Talk:Joseph Young

Your writing was intelligent and thoughtful, but it could have used some fine-tuning to make it into a stronger, more cohesive argument.

1) Sources: Zittrain's book is a great read, but was not applicable to your argument. He mainly discusses how the Internet is becoming a propriety venture from its original purpose of a free communication tool. Your position is that the social networks are removing the "organic" nature of human interactions. The connection between the two was not clear. I did not think to use a blog post as one of my sources, and I thought your use of it was clever and applicable. The only problem is that it is hard to validate the accuracy of a blog post made by a completely anonymous user.

2) Avatar Process: You made a good point about how it was easier to create a fantasy character than a realistic one. This point was good at coming back to your central argument, which was about how technology is limited and does not capture the organic facets of human nature. I have to disagree with the argument you're making, however. I think the comparison you make between social networks and evolver.com is unfair: social networks definitely do remove what you call the organic aspects of human nature, but I don't think evolver.com was made to replace social interaction like you state. Evolver.com is just a tool to make rather accurate 3D pictures. It is not meant to serve as a virtual environment for people to communicate with each other.

3) Organization: You made valid arguments about how social networking sites are changing human interactions by removing the "organic" aspects of face-to-face communication. It just didn't seem coherent when you paired it up with the avatar construction process. The two parts seemed very disjoint.

Overall, I liked your essay, and was definitely more insightful than the majority of the others written here.

-L Andrews