were the emblematic places for this era, the places that gave punk part of its aesthetic, and like most aesthetics this one contained an ethic, a worldview with a mandate on how to act, how to live. […]

A city is built to resemble a conscious mind, a network that can calculate, administrate, manufacture. Ruins become the unconscious of a city, its memory, unknown, darkness, lost lands, and in this truly bring it to life. […] An urban ruin is a place that has fallen outside the economic life of the city, and it is in some way an ideal home for the art that also falls outside the ordinary production and consumption of the city.
—Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost

Although it was written by Solnit, I feel as though it is relevant to the rest of the small portion of the book we read.  The last sentence refers to the ideal home for art as an urban ruin.  It seems like a large cycle as the urban scene was made out of nothing from great artists and as it has deteriorated over years and years, it becomes a new element for artists to take advantage of.  It is outside of the ordinary production and consumption of the city. Which I would consider as a good start for artists to find a source of inspiration.  Profits would then come after this and would feed back into the cycle of economics and art as they go around and around.