The Young Researchers Forum 2012 20th & 21st January, 2012 Western Province Aesthetic Resort, Colombo

Session: The Personal and the Public Date: 21st January, 2012 Time: 3.30pm-4.30pm
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The Young Researchers Forum 2012 Youth and Facebook: The Impact on the Public Private Distinction Tharindi Udalagama tharindi.udalagama@gmail.com The society as we know it is changing rapidly, the speed of change is beyond comprehension as the speed of information is governing every sphere. The developments in information processing, storage and transmission of information technologies in everyday life has made society highly networked with the convergence of telecommunication and computing that links banks, homes, offices, factories, shops and the like (Nayar 2004). As John Naisbitt suggests (1984; cited in Nayar 2004: 48) computer technology is to the information age what mechanization was to the industrial revolution. Information networks link together different locations within and between offices, a town, a region, a continent even the entire world (Webster 2002). The constraint of the clock and distance have been radically relieved, organizations as well as individuals are capable of managing their affairs effectively on a global scale. It is understood that Information and Communication technologies have dominated and reshaped society in a manner that social change is inevitable. The effects of these changes have affected the formation of private and public spheres especially in the lives of the young. The forte of this paper is to unravel its impact on the formation of the public and the private spheres, especially in the lives of its young users in Sri Lanka, with the findings of a conducted qualitative inquiry in the years 2009-2010 on the web based social network called Facebook. The totality of human interactions can be distinctively recognized in the two spheres of public and private domains. The earliest discussions of the division between public and private spheres date to ancient Greece, where public referred to the realm of politics and private to the areas of family and economic life. The first recorded uses of the word public in English identifies the public with the common good in society whilst private was used to mean privileged, at a high governmental level (Sennett 1992). By
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The Young Researchers Forum 2012 the end of the 17th Century, the opposition of public and private was given a meaning that we use to date. Public meant open to the scrutiny of anyone, whereas private meant a sheltered region of life defined by ones family and friends (Sennett 1992). Public came to mean interactions outside the life of family and close friends with complex social groups in the capital city whereas private meant the interactions with ones family and close friends within the limits of what could be termed as the inner social circle. Sennett (1992) correlates the changes in the definitions of the two terms public and private with the conditions of behaviour and terms of beliefs in the 18th Century. He states that as the cities grew, and the developed networks of sociability independent of direct royal control, places where strangers might regularly meet grew up. This era saw the building of massive urban parks as an attempt to make streets fit the special purpose of pedestrian strolling as a form of relaxation. During this Century coffee houses, cafes and coaching inns became social centers and the theater and opera houses became open to a wide public through the open sale of tickets rather than the older practice whereby aristocratic patrons distributed places. Urban amenities were diffused out from a small elite circle to a broader spectrum of society, so that even the laboring classes began to adopt some of the habits of sociability, like promenades in parks, which were formerly the exclusion provinces of the elite, walking in their private gardens or giving an evening at the theater. The changes of social conditions of behaviour and beliefs of an era determine the regulation of the public and private spheres. In the contemporary age of information, a similar change has occurred in determining the public and private spheres with the spread of Information and Communication technologies. In todays context the most talked about Information and Communication Technology are the web-based social networks; Twitter, Facebook, My Space, etc. Preliminary observations revealed that the most popular social networking site among the computer literate Sri Lankan youth with access to the internet is Facebook. The founders of
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The Young Researchers Forum 2012 Facebook created a new means for friends and family to keep in touch and share information about their lives, that is popularly defined as digital map of peoples real world social connections. But, the users have found new methods to use this technology to accomplish their goals in life. For example, almost all FM radio channels and TV channels in Sri Lanka have Facebook pages to inform their fans of their events. And in the global context we have witnessed the use of social networking sites such as Twitter and Facebook for organizing and enforcing revolutions against totalitarian

governments in the Middle East. Facebook has become a common parlance in contemporary society, especially among the youth. With a generation of youth growing up in front of computer screens glued to the Facebook, the division of the two spheres; public and private is very much marred. There are specific norms and values governing each sphere. In the age of the internet, this public-private distinction is constantly violated due to the speed in the exchange of information. This paper will illuminate how these two spheres have overlapped on Facebook and how this overlapping affects the social life of the youth of Sri Lanka, the paper will also situate Facebook as a Public sphere that was widely active during the presidential elections in 2010, which is maybe the closest comparison to the middleeastern revolutions in the Sri Lankan context. REFERENCES Nayar, P.K., 2004, Virtual Worlds: Culture and Politics in the age of Cybertechnology, Sage Publications: New Delhi Sennett, R., 1992, The Fall of the Public Man, W.W. Norton: New York Webster, F., 2002, Theories of the Information Society. 2nd ed. Routledge: New York

The Young Researchers Forum 2012