Social Networking and Cloud Computing: Precarious Affordances for the "Prosumer"

drive. Arguably, the World Wide Web has always functioned in this manner, though the "easy-to-use" qualifier might not apply. In the early days of the Web, a producer needed basic coding or mark-up literacies, such as knowl edge of HTML, to build a website. While some websites offered minimal engagement to the user, for the most part, they were static, read-only, and unidirectional nodes of information.1 In recent years, use of web-based plat forms that engage fuller participation, that rely on "scaling" a large user-base of "prosumers" (producer/consumers), and that solicit user-generated con tent has proliferated, ushering in social networking and "cloud computing" as a part of everyday digital life.2 "Social networking" as a descriptor marks a huge range of personal ized cloud computing platforms and functions of interaction on the web. "Cloud computing" refers to the use of a network-based application that also handles user data storage. In other words, both the program and any documents, files, or data generated through this program all reside on the host's remote networked server and not on a user's own hard drive. Hugely popular instances of this sort of social networking and cloud computing are carried out on such sites as MySpace, Facebook, Flickr,YouTube, Twit ter, and Delicious.3 All of these platforms offer a variety of user controls that allow for the creation of personal networks, such as "adding a friend," "subscribing" to a channel or feed, and "following" other users as well as options to subscribe to an RSS (Really Simple Syndication) "feed" directed at a "reader."4 They also offer subplatforms, for activities such as blogging on a MySpace page, messaging users directly through the web interface or via cell phone-enabled SMS (Simple Message System) text messages, and incor porating various digital objects such as digital video and photos into a Tweet