Dialogue and the Social Self...

First, I have to say WOW in the sense that, this is so much information with various philosophical perspectives, and in another aspect in amazement of the of the tangents these scholars are able to look at in answering who someone is.  In this chapter I learned about the pragmatists and cultural historical thoughts of the social self.  Both make sense when I look at the simple thoughts behind the two ideas.  I will focus on the pragmatists outlook.  Pragmatists looked at the development of social self "through dialogue within groups of interacting individuals.  Ideas belong to a culture and are 'tools...that people devise to cope with the world in which they find themselves'" (pg 23).  I found it interesting how William James's broke down the aspects in which to discover the "empirical 'me'" by looking at the "material me", the "social me", and the "spiritual me".  The one particular idea that popped out at me, in an aspect of social networking, was under the "social me".  It state that "James thought that we all have as many social selves as those who know us".  This is very true because most of my friends, past or present, became my friends because we had similar outlooks on a particular perspective of life, whether it was hobbies, views, career, or what not.  This is the different "social me's" that I have, because not all my friends are friends with each other, however the ones in the similar "circles" probably are.  Mead said it better than I can in relation to my previous sentence in saying that, "...the nature of self experience as embedded in temporality and social life through the use of theories of relativity, in which a common social life is 'sliced' by the different individuals within it according to their own activities, and this 'slicing' composes individual experience within the group" (pg 44).  I learned a lot from this chapter and I could go on about writing more about it, however I don't want to write a novel about this chapter and I will keep it as a blog.  With this said I just want to touch on a part of the reading I found fascinating..."social meaning and values are never table for long, for they are constantly going through a process of destabilization and reconstruction" (pg 43).  I believe that this is a big part of answering "who I am" because while we all grow up, our views on particular matter may change, and this process of solidifying stable meanings is a large part of who we become. 

So how does all this pertain to Social Networking?  I specifically stuck to blogging these points in the book because these perspectives on the social self can easily relate to Social Networking sites like Facebook.   The various "social me's" are found in peoples profiles and web pages, and if we want to analyze it by looking at someone's "about me" or "interests" sub-page, we could probably break it down into the "material me", "social me", and "spiritual me".  Furthermore, the various "friends" we befriend through Facebook (or other Social Networking sites) is the collective of friends we have from various "social me's" that people know us as.  Facebook makes it really easy to see who knows you by your specific  "social me" by looking at a person's "mutual friend".  I can't count how many times I found an old Army buddy from the "mutual friend" function on Facebook.  Once again, I can tie this reading into Social Networking sites in so many ways, but I want to keep this blog a blog and not a novel.  This was a very interesting and informative chapter, as well as philosophical, but as we read through this book, its going to be a continuing challenge of understanding and tracking the various ways scholars can analyze "who I am".