Social Networks
As we've mentioned a few times on the blog lately, the Program in Comparative Media Studies featured the latest version of the MIT Communications Forum last week, an event particularly of potential interest to Consortium readers.
C3 Principal Investigator Henry Jenkins moderated a conversation between University of Chicago law and political science professor Cass Sunstein and Yochai Benkler of Harvard University's Berkman Center, in an event called "Our World Digitized: The Good, the Bad, the Ugly."
Sustein is the author of Republic.com 2.0 and Infotopia: How Many Minds Produce Knowledge, while Benkler wrote The Wealth of Networks.
According to the abstract:
Much discussion of our impending digital future is insular and without nuance. Skeptics talk mainly among themselves, while utopians and optimists also keep company mainly within their own tribal cultures. Today's forum challenges this unhelpful division, staging a conversation between two of our country's most thoughtful and influential writers on the promise and the perils of the Internet Age.
The audiocast of the event is already available here, and video will be available soon.
Continue reading "Our World Digitized: Henry Jenkins, Yochai Benkler, and Cass Sunstein" »
I was contacted by a reporter on Monday with The Chronicle of Higher Education about a decision from the NCAA to work with the NBA to develop a company to help cultivate the organization of youth basketball in the U.S. Prior to the request, I hadn't heard about the announcement, but there was particular interest in the Comparative Media Studies/Convergence Culture Consortium perspective because of the centrality of social networking at the center of the initiative.
I had a 10 or 15 minute conversation with a reporter who was contributing to the article, Catherine Rampell, in which we talked about the positives and negatives of such a decision, particularly how this approach has much promise but also plenty of potential stumbling blocks. You can see the full article here.
My appearance comes in the article's conclusion, in which they propose that reaction is mixed. As evidence of the mixed reaction, Brad Wolverton picks out mine as a positive response to the decision, saying "A project like this really catches my eye," and noting I thought it had "much potential," while Eric J. Anctil was quoted as saying that it's hard to get kids to "do what you want them to do" and that this "sounds like a good idea to people who are in their 40s and don't know what kids like."
Being a journalist myself, I know how the construction of articles goes, and perhaps it set Eric and I up as being on two opposite sides of the article, myself the CMS optimist and Eric the cynic. But, and perhaps Eric would agree with me, I'm both optimist AND cynic when it comes to announcements like this.
Continue reading "NCAA/NBA Social Network for Youth Basketball" »
The social blogging site LiveJournal.com has had quite a tumultuous past year, starting last May with what has been called Strikethrough 2007 by users, wherein hundreds of community and fan journals with content ranging from fanfiction to abuse and molestation survivor support groups to discussion groups for Nabokov's Lolita were deleted on claims of child pornography.
Then there was the licensing, then sale, to Russia-based company SUP toward the end of last year, which, according to Wired, raised suspicions of censorship among Russian users and general wariness of change amongst US users.
To ease the transition, a LiveJournal advisory board was created with founder Brad Fitzpatrick, Professor of Law at Stanford Lawrence Lessig, Internet investor and journalist Esther Dyson, and danah boyd, a fellow at Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society.
Despite some changes made to the abuse policies, the change in ownership caused little uproar amongst LiveJournal users, until now.
Last week, it was revealed that LiveJournal had made a drastic policy change, without bothering to inform current users. LiveJournal began with two account options, "basic" and "paid," with a former having less features than the "paid" account in exchange for being free. In 2006, LiveJournal introduced a "plus" account option, which offered more features than the "basic" in exchange for hosting ads.
Last week, they did away with the "basic" option, so that all new accounts would have to pay a fee or host ads. While this is an annoying (and arguably poor) decision, what really angered users was that there was no announcement of the change on the LiveJournal news feed, the news traveling instead by word of mouth. Users were angry that they were not notified of such a significant change in policy, and the revelation that at least three of the four members of the appointed advisory board had spoken out against the decision.
Continue reading "Participation and User Value: LiveJournal's Latest Debacle" »
As part of ongoing work about YouTube and the nature of online video sharing we've been pursuing, I've been looking lately at the some of the reasons for the ascension of the service to almost generic status as a shorthand for online video-sharing. The reasons for YouTube's rise to Xerox status in the US are many and murky, some having to do with diverse matters like site design, early mover status, canny marketing, the width of the stripes on their sweaters and champions they picked up along the way. Undoubtedly, however, I think that one of the reasons for YouTube's particular success is the downmarket quality of the video on the site. This is due to change, with the service currently testing technology that's been in development for a while now to increase the video and audio quality of the site, so it is perhaps prudent to point to some of the reasons I think grainy quality equalled success in YouTube's case.
Continue reading "YouTube's Downmarket Aesthetic" »
Perhaps it is intuitive, but it's always helpful to have some bolstering studies out there. News came out earlier this month of the results of a study from the Stern Business School at NYU that, among a variety of factors studied surrounding the success of album sales, blogs and social networks are particular indicators of successful album sales.
According to Jacqui Cheng with Ars Technica, the study found that albums with 40 or more posts made about them before their release received three times the average sales; for albums with 250 or more blog posts about them, the sales were six time the average.
Continue reading "Online Buzz as a Catalyst and a Symptom of Popularity" »
I've had the pleasure recently of having several conversations and exchanges with Bernard Timberg, a professor at East Carolina University. Bernard wrote a piece on soap operas more than 20 years ago that dealt with production, and Abigail Derecho and I are interviewing him for the collection we are putting together on soaps, looking at the rhetoric of the camera in American soaps today, compared to the early 1980s.
Timberg has written on a variety of subjects, including a substantial amount of work on talk shows, and he is passionate about fair use as well, which is where our most recent conversations were targeted.
Continue reading "Bernard Timberg and "Launch" and "Rebound" Texts" »
I wanted to provide an update from my post earlier this week with some more notes about my recent trip to Shanghai. For more posts on the trip, see my blog.
As I was getting ready for the trip, I stumbled onto a recently released study, produced by IAC and JWT, which compared the centrality of digital media in the life of teens in the United States and China. I used these statistics in my talk at the conference to suggest the importance of fostering new media literacies and ethics among Chinese youth. Here are some of the report's findings:
- Almost five times as many Chinese as American respondents said they have a parallel life online (61 percent vs. 13 percent).
- More than twice as many Chinese respondents agreed that "I have experimented with how I present myself online" (69 percent vs. 28 percent of Americans).
- More than half the Chinese sample (51 percent) said they have adopted a completely different persona in some of their online interactions, compared with only 17 percent of Americans.
- Fewer than a third of Americans (30 percent) said the Internet helps their social life, but more than three-quarters of Chinese respondents (77 percent) agreed that "The Internet helps me make friends."
- Chinese respondents were also more likely than Americans to say they have expressed personal opinions or written about themselves online (72 percent vs. 56 percent). And they have expressed themselves more strongly online than they generally do in person (52 percent vs. 43 percent of Americans).
- Chinese respondents were almost twice as likely as Americans to agree that it's good to be able to express honest opinions anonymously online (79 percent vs. 42 percent) and to agree that online they are free to do and say things they would not do or say offline (73 percent vs. 32 percent).
Continue reading "Field Notes from Shanghai: China's Digital Mavens" »
A friend of mine, Surya Yalamanchili, recently took a job as director of marketing for LinkedIn. His moving into that position got me to thinking about the role that social networking site plays in the "Web 2.0" universe and the reasons people get involved with the site.
As you know, I am am a proponent of social networks and the way they can transform our lives. I also think they introduce a variety of new strains and that you should not enter them lightly; as well, you should have a strategy about how to handle connections and try to remain consistent with that strategy.
All these issues prompted me to write after I read Steve Cody's recent piece on LinkedIn over on his RepMan blog about the headache of trying to manage LinkedIn. Steve is one of the co-founders of Peppercom, a public relations company who recently graciously hosted me for a day at their offices in New York City. He writes about some of the challenges of finding use out of LinkedIn from an executive-level standpoint.
Continue reading "What Value Is There in Being LinkedIn?" »
Last week, I brought up the phenomenon surrounding Soulja Boy and the "Crank Dat" dance craze that propelled him to success and touched upon a few of the things that drew my attention to this particular case. This week I thought I'd dig in a little further, and try to tease out some of the things that Soulja Boy really embodies for me (as a concept more than as a musician or performer) through a closer examination of his official music video, which touches upon a lot of these themes of production, participation, and distribution in the age of convergence.
Continue reading ""Meet me at my crib . . .": Reading the official "Crank That" video" »
Social networking sites are changing the way we interact with our peers. The National School Board Association and Grunwald Associates LLC released a recent study about how "teens and tweens are creating content and connections online." They reported that 96% of students with Internet access use social networking technologies.
While it may seem that Social Networking Sites (SNS) seem to be vulnerable to the next new site, we can't deny that MySpace and Facebook.com are here to stay.
What are the characteristics of a good SNS? What are some of the key differences between them? How are the good sites holding the interest of its users?
I thought the best way to answer these questions was to create profiles for three popular sites, Friendster, Facebook and MySpace. I wrote a mock user profile from the position that I was the actual site I was writing the profile for.
Continue reading "A Guide to Social Networking Sites" »
The past few weeks, I've been following the controversy around Rapleaf, a company that got some attention in early 2006 as an expanded, more powerful version of Ebay's feedback system, which would allow people to build and look up the "reputations" of other by entering an email address. Profiles on Rapleaf can include everything from your age to your political affiliations to what books you want to buy, as well as testimonials from people who have done business with you (though it's unclear how Rapleaf verifies that these testimonials are legitimate). In short, Rapleaf billed itself as a way to find out what you were getting into before entering a business transaction.
That proposition quickly became rather ironic once controversy surrounding the company started picking up speed in late August 2007, when some bloggers received email notifications from Rapleaf informing them that they had been searched.
While some of the backlash was directed at the "spam" factor of receiving annoying email invitations to Rapleaf, the most vocal outrage was over the potential invasion of privacy.
Continue reading "Privacy and Information Ownership: The Rapleaf Controversy" »
As we have mentioned a few times here on the blog, C3 has been been paying special attention to social networking sites in the past several months. That work has spilled over here on the blog in a variety of ways, looking both at the business models and deals struck around the business models for these sites, and perhaps even more interestingly, the types of behaviors that take place in these online communities.
For me, it is key to distinguish between Facebook the company and site, and Facebook the community of people, just as it is for MySpace, or even sites like YouTube. Especially when lawsuits and accusations start getting thrown around, precision of language matters, as squabbles between corporate parent entities often instead seem to be conversations that show disdain for the community of users who inhabit and empower these sites.
In my mind, it is crucial to realize that these sites mean nothing without the people on them, and that any discussion of the brand equity of a YouTube or MySpace has to be tempered with the realization that it is directly the users who provide that value and who control the continued vitality of these sites.
Continue reading "Social Networks Eye Going "Public"" »
Those who follow the blog even with casual interest probably know that the world of soap opera is the site of a significant amount of my research and writing. I'm currently in the early stages of preparing a course here at MIT in the spring on soap operas, and my Master's thesis work was on the subject as well.
I'm also really interested in the topic of surplus audiences, those that rest outside the "target demographic" but who still create a valid and significant audience portion. The fact that pro wrestling is sometimes among the most popular content for young adult women, according to some numbers I've seen, or that 25 percent of gamers are over 50, as I wrote about earlier today, are key examples of this.
Perhaps most interesting to me, then, is male soap opera fans, a group I fit into. There are many male soap opera fans, and that's nothing new, but soaps have always been about the 18-49 female demo. Some have gone so far as to say that anyone else simply doesn't matter or doesn't exist, since that's not who shows are selling to advertisers.
Continue reading "Surplus Audiences, ATWT, and the Luke/Noah Kiss" »
This is the final part of the four-part series featuring an interview with WiredSafety's Parry Aftab.
Sam Ford: If the government's involvement is limited, what are your views on how to manage self-regulation?
Parry Aftab: The industry needs to do a lot of self-regulation because they have the power to respond quickly and create standards that will be enforced. Further, they should want to, because their insurance and banks and venture capitalists will expect them to answer to these questions when these social networking companies start getting popular. That's just good business to be prepared for these safety issues. Whenever the business environment require the companies involved to be smarter and more careful, I am always for self-regulations. I think MySpace had the best of intentions, and we worked with them for free. A lot of people are safer because we did that. The key to keep in mind is that these companies, for the most part, will do the right thing and the safe thing. No one wants to have something terrible happen through their site, and the people who work for these companies are often parents themselves, and we've all been kids ourselves once. A lot of what needs to be done for safety really are simple things these companies can do, simpler than many people think.
Continue reading "An Interview with Parry Aftab (4 of 4)" »
This is the third part of a four-part series with Parry Aftab, the Executive Director of the WiredSafety organization.
Sam Ford: Are you still working with MySpace?
Parry Aftab: When Rupert Murdoch took over MySpace, everything was put on hold with everyone for about 10 months while they were tring to figure out what to do. I personally wasn't very pleased with the company's responsiveness once Murdoch took over. I work with MySpace still, but we don't work with them in the same way we had before. They've hired their own lawyers now, and they are working with all the politically correct groups to work with. No one is embedded with them like we were in those days, but our mark is still there.
Continue reading "An Interview with Parry Aftab (3 of 4)" »
This is the second part of an interview with Parry Aftab, Executive Director of WiredSafety, an organization which focuses on safety issues related to children on the Internet and particularly on social networks.
Sam Ford: Tell us about what has now grown into WiredSafety and the work that you all do.
Parry Aftab: We are a network of 12,000 unpaid volunteers from 76 countries around the world. We have no offices; we operate virtually. None of us are paid a dime, including me. And we all come together to do different aspects of the job. I had personally been interested in Internet safety before I saw the picture of the little girl. I had gotten involved in writing a book on Internet safety and also did a piece on CNN. At the time, my argument was that you could protect children on the Internet, but it requires a little more of a thoughtful response and not knee-jerk reactions to just shut the technologies down. I self-published a book on these issues that ended up becoming a bible on Internet safety for some called A Parent's Guide to the Internet.
My early days were spent working to protect the Internet to well-meaning people, some of them in Congress, who were interested in curtailing or even shutting down the Internet. When I saw that image, though, I went from working primarily on protecting the Internet to protecting children from horrible things, such as online child pornography, cyber bullying, and a range of other issues. My work focused on trying to keep children from being sexually exploited and trafficked online, for instance.
Continue reading "An Interview with Parry Aftab (2 of 4)" »
Over the next few posts, I want to present an interview I conducted over the weekend with Parry Aftab, a leader in Internet safety movements for children who heads up the WiredSafety volunteer organization. Aftab, a lawyer, has worked with a variety of companies--including MySpace--to help develop their strategies on how to develop child safety protections and privacy settings while still maintaining as many of the features of the network as possible.
I first got introduced to Parry through a New York Times story by Brad Stone, in which she was quoted as saying that no good could come of children using Webcams. At the time, I wrote, "The problem is that people go to these extremes when discussing the issue. It has to be all bad because of child safety fears, with no balancing discussion of the many ways high schoolers could use tools such as video chat and Webcams."
Later, I received comments here on the blog from Aftab, in a post on DOPA that was part of my Access vs. Censorship series.
Continue reading "An Interview with Parry Aftab (1 of 4)" »
As many of you know, we have been doing a significant amount of research here at the consortium recently in regard to social networking. While some of this has ben for a white paper shared internally in the consortium, our musing on social networks has appeared multiple times here on the blog in the past several months (see here, for instance).
Tied into those comments on social networking, though, are questions regarding social marketing, especially as we think about how brands co-exist in these online spaces. There are always a variety of opinions on what this means for users, what the correct balance between marketing and a lack of commercialism is, and...on the business side...what constitutes a worthwhile investment and what does not.
Continue reading "Social Networking and Social Marketing" »
Over the weekend, I thought it might be helpful to point the way to a few recent posts from the blogs of some C3 Consulting Researchers and corporate partners.
First, the ninth round of Henry Jenkins' continuing Gender and Fan Studies series posted late this past week. This round features Cynthia Walker and Derek Kompare. It can be found here and here.
I continue to do a lot of thinking about virtual networks and how they are transforming social and professional relationships, as I've written about several times here on the C3 blog. For instance, see my post from back in June on personal questions on maintaining personal relationships raised by social networks.
That takes me to this interesting post from the Idea City blog from our partners over at GSD&M. This focuses on how Facebook is being heralded as the next big breakout star of online networks, based particularly on its surge of popularity since going public and away from high school and college registration.
Continue reading "Gender and Fan Studies, Facebook, and The Death of Marketing" »
While thinking today about how this issue between the Writer's Guild of America and television producers seems to have been stretching on for quite a while now, I began to realize that a lot of the issues I've been covering for the Consortium since we started our blog a little under two years ago, and especially since I've been the primary contributor to the blog since last summer have not changed that much.
So, while people talk sometimes about how fast change happens, it is important to realize that the falsity that nothing is ever going to change is often countered by an equally tall tale, that things are changing extremely quickly. The truth is that industry practices, corporate infrastructure, technological lagtime, and an endless variety of factors causes everything to move slowly.
I was told by an industry executive not too long ago that the upfronts this year didn't feel that much different, as if this person were somehow disappointed. I think that's how we all feel when we realize that the new environment feels only slightly removed from yesterday's...and that's because we as human beings can only move in steps. The first cars really did resemble horseless carriages, and the first mobile phones looked quite like landline phones. Change necessarily comes one step at a time.
That being the case, I thought it might be interesting to revisit the stories that were posted here on the blog during this same week last year. You'll see a few stories that have fallen by the wayside but a few more that could quite possibly be easily plugged into this week's headlines and still seem right at home.
Continue reading "How Much Have Industry Developments Changed in the Past Year?" »
There are both positives and negatives to building walls around content and services. I often get caught up in the negative aspects, especially when thinking content that is locked down by service providers, which I find to be a particularly bad idea for the content brands.
For instance, if you are an ardent fan of a particular show that uses a transmedia storytelling campaign across multiple platforms, but that deal is locked down into only those who have Sprint mobile or Verizon for an online provider or Comcast as a cable provider, it can be a little hard to take for the fans most likely to take advantage of such transmedia stories. After all, if you follow three shows, but you must have Verizon mobile service for the extra content for one, AT&T for another, and T-Mobile for the third, it wouldn't really seem very worthwhile to have three cell phone contracts just for the extra mobile content.
That being said, though, it doesn't mean that walled gardens are not without their uses, and Steve Bryant has raised some good points in this regard in relation to the benefits of privacy, particularly in relation to Facebook's lack of searchability and accessibility from the Googles of the world.
Continue reading "Gated Content, Walled Gardens, and Social Networks" »
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