March 8, 2012 • 2 notes

Final Project Proposal

One of my hobbies is cooking.  It relaxes me at the end of the day and also gives me a sense of accomplishment — hey, I created something that others can enjoy! I get many of my recipes from cooking blogs, many of which I discovered through Pinterest.  However, cooking blogs are a completely different world than most food related things I am accustomed to (Food Network, celebrity chefs, foodies, Travel/Cooking Channels, respectively).  Cooking blogs have changed the way people interact with each other.  For example, in many posts, the blogger will, when prefacing a recipe, write that she/he found the recipe on their “good friend” Suzie Cooks!’s blog.  Now, this person knows “Suzie” from Suzie Cooks! as Suzie Cooks!.  They’ve never actually met the person but already consider them a friend.  Another strange difference cooking blogs have from other types of social networking, is their virtual dinner parties.  For these parties, food bloggers are invited to post recipes and beautiful pictures of the food created by these recipes at the same time on the same date so all may enjoy the “virtual” food at the “virtual” party.  Kind of a virtual potluck.  Because of these things, I’d like to argue that cooking blogs have created their own virtual world; they may have started as a mere liquid network, but now that food bloggers are becoming friends with other food bloggers, who they’ve never met, yet speak affectionately of, they believe this world they have created is real.  Due to this factor, I would liken food to the gold standard; for food bloggers, cooking has become a signifying practice.  A beautiful picture of food is worth more than the actual prepared dish itself.  Therefore, whereas normally a recipe title would be the signifier for the prepared food once it has been cooked (the signified), now the signified has become a picture of the food (which, one could argue, could be the signifier as well…?).  Food bloggers are blurring the lines between actual reality and virtual reality.  Therefore, for my project, I plan on monitoring some of these food blogging relationships, “attending” a couple virtual dinner parties, and, through my research, developing a clear, substantial thesis for a research paper as my final project.

January 27, 2012 • 1 note

Cultural Social Networks

While reading this article, the sentence that struck me the most was, ” Individuals who name more friends are also named more frequently by others, even among people they did not claim as their friends” (Shaw).  This may sound kind of sad but it reminded me of Facebook.  Facebook is basically our modern interpretation of a way in which we can create our own social networks (hence, the name of the movie about Facebook).  This insight demonstrated our connectivity to all people throughout history and across cultures.  We may not be giving out honey sticks, but we are certainly “friending” people to increase our popularity, so we can claim we have more Facebook friends than our actual friends do.  How many people are friends with people they’ve never met or have only met once?  We, as Facebook account holders, have made the word “friend” into a verb.  The phrases, “You should friend me on facebook” or “Hey! I think I just friended you!” are pretty common in our vernacular — and everyone knows what it means.  At least, everyone in our social network understands what we’re trying to say.  And if someone is too “old” or “out of the loop” to get our jargon, why would we want to friend them anyway? Just sayin. ;)

networktopologies:

Some of you might find this article useful/interesting:

….Modern human social networks share several features, whether they operate within a group of schoolchildren in San Francisco or a community of millworkers in Bulgaria. The number of social ties a person has, the probability that two of a person’s friends are also friends, and the inclination for similar people to be connected are all very regular across groups of people living very different lives in far-flung places…..”

MORE HERE

(via networktopologies-deactivated20)

January 11, 2012