Social Media

Forget the term new media, it’s passed, it’s gone. Today’s key word is social media. What this term means is the following. Any medium that encourages conversations via new technologies, whether twitter, blogs and podcasts or forums is a social media. It is the idea that authority has disappeared. Rather than be talked to by the content producers a dialogue is formed. Liana Lehua of Girls gone geek.tv for example started following me just as I was listening to her talk on another podcast than your own. There is no need for the tabloid press to tell us what the “rockstars” are doing, rather they tell us themselves. Look at Leo Laporte’s blog. Look at Documentally’s two websites. Look at Loudmouthman, Jeff Pulver and others. These people all create content for us to enjoy. Each of these people is taking advantage of the social media to create a profile for their activities both as podcasts and textual content. Those who are new to the media, who have yet to create a name for themselves have a great opportunity. If you’re a sociable individual then take some time to learn about the social media movement and participate. Participation is a key concept. We are all publishers, we all have a website. We have moo cards and they’re social media bookmarks. They’re just a quick way of sharing contact information. As soon as we get to our computers we add those we meet and keep up to date with what we’re doing. It creates a great sense of unity. They’re also taking advantage of the new social media landscape. It’s a shame that most people are limited to zombie biting, vampires and other wastes of time rather than sharing their creative output. I wish more people would write about what’s important to them and share it via twitter, blogs and of course aggregate the content according to the various social media tools like Plaxo Pulse, Lijit and Tumblr. This is a call for more people to take proper advantage of the current social media trends and participate more actively. Don’t just join a social network and post photographs. Write and produce content as well.

According to a recent article in the Times England is top EU country for social networking with 5.6 hrs a month spent on social networking websites such as Facebook:

Britons are the ‘social networking’ champions of Europe, displaying a far greater appetite for websites such as Facebook, MySpace and Bebo than fellow citizens on the continent.

British internet users spent an average of 5.8 hours a month - about a 11 minutes a day - on such sites, in comparison with their nearest rivals the Germans, who spent 3.1 hours a month (6 minutes a day), according to research.

Social networking websites should never be down because their success comes from three factors; ease of use, accessibility, and reliability. With a good layout and good interaction, the website attracts the novice as well as the weather-beaten web surfer that’s seen it all. Accessibility is about it being easy to use on all browsers, whether mobile phones, laptops, or desktops. The third one is the key.

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Internet addiction and e-mail addiction should have gone the way of the polaroid years ago. Why are there several news sources claiming that people are addicted to e-mail? That’s like claiming that people are addicted to toilet paper or using a pen when writing on paper. It’s a question of practicality and it’s already an out of date claim. Who still writes e-mails when you can send a pm, write on someone’s wall or send out bulletins. Most of those reading this post will understand what I mean. When’s the last time you sent an e-mail? Hotmail has been replaced by Facebook and myspace. Why would you use old fashioned technology like e-mail when Facebook and myspace are more practical. There’s no spam, there’s no spending twenty minutes looking for the names and addresses. It’s a pointless article that demonstrates a lack of understanding of the new online communication channels. There are so many to be used, whether for photo, audio, video, or other. As an afterthought, it’s a bunch of statisticians having fun with numbers. Why don’t they do polls like the one I did, why don’t they give some theory behind the article? I haven’t even read the article, skimming was enough for my prejudice for such an article to form. Get the early adopters to write and explain the relevance of such statements, not the computer illiterate. I want the skills I have learned through my media tech and society module to be used. “Science sans conscience n’est que ruine de l’ame” or in this context, “stats without analysis are no more than a waste of time”. ;)

What’s the worst thing about being a student. The stress never disappears. What’s the best thing about being a media student? As long as you can find the theoretical background that goes with an activity you love you can justify doing a case study on the topic. I’m fresh back from the library where I went through looking for some books about the internet and society, the virtual community, reading digital culture, The World Wide Web and contemporary cultural theory, and finally the social shaping of Technology. I’m not going to read every single page but rather going to explore the notion of community and how it affects contemporary life. I know that the World Wide Web has progressed from such a point that being online is no longer the domain of geeks but rather the empire of all those with interesting lives. Look at musicians and sites like Myspace for example. Look at the FIBA website during the FIBA 2006 world Championship. Look at everyone posting pictures of cats on various websites. It’s part of the digital lifestyle. The premise of my case study is simple. Whereas five years ago being online was seen as something that only the least socially apt of people would do the opposite is now true, as demonstrated by the popularity of Myspace for a while, Facebook at the moment and then Virb for the near future. Those who saw the death of society because of how technology is getting people to stay at home without conversing with anyone in their physical world is a thing of the past. Twitter, Jaiku, Facebook (the mobile version) MSN messenger - the mobile version all ensure that we’re wired whether we’re sitting in a bedroom on a beautiful sunny day or standing outside under the torrential rain. Of course, there’s no rain but the point remains the same. A world where people can only be online from behind a computer is gone hence greater sociability. Let’s see how I manage to integrate that notion into my case study ;)

Jaiku is a Finnish software that makes conversing with people easy. It’s an advanced form of chatroom and I love it. It works on the same principle as twitter with the added bonus of having feed reading and integration as a bonus. If I’m going out for the day but I want people to know where I am at any given point in time I can send messages to twitter because it’s the price of a local phone call rather than international, as with Jaiku where the message is sent to Finland. I added my blog therefore a summary of blog posts will automatically be added to my jaiku feed. I could add flickr, my video feeds and other feeds if I so desire and it should work. On Jaiku I love how conversations can take place based around posts about what someone is doing. One person talked about only having 5 gigs left on their hard drive and a short conversation followed on from that post. Leo Laporte commented on his twitter identity being ussurped recently and this encouraged a flurry of activity. It’s like many of the Web forums I’ve visited. People join a community and select their friends so that they get updates whenever someone posts. The difference is that there is a migration away from the desktop and laptop to the mobile phone. It’s becoming an integral part of people’s lives. Of course at the moment it’s for early adopters rather than anyone but over time when it becomes more socialy acceptable we should find a progression whereby information workers are no longer tied to their desks.

I have been studying and discussing media tech and society. I have also been listening to the podcasts from the SXSW event on interactivity and my view of technology and daily life has changed. That’s reflected by what I was going to post as an answer to a comment on flickr. The iphone will sell because it’s what people want. People have accounts on flickr, they’re part of myspace and they’re on facebook. There friends are as well. Recently I’ve been going out with a camera and taking up to 180 pictures in one night. I upload them to facebook, controlling who can see them and they’re popular. People get round to requesting more pictures so I need to take more. With my mobile phone comes a one gig mini sd card therefore I can store thousands of pictures. I show people the pictures and if they want to see them online then at least I’ve got a practical way of getting people to approve them. What was SXSW about? Interactivity. Why? because social networking websites encourage the free sharing of all the media you’re creating.

Claire - Apr 1, 2007

What’s the subject of your dissertation and where do you go to school? Tried to find both bits of information on your blog, and I’m sure its there, just wanted to ask to save some time. Thanks, I enjoyed perusing your blog. Good luck with writing.

I love technology, especially in the form of online communities. I’ve been part of so many online communities I have some degree of expertise. I’ve seen the birth of the chatroom and it’s evolution, the popularisation of instant messaging and through flipside and nochicktrix I’ve seen the forming of virtual communities. More recently I’ve seen the increase from virtual communities to real communities. Over the past two years, almost everyone I know has created a myspace account and for a while, this was the best place for people to be. More recently though people have moved to Facebook. Having more than 140 friends, of which only three I do not know, is a sign of how times have changed. It’s actually fashionable to be part of an online/offline community. All the parties I’ve recently been to have been advertised on Facebook among other places and it’s become the social networking site of choice. If you’re not there you don’t know what’s going on anymore. It’s a great shift. It’s also replacing e-mail. Why e-mail people when all your friends are on Facebook. Why not take advantage of unlimited photo uploads to Facebook to add all those past nights for everyone to enjoy. I love the way technology is going. It’s sociable.

Twitter is a global short messaging system that allows people to post what they are doing 140 characters at a time. For the moment it is a relatively new phenomenon therefore it’s not too hard to keep track of the conversations going on. They are also geo logged. As you’re watching people’s messages you can see China say that they’re getting ready for the night ahead whilst in Europe people are going out to lunch. In the US people are complaining about having to wake up early in order to catch their planes, go for walks or in certain cases go to bed. It’s amusing and it’s reminiscent of ten years ago when I spent 13hrs in a chatroom at a time when spending ten minutes online was expensive. it’s cyclical. One thing is popular, then is replaced by something else before becoming popular again. One difference this time is the technology used. Google maps show where in the world people are tweeting from whilst the twitter site simply shows what people have written. It’s amusing to watch the world and what people are doing in it.