I worry that I leave it too long between posts here. It’s just that you know when you really want to be creative and write something really interesting but because you’ve been really busy having a real life and not one of these ‘virtual lives’ it gets harder and harder to come back and write something worth reading.

Maybe it has something to do with not spending days locked away in my little ’study’ writing in order to justify the stupid amount of money I spent on tuition fees last year. Maybe it has something to do with my new found ignorance of current affairs in favour of Heat World. Maybe it has something to do with the lack of excitement that erupts in me when another moron finds out all that lies beyond the veil?

It’s funny because although there is nothing more I love than reading about ‘Iran’s young women’ finding ‘private paths to freedom’ I seem to get really irritated by the way people write about the ’separation between public and private spaces’ as though it’s a news flash. Reality check Peter: We all make a degree of separation between our public and private spaces. It is an ‘important issue’ for all of us called ‘getting on with life’. It’s that judgement we all make about what is appropriate in our different circumstances and surroundings, whether restricted by law, culture, tradition, habit or whatever. But credit where credits due and all that – it makes for a good read and I’m glad that such topics are being written about and as a result I hope that people can get a better understanding not just about Iranian youth culture but about the expression of youth culture more generally.

Which brings me on to the ubiquity of social networking in young lives. I got talking today about the benefits of social networking in business and it’s really got me thinking more about how people use social networking and for what purpose. If I’m completely honest I’d say that 95% of the time I use both Facebook and Myspace to lurk and the other 5% making my profile look interesting, adding photos or messaging old friends. As a rule I much prefer email but you know when you’ve completely lost touch with someone and then they pop up for a chat and you’re not too keen about giving them too many contact details? It’s like the perfect compromise!

So how can businesses benefit from using social network sites? Well in my opinion I’m not really sure they can. Most businesses have some form of software to set up collaborative forums, bulletin boards or news feeds and I don’t think it’s necessarily important for businesses to have a photo tagging option or ‘never-ending quiz’ feature. Portals on the other hand along with blogs and wikis – well that’s another story altogether.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 2nd, 2008 at 8:23 pm and is filed under News, Personal, Web 2.0 and tagged as blogging, iranian, youth. Print this blog post. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a comment, or trackback from your own site.