{"id":1194,"date":"2011-11-02T00:13:27","date_gmt":"2011-11-02T00:13:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/comp6044\/?p=1194"},"modified":"2011-11-02T00:13:27","modified_gmt":"2011-11-02T00:13:27","slug":"future-society-i","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/comp6044\/2011\/11\/02\/future-society-i\/","title":{"rendered":"Future society I"},"content":{"rendered":"

What is sociology? Sociology is the systematic, sceptical and critical study of the social. It studies the way people do things together. [..] it becomes a form of consciousness, a way of thinking, a critical way of seeing the<\/em> social<\/em>. Sociology, a global introduction, Macionis and Plummer. <\/strong>As I was reading Chapter 6. Groups, organisations and the rise of the network society, Manuel Castells<\/strong>‘s ideas about the network society and the Information Age<\/strong> (this is the name of his 3 books on this topic) were described: people, cities, businesses and states are nodes in networks through which information, money and people flow. These flows make time become a perpetual present<\/em> and space becomes global, being everywhere at the same time. A guide to this trilogy is David Bell’s Cyberculture Theorists<\/strong> which discusses the ideas of Castells and Haraway.<\/p>\n

Haraway, the other theorist\u00a0besides Castell discussed by Bell, is a professor at the University of California in the History of Consciousness. She published in 1985 a cyborg manifesto <\/em>suggesting enhancing our human bodies to transgress the boundaries of nature<\/em>. She is recently interested in the links between humans and animals.<\/p>\n

A quick browsing through the Cyberculture Theorists google book http:\/\/goo.gl\/yS4n1<\/a> brought me to Carl Popper<\/strong>‘s World 3 about which\u00a0I read last year. Popper’s elegant philosophy explains the world on 3 levels:<\/p>\n

World 1: the world of physical things
\nWorld 2: the world of mental events and objects
\nWorld 3: the world of abstract objects produced by the mind such as scientific theories<\/p>\n

Bell states that world 3 is sometimes referred to when cyberspace is discussed. Cyberspace is a term coined by William Gibson<\/strong> in his novel Neuromancer.<\/strong> In this novel cyberspace is entered as disembodied consciousness<\/em> by joining the network which is the battleground over ownership and access to data, much like today’s internet where Google, Facebook and other players are crunching user data to provide the best sponsored ads.<\/p>\n

People like to spread information and social networks, microblogging \u00a0helps them do that easily through webpages like\u00a0Twitter or\u00a0status\u00a0updates on Facebook. For example, 100 billion updates are processed each day on Facebook. People care what others think, more than what Google thinks. <\/em>This is why rating appeared recently on Wikipedia and that is what the Facebook Like button is all about. Socialnomics, Erik Qualman<\/strong><\/p>\n

The Zeitgeist,\u00a0the spirit of the age, our common consciousness is the one leading us in this connected, common, social direction.<\/p>\n

By selectively reading through these books, I think that the most comprehensive is the Sociology book. I was particularly interested in the chapters about the future of society and the internet. It contains valuable information regarding these topics. I have the feeling they are all predicting the future. We don’t really realize where we are heading, but the change is already here, we are already this cybersociety.<\/p>\n

I also read 3 chapters on Social Marketing (Marketing to the Social Web – Larry Weber<\/strong>), but I couldn’t find some valuable information, something that Qualman didn’t mention in his book – the main idea emphasized is what I already mentioned in my previous post – that the new marketer’s perspective should take into account the customer,\u00a0 he should be an aggregator and not a broadcaster<\/em>.<\/p>\n

I will keep on reading about Social Marketing and Sociology.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

What is sociology? Sociology is the systematic, sceptical and critical study of the social. It studies the way people do things together. [..] it becomes a form of consciousness, a way of thinking, a critical way of seeing the social. Sociology, a global introduction, Macionis and Plummer. As I was reading Chapter 6. Groups, organisations […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":208,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[264],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1194","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-sociology-discipline"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/comp6044\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1194","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/comp6044\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/comp6044\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/comp6044\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/208"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/comp6044\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1194"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/comp6044\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1194\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1206,"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/comp6044\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1194\/revisions\/1206"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/comp6044\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1194"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/comp6044\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1194"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/comp6044\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1194"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}