Wednesday, May 30, 2007
Would you be my friend? a $580 million investment
Against my normal internet behaviour, but in line with the research for this assignment, I logged onto Myspace, and began to randomly check out some of the 140 million pages available, in hope of performing some good-old content analysis. Sooner than I would’ve expected, patterns began to emerge. Strangely similar sites which splatter their every bit of personality all over your computer screen. Listed are their favourite songs, the latest night-out photos, the impossibly large list of ‘friends’, which include both personal and commercial identities, and capped off with disjointed comments posted by their friends, which at best lacked the grammatical structure required for a year 7 essay. I suppose that due to the short preparation of the essay, it was a slight generalisation, but the repulsively egocentric content not only caused me to readjust my retinas, but my internet explorer to crash. How can something which is run by self-obsessed teenagers and 20-somethings socialites be the brightest light for the future of participatory media? And why is it so appealing that News Corp was willing to pay $580 million for it?
What is social networking?
Social network sites have arguably become the biggest phenomenon since the introduction of consumer-accessible cyberspace. Sites like Myspace, Facebook, Friendster and Bebo have slowly embedded themselves into the lives of mainstream audiences. Myspace, the mack daddy of all social network sites, have recently become such a dominate force in cyberspace, that it is fostering more hits than sites with more traditionally substantial contents. In November 2006, MySpace, surpassed Yahoo in the number of Web pages visited by U.S. Internet users, according to comScore Media Metrix, which recorded 38.7 billion page views for MySpace as opposed to 38.05 billion for Yahoo [Jesdanun, 2006]. Think about that for a second. More people are logging on to Myspace than a search engine which potentially will lead to every site on the World Wide Web. This illustrates the shift in balance towards participatory media, or Web 2.0, where everyday users are given the platform to create and share their content with millions of potential audiences around the globe. Though termed social network, these sites now offer much more than keeping old friends and making new ones. In essence, its ultimate aim is to create a large enough population to support a virtual community in which people have the ability to “blog, flirt, diarize, post pictures, share videos, creative artwork, and meet new people.” [Boyd, 2006]
Possibilities or deterioration of social networks?
Myspace’s 140 million users are more than just a number. Online networks have shown the ability to explode in popularity, gathering large audiences from all walks of life, even though often these sites had very specific groups/sub-cultures as its first users. When Friendster and other early social network sites appeared, it is believed that the early adopters often framed the social norms, not the system’s designers [Donath & Boyd, 2004], as the creators had no expectations on how much of a phenomenon it will become. This allowed the users to take advantage of the ‘technological affordances’ and early adopters used the site freely, repurposing the new medium to meet their needs. It soon became obvious that such technologies can produce a much larger variety of users than previously imagined. With further commercialisation and other facets of society joining the social networking phenomenon, the objectives on such sites are beginning to blur traditional boundaries.
As Jenkins puts forward, theoretically, online communities are defined through ‘voluntary, temporary and tactical affiliations’, are reaffirmed through common ‘intellectual enterprises and emotional investments’ and are ‘held together through the mutual production and reciprocal exchange of knowledge’. [Jenkins, 2004] The power of social networking sites lies in the notion of collective intelligence, where content can become far reaching given it is ‘relevant to a loose network of diverse publics’. [Jenkins, 2004] For example, Myspace’s success was due to its ability to include templates for mp3 upload and playback in its format, a defining feature for indie rock bands wanting to get their music into circulation. The ability to bypass previous industry gatekeepers gives Myspace the power for both producers and consumers, as content can theoretically travel from producers to consumers instantly. However, with this ease of distribution also comes the burden of being lost in the sea of information, with the current plethora of pages on social networking sites, the ability to find anything relevant is beginning to look bleak. However, even though most pages do not contain anything interesting beyond its close circle of friends, some sites do standout with content which fascinate the masses and through word-of-mouth nature of networks, it would spread rapidly to potential consumers worldwide. Initially, a few distinct communities populated the sites, but with time, boundaries between these communities began to fall as the six degrees of separation will begin to bridge the sub-cultures.
On a personal level, social networking sites’ ability to forego geographical boundaries, to communicate with many separate individuals simultaneously would have been otherwise impossible in traditional circumstances. Social network sites allow users to simulate physical interactions through an online environment, though may not always be preferred, it is the easiest and most cost effective way to interact. The danger of such simulation is the more dependent the user is on the technology, the more real and time consuming the online community becomes. Taking teenagers as an example, youth are more addicted to spending time online, not solely due to the transformational technology involved, but rather attributed to the lack of mobility and access to youth spaces where they can hang out uninterrupted. [Boyd, 2006]
Basically, social network sites have managed to create a free arena in which people are able to promote both ‘personal and commercial expansion.’ In this sense they are the fusion of personal and commercial elements of internet communications. Despite criticism to the contrary, most individual members know and interact with a number of their internet friends outside of the online community and in person. In this case, these sites simply serve as an alternative form of communication in which images, videos, and brief comments supplement an already active relationship. Social network sites like Friendster and Myspace are constructed in a way that requires people to indicate relationships or friendships with other participants. A prevalent assumption by many observers is that the articulation of friendship is equivalent to friendship. In other words, if people say that they are friends on these sites, they must be friends in other contexts as well [Boyd, 2004]. However, it is obvious with a brief glance at most MySpace profiles that people are collecting a great deal more friends than it is humanly possible for them to maintain any working relationship with.
This is where a great deal of criticism originates in regards to social networking sites. MySpace promotes superficial communication in which the MySpace interface itself allows individuals to represent themselves in a way that is both false and uninhibited by the restrictions of face-to-face communication [Barnes, 2006]. Such criticism is the result of insufficient understanding of precisely what it is that the MySpace community is and the varied levels of communication that it provides. MySpace is not simply a site for connecting friends, it is a place for networking and personal promotion or marketing. Marketing involves commercialism and commercialism is superficial. When we see photos, interviews, or stories about celebrities, we do not see accurate representations of these individuals. We do not see what they look like first thing in the morning, or what they are like without the public limelight. As a matter of fact everything about their person is completely manufactured, or at least portrayed from a very acute angle, from the roles they play for a public that craves drama to the alteration of every photo in which they are featured to either augment or enhance their beauty and public image. Image being the operative word here. As a networking tool MySpace provides the possibility for individuals to achieve a level of personal promotion close to that of a Hollywood celebrity.
This becomes a more visible problem when people are seemingly replacing real physical spaces with online space. Granted, a cyber world eliminates a lot of the issues faced by social networking in the physical world. The meaning of friends in an online environment can be interpreted very different to traditional notions of friendship. Many users’ online and offline friendship patterns are quite contrary, which complicates the absolute meaning of these friendships. [Perkowitz, 2003] Users feel that the networking site’s duality of distance and proximity are the best way to approach certain individuals, where users have the opportunity to share intimate details without being physically intimate at the same time. In one’s online identity, it is important to be connected to all of your friends, acquaintances, celebrities and other people/entities you respect. Attention-seekers and musicians often seek to be friended by as many people as possible, but most people are concerned with only those that they know or think are cool. [Kornblum, 2006] Of course, a link does not necessarily mean a relationship or even an acquaintance; sometimes it is only as meaningful as its function, a link to another page.
Invading yourspace? The commercialization of Myspace.
Commercial establishments have only recently begun to discover the limitless potential of online social network sites and its subsequent ability to sell their products. On a basic level, the popularity of social network sites allows revenue to be generated from click ads, which is the main source of income for these sites. However, the more interesting issue is that regarding “viral marketing”, a type of advertisements aimed at word-of-mouth and brand association/recognition. Social network sites allow various forms of advertisements to be produced within a ready made template, and to be distributed through a cost-free community, without the repulsive label of being advertisements (at least initially), as all interactions between commercial and personal identities online are simply labelled as ‘social’ due to interface limitations.
Given the identity producing nature of social network sites, marketers no longer need to force the first interaction, users on the sites are willingly adding bands/clubs/bars to their ‘friends’ list as they are seen to be representative of their profile and lifestyle. Currently, the entertainment industry is benefiting significantly from social networking sites, in particular Myspace. With its roots in indie rock music, Myspace have now evolved into a big musical advertising machine. Using an example close to heart, Famous, a Saturday club night at QHB in Melbourne, has over 9000 friends on Myspace, while few are legitimate real life associates such as resident DJs, bar staff, and other related bars and clubs, the majority of its ‘friends’ select Famous not because they know the owners of the bar, or the organisers of the night, or even the makers of the website, but those who have been or heard of the club and openly recognises it as apart of their identity. This is the power of brand association. In the comments column, the most constructive of conversation between personal users are “I love famous”, and “can’t wait till famous again”, and other meaningless one-sided ramblings.
At first glance, the Famous Myspace page closely resemble a backstreet wall in urban Melbourne, jagged and disorganised posters clustering its bulletin boards, comments posted by ‘friends’ are nothing more than advertisements from upcoming events, products of artists who have performed at Famous, and various other forms of promotional material. This will all no doubt be forwarded to those who have ‘befriended’ Famous. Except in this case, rather than hitting the delete button, those who are receiving these sorts of ‘spam’ are seeing it as a social interaction between Famous and them specifically, thus proudly plastering it all over their Myspace pages, and in turn forward to their next degree of friendship circles. In other sites such as Facebook and Friendster, lovers of obscure bands, specific club goers, even a particular brand’s clothing enthusiasts have all formed sub-culture communities, where it is deemed necessary to further produce a visible online identity with tangible and intangible commodities. This becomes a marketer’s dream, where promotional material carrying an online identity can now travel through cyberspace without restriction.
Whether these questions are about users defining their identities through the brands they buy, or whether they’re deliberately inserted by stealth marketers to raise brand awareness and collect information, the effect is the same: on Myspace, interaction between users is effectively eliminating lines between personal communication and advertising. [Hill, 2007]
Future
Many have argued that social networking sites are nothing but a ‘fad’, a craze soon to be replaced by another medium. Currently there are dozens of popular social networking sites online and scores of others popping up everyday. The trend in mainstream social networks will inevitably dry out as the market reaches saturation. The perceived value of social networks, in general, is diminished with each new service entering the market.
Due to its word-of-mouth nature, a social network brings about a tidal wave worth of users to the site but also has the potential to take them away just as easily. [Shuaib, 2007] We are already seeing the gradual decline of Myspace and the rise of Facebook (2 million additional users per month) as the new thing. [Levy, 2006] Unlike what Myspace has done with music, new social network sites offer very little in terms of innovation, instead simply create gimmicks which attract users on a short-term basis, with the hope of generation enough revenue in that space of time.
Even though a lot of the pages on social networking sites tend to be nothing more than attention seeking egocentric shrines, the value and goal of a social networking site is depends solely on the individual, therefore making it a continuously evolving medium. A great deal of site members focus on strictly personal relationships, while others combine personal and promotional elements, and still others create purely promotional profiles. MySpace is not the beginning of a ‘cataclysmic deterioration in interpersonal communications’. [Melber, 2006] On the contrary, it is the beginning of a revolution in networking and personal promotion. Individuals will continue, as they always have, to maintain meaningful and dedicated relationships based upon face-to-face interaction. However, what they find on MySpace is a marriage of personal and commercial communication, with the development of complex networks connecting people from across the world, it just may be a glimpse of what our society would look like in the near future.
What is social networking?
Social network sites have arguably become the biggest phenomenon since the introduction of consumer-accessible cyberspace. Sites like Myspace, Facebook, Friendster and Bebo have slowly embedded themselves into the lives of mainstream audiences. Myspace, the mack daddy of all social network sites, have recently become such a dominate force in cyberspace, that it is fostering more hits than sites with more traditionally substantial contents. In November 2006, MySpace, surpassed Yahoo in the number of Web pages visited by U.S. Internet users, according to comScore Media Metrix, which recorded 38.7 billion page views for MySpace as opposed to 38.05 billion for Yahoo [Jesdanun, 2006]. Think about that for a second. More people are logging on to Myspace than a search engine which potentially will lead to every site on the World Wide Web. This illustrates the shift in balance towards participatory media, or Web 2.0, where everyday users are given the platform to create and share their content with millions of potential audiences around the globe. Though termed social network, these sites now offer much more than keeping old friends and making new ones. In essence, its ultimate aim is to create a large enough population to support a virtual community in which people have the ability to “blog, flirt, diarize, post pictures, share videos, creative artwork, and meet new people.” [Boyd, 2006]
Possibilities or deterioration of social networks?
Myspace’s 140 million users are more than just a number. Online networks have shown the ability to explode in popularity, gathering large audiences from all walks of life, even though often these sites had very specific groups/sub-cultures as its first users. When Friendster and other early social network sites appeared, it is believed that the early adopters often framed the social norms, not the system’s designers [Donath & Boyd, 2004], as the creators had no expectations on how much of a phenomenon it will become. This allowed the users to take advantage of the ‘technological affordances’ and early adopters used the site freely, repurposing the new medium to meet their needs. It soon became obvious that such technologies can produce a much larger variety of users than previously imagined. With further commercialisation and other facets of society joining the social networking phenomenon, the objectives on such sites are beginning to blur traditional boundaries.
As Jenkins puts forward, theoretically, online communities are defined through ‘voluntary, temporary and tactical affiliations’, are reaffirmed through common ‘intellectual enterprises and emotional investments’ and are ‘held together through the mutual production and reciprocal exchange of knowledge’. [Jenkins, 2004] The power of social networking sites lies in the notion of collective intelligence, where content can become far reaching given it is ‘relevant to a loose network of diverse publics’. [Jenkins, 2004] For example, Myspace’s success was due to its ability to include templates for mp3 upload and playback in its format, a defining feature for indie rock bands wanting to get their music into circulation. The ability to bypass previous industry gatekeepers gives Myspace the power for both producers and consumers, as content can theoretically travel from producers to consumers instantly. However, with this ease of distribution also comes the burden of being lost in the sea of information, with the current plethora of pages on social networking sites, the ability to find anything relevant is beginning to look bleak. However, even though most pages do not contain anything interesting beyond its close circle of friends, some sites do standout with content which fascinate the masses and through word-of-mouth nature of networks, it would spread rapidly to potential consumers worldwide. Initially, a few distinct communities populated the sites, but with time, boundaries between these communities began to fall as the six degrees of separation will begin to bridge the sub-cultures.
On a personal level, social networking sites’ ability to forego geographical boundaries, to communicate with many separate individuals simultaneously would have been otherwise impossible in traditional circumstances. Social network sites allow users to simulate physical interactions through an online environment, though may not always be preferred, it is the easiest and most cost effective way to interact. The danger of such simulation is the more dependent the user is on the technology, the more real and time consuming the online community becomes. Taking teenagers as an example, youth are more addicted to spending time online, not solely due to the transformational technology involved, but rather attributed to the lack of mobility and access to youth spaces where they can hang out uninterrupted. [Boyd, 2006]
Basically, social network sites have managed to create a free arena in which people are able to promote both ‘personal and commercial expansion.’ In this sense they are the fusion of personal and commercial elements of internet communications. Despite criticism to the contrary, most individual members know and interact with a number of their internet friends outside of the online community and in person. In this case, these sites simply serve as an alternative form of communication in which images, videos, and brief comments supplement an already active relationship. Social network sites like Friendster and Myspace are constructed in a way that requires people to indicate relationships or friendships with other participants. A prevalent assumption by many observers is that the articulation of friendship is equivalent to friendship. In other words, if people say that they are friends on these sites, they must be friends in other contexts as well [Boyd, 2004]. However, it is obvious with a brief glance at most MySpace profiles that people are collecting a great deal more friends than it is humanly possible for them to maintain any working relationship with.
This is where a great deal of criticism originates in regards to social networking sites. MySpace promotes superficial communication in which the MySpace interface itself allows individuals to represent themselves in a way that is both false and uninhibited by the restrictions of face-to-face communication [Barnes, 2006]. Such criticism is the result of insufficient understanding of precisely what it is that the MySpace community is and the varied levels of communication that it provides. MySpace is not simply a site for connecting friends, it is a place for networking and personal promotion or marketing. Marketing involves commercialism and commercialism is superficial. When we see photos, interviews, or stories about celebrities, we do not see accurate representations of these individuals. We do not see what they look like first thing in the morning, or what they are like without the public limelight. As a matter of fact everything about their person is completely manufactured, or at least portrayed from a very acute angle, from the roles they play for a public that craves drama to the alteration of every photo in which they are featured to either augment or enhance their beauty and public image. Image being the operative word here. As a networking tool MySpace provides the possibility for individuals to achieve a level of personal promotion close to that of a Hollywood celebrity.
This becomes a more visible problem when people are seemingly replacing real physical spaces with online space. Granted, a cyber world eliminates a lot of the issues faced by social networking in the physical world. The meaning of friends in an online environment can be interpreted very different to traditional notions of friendship. Many users’ online and offline friendship patterns are quite contrary, which complicates the absolute meaning of these friendships. [Perkowitz, 2003] Users feel that the networking site’s duality of distance and proximity are the best way to approach certain individuals, where users have the opportunity to share intimate details without being physically intimate at the same time. In one’s online identity, it is important to be connected to all of your friends, acquaintances, celebrities and other people/entities you respect. Attention-seekers and musicians often seek to be friended by as many people as possible, but most people are concerned with only those that they know or think are cool. [Kornblum, 2006] Of course, a link does not necessarily mean a relationship or even an acquaintance; sometimes it is only as meaningful as its function, a link to another page.
Invading yourspace? The commercialization of Myspace.
Commercial establishments have only recently begun to discover the limitless potential of online social network sites and its subsequent ability to sell their products. On a basic level, the popularity of social network sites allows revenue to be generated from click ads, which is the main source of income for these sites. However, the more interesting issue is that regarding “viral marketing”, a type of advertisements aimed at word-of-mouth and brand association/recognition. Social network sites allow various forms of advertisements to be produced within a ready made template, and to be distributed through a cost-free community, without the repulsive label of being advertisements (at least initially), as all interactions between commercial and personal identities online are simply labelled as ‘social’ due to interface limitations.
Given the identity producing nature of social network sites, marketers no longer need to force the first interaction, users on the sites are willingly adding bands/clubs/bars to their ‘friends’ list as they are seen to be representative of their profile and lifestyle. Currently, the entertainment industry is benefiting significantly from social networking sites, in particular Myspace. With its roots in indie rock music, Myspace have now evolved into a big musical advertising machine. Using an example close to heart, Famous, a Saturday club night at QHB in Melbourne, has over 9000 friends on Myspace, while few are legitimate real life associates such as resident DJs, bar staff, and other related bars and clubs, the majority of its ‘friends’ select Famous not because they know the owners of the bar, or the organisers of the night, or even the makers of the website, but those who have been or heard of the club and openly recognises it as apart of their identity. This is the power of brand association. In the comments column, the most constructive of conversation between personal users are “I love famous”, and “can’t wait till famous again”, and other meaningless one-sided ramblings.
At first glance, the Famous Myspace page closely resemble a backstreet wall in urban Melbourne, jagged and disorganised posters clustering its bulletin boards, comments posted by ‘friends’ are nothing more than advertisements from upcoming events, products of artists who have performed at Famous, and various other forms of promotional material. This will all no doubt be forwarded to those who have ‘befriended’ Famous. Except in this case, rather than hitting the delete button, those who are receiving these sorts of ‘spam’ are seeing it as a social interaction between Famous and them specifically, thus proudly plastering it all over their Myspace pages, and in turn forward to their next degree of friendship circles. In other sites such as Facebook and Friendster, lovers of obscure bands, specific club goers, even a particular brand’s clothing enthusiasts have all formed sub-culture communities, where it is deemed necessary to further produce a visible online identity with tangible and intangible commodities. This becomes a marketer’s dream, where promotional material carrying an online identity can now travel through cyberspace without restriction.
Whether these questions are about users defining their identities through the brands they buy, or whether they’re deliberately inserted by stealth marketers to raise brand awareness and collect information, the effect is the same: on Myspace, interaction between users is effectively eliminating lines between personal communication and advertising. [Hill, 2007]
Future
Many have argued that social networking sites are nothing but a ‘fad’, a craze soon to be replaced by another medium. Currently there are dozens of popular social networking sites online and scores of others popping up everyday. The trend in mainstream social networks will inevitably dry out as the market reaches saturation. The perceived value of social networks, in general, is diminished with each new service entering the market.
Due to its word-of-mouth nature, a social network brings about a tidal wave worth of users to the site but also has the potential to take them away just as easily. [Shuaib, 2007] We are already seeing the gradual decline of Myspace and the rise of Facebook (2 million additional users per month) as the new thing. [Levy, 2006] Unlike what Myspace has done with music, new social network sites offer very little in terms of innovation, instead simply create gimmicks which attract users on a short-term basis, with the hope of generation enough revenue in that space of time.
Even though a lot of the pages on social networking sites tend to be nothing more than attention seeking egocentric shrines, the value and goal of a social networking site is depends solely on the individual, therefore making it a continuously evolving medium. A great deal of site members focus on strictly personal relationships, while others combine personal and promotional elements, and still others create purely promotional profiles. MySpace is not the beginning of a ‘cataclysmic deterioration in interpersonal communications’. [Melber, 2006] On the contrary, it is the beginning of a revolution in networking and personal promotion. Individuals will continue, as they always have, to maintain meaningful and dedicated relationships based upon face-to-face interaction. However, what they find on MySpace is a marriage of personal and commercial communication, with the development of complex networks connecting people from across the world, it just may be a glimpse of what our society would look like in the near future.
Tuesday, May 15, 2007
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