New Media, Networking & Phatic Culture- Vincent Miller

Something that I understood is that communication and the value of writting has changed dramatically with the creation of socail networks such as Facebook, twitter and myspace. Miller also compares blogging to the social networking sites listen above. Blogging allowed for individualization to occur which is a "process in which communities and personal relationships, social forms and commitments are less bound by history and, under globalization, space, are free to, and perhaps forced to actively contruct their own biographies and social bond"(Miller 388).Whereas, Twitter for instance is a form of microblogging that limits the user to only 140 words. According to Miller, Twitter is a combination of a social networking site, blog and text message. This limitation also limits the quality of what a person may say in their status. Socail networking sites like facebook, focus soley on friends, images and link to others. Text isnt important or doesn not contain any quality of the textual material.Social networking sites therefore, can be refered to as Phatic exchange which can be defined accoeding to Miller as a "communicative gesture that does not inform or excanhe meaningful information or facts about the world"(Miller 393-394).

Despite these negative changes, Miller points out that phatic media also has its positives. One example of this can be text messaging( Twitter can fall in this category as well). An advantage of text messaging is that dialouge and conversation can be avoided. It also allows people to save time from having an entire conversation which could've been brief. Another advantage of pathic media and which proves that media does matter; is that a personal information can be used as commodity to build relationships.

Something I found interesting was the concept of connected prescene. This is described as being in touch through networking technologies. Some examples of networking technologies include cell phones, email, text messages, blogs and other wireless technologies. All of the above allow people to maintain social interaction and communicate. It does sadden me that the quality of the text has lessen. But on the bright side, it gives youth another way to express themselves and images such as photos is art and another form of text.