Anetta Orlova:

– What’s the psychological background of social networks arrival?

– Any process can be treated as both a positive and a negative one, you know, it can be compared to cutting appendicitis, which can be in itself either good or bad taking into consideration the fact that it still runs some certain functions in our body.

We live in a modern world, moreover it is a megalopolis, where people are just naturally becoming aggressive. While we are moving in the streets, we meet as many people as a man living some hundreds years ago could not have met within the whole of his life. And they are all strangers. And at such moments we tend to think as animals, I mean we try to figure out, whether a man is dangerous or not. And take even the tube, where in the rush hour you haven’t got even a slight possibility to keep your private space in this crush, all permissive limits of energetic field being violated.

Within the day a person accumulates a great number of neurotic impulses. As a result, when in the evening he is invited by his friends to meet, he will most probably refuse (in 9 cases out of 10). The reason is that they didn’t manage to relief the stress they’ve got both at work and in the street, where they constantly have to socialize with extremely various people, talk over the phone, be afraid for their working place every other minute, click with the mouse and look into the monitor and check great deal of information in it. Well, now we are home and what happens? We again come across a vast deal of negative information concerning linen cleaning, cooking, washing up, etc.

All that brought to the mail-clustering method of communication, which lies in involving a couple of houses standing by, still not being always possible due to interests discrepancies and frequent changes of residence. So a person starts checking the alternatives, which is enjoyed by such geniuses as Albert Popkov and leads to the surrogate alternative to real communication arrival. The latter satisfies a man’s communicational needs, minimizing the necessary resources at the same time. Now the process of socialization is as magic as this: you just click the mouse and you have a friend, you do not like it, click, click, and you are not friends any more… You do not need to meditate on the issue, to decide for the appropriate time, to go and buy something… What a sweet gift: just send sms and get presents for three friends. Well you don’t even have to express your emotions with words: you just click and get as many emoticons as many emotions you can imagine.

– Well, it may be worth introducing unlimited telephone fares at the legislative level, that may abandon the necessity of the Internet as a source of communication?

– No. A telephone call is the most powerful sort of communication ever existed. If we get a letter, we can afford ourselves not to read the one or not to reply it, or we may reply but later on… That gives us the opportunity to control our own time. It’s all different with a phone call which demands an instant feedback. It does demand to meditate on with whom you are going to talk to and how you are going to do that, and what is most important – you have to wind up communication. On the Internet you feel free just to put an emoticon, just not to answer, just give up the talk at that very phrase, which causes you feel somehow uncomfortable, kind of “gone offline”. And you know that will be less tactless, than an unaccepted challenge. But one shouldn’t forget that it is a kind of a surrogate leaving out any exclusivity.

– It seems that a social network provides us with the possibility to regulate and design our interrelations?

– That’s it. What does favourite community imply? This is a pure alternative to a dating site. As soon as you get registered, you start off with checking the opposite sex’s pages or those of the people you are interested in by indicating this interest. Once you get a feedback, you feel that you’ve just achieved a sort of mutuality. That is much simpler, than to get acquainted in, let’s say, a restaurant, where you have to think over how you are going to come up to the object of your interest, to say something, to react and to proceede with the chat so that everything will work out. But the first thing we are afraid of in these cases is hearing “no”, which is naturally positively avoidable in the net.

– Moreover web-communication teaches us to tell lies…

– The same can be applied to any new information culture which gives many options to invent any new alternative. I am an advocate of social networks, but I wish they were more closed. Let’s take “Odnoklassniki” for instance – it has no systems of people’s differentiation. I mean, they have no resumes to a kind of figure out a person as an individual. People are moving there absolutely at random and we can learn nothing about them. We need to bring closed communities, which would unite people according to their interests. And I hope that FaceGallery is going to become one of them. The most important here is not to make a mistake allowing public access to the resource, you can cause all other people there choke.

– What do celebrities look for in Internet communities?

– They are really rare guests there. Usually these are “green” stars, who are quite enthusiastic about the thing, once they feel other people getting a bit interested in them. So the Internet turns into the cheapest way to promote. You can get along with everybody and feel somehow high about the number of guests at your account or the number of people having watched your today’s air…

You can also meet established celebrities in communities. Their purpose is mostly to renew their image and attract new generation to their character. They count having a private blog or a profile to be a trendy thing nowadays. Any celebrity is constantly struggling his or her place in Mass Media sources, which stands for the fact that they prefer to use every other opportunity to come close to their potential audience. In this case an Internet community is just one of the constituents of his or her communicative strategy background.

– How necessary is it to be everywhere today?

– It’s no doubt not good that today we are having that great number of sites. Only PR specialists or Mass Media workers have to manage to be everywhere. They are to monitor the net to be always on track, which enables them to find out something brilliant after all. Well, if we mean a person having nothing common with media business, a person who is not a paedophile searching for sweet kids and a person, who is not working out some rich daddies… (laughing). Then this person will make use of no more than a couple of sources.

– How strong is a personal individuality expressed in the net?

– I believe that it’s almost not expressed as the only channels we use within this kind of communication are visual and textual languages. Provided a person is not a psychologist, it’s almost impossible to design more or less precise portrait of a collocutor. Well, as far as another advantage of FaceGallery is concerned, which appeals to me well, is that the users will be able to meet in some certain place, a club, which will invest into their full-fledged communication and maybe will help them to figure out their mutual interests for the further contacts and cooperation.