last week my friends and i got in to a debate about the "eminent" demise of facebook. they insisted that the sudden emergence and success of twitter was proof that people no longer considered facebook as the source for internet communication and recent (failed) redesigns of facebook were the death throes of the once all powerful site. i disagreed. for several reasons.
to begin with, i don't believe facebook and twitter are meant to do the same things. i would even go so far as to say that twitter is a "social networking site" in the strictest sense of the word. i say this knowing full well that i am not the model user/appreciator of twitter, but i do listen to those that love the site and what sticks out most to me is how unidirectional the messages of twitter seem to be. transactions on twitter seem to clearly fall into two categories, input and output, with little overlap. some people use twitter to glean bits of news from sources important to them (input) but, at the heart, twitter is geared toward the individual who wants to broadcast status messages to an audience (output). sure, followers can reply, but conversation is limited to 140 character snippets and a scrolling home page where new posts replace the oldest. in this way, it's hard for me to think of twitter as a community building site (community implies the exchange of significant content. and, yes, that was a value judgement.) and, as the "networking" part of social networking implies some sort of exchange, i really wonder how this is achieved under such time/space constraints. and, you know, telling 200 followers you had cream of wheat for breakfast hardly seems like a way to build or maintain relationships.
facebook is a horse of a different color. with a number of functions (contact information, messages on the public wall and the private inbox, picture albums, etc.) i don't understand how it is perceived as being in direct competition with twitter. if anything, twitter is simply one element, the status message, extracted from the entirety of the facebook world. now, i should disclose the fact that i think both sites are superfluous. facebook is just as guilty of encouraging the me-centered approach to 2.0 (i tag myself in a friend's picture, i list movies/tv/books that demonstrate my pop cultural savvy, etc. etc. ad nauseum) and i am just as guilty as the next in participating. that said, it fulfills my definition of social networking in that users exchange information. and, successful or not, the redesigns are always crafted with that input-output exchange in mind (you can digg a comment now, see new photos as soon as they are posted, read friends' status messages on your home page the moment they are posted...).
so will twitter kill facebook? not exactly. i think it's important to note how the twitter is keeping facebook on its toes, but i don't take it as a real threat. and while we may be too lazy to read an entire article in the paper (140 character summaries, please!), i don't think were willing to live by status messages alone. twitter's numbers may be rapidly increasing, but facebook has the edge in that this generation (see pew study) love uploading content (pictures, videos, audio...).
but i suppose the golden rule here is that nothing lasts forever. does any body even remember friendster? have all those myspace users run to facebook and never looked back? twitter may have its moment and facebook's popularity may lag (though numbers say membership is still growing) but one day the only places you'll find both sites will be on the wayback machine.
Sunday, March 29, 2009
Wednesday, March 25, 2009
new news
not just on the graduate level...
proponents of the change stress that children today must have a firm grasp of technology if they are expected to succeed later in life. detractors say this should not come at the expense of traditional (read: print) learning methods.
i think it's safe to say there's room for both. why not assign students the task of researching the victorian era in both wikipedia and a reliable print source? why not have them twitter in (historical) character?
the people have been heard! again.
it seems like facebookers really know how to cause a fuss over changes they don't like. last month they lead a rebellion against the terms of use clause that gave facebook indefinite ownership over all user content (you quit, but facebook holds the info in your profile hostage). this month, facebook users complained that the redesign to the site was no good and facebook acquiesced. apart from confusing regular users (me: "hey, where'd that button go? it was right here a minute ago.), the redesign streamed more details in the public forum (your "friends" see more and more about you on their home page) and made privacy settings difficult to locate. but, no more.
in light of this and our discussion on monday, i think i'll go investigate those privacy settings now.
Saturday, March 21, 2009
nicole's blog (brought to you by google)
After a long day at the office, I came home and found Iron Man on DVD on my coffee table (thanks roommate! Thanks Netflix!). A perfect end to a less than perfect day, I decided. I made dinner, kicked my shoes off and settled in for what I thought would be a pleasantly mindless two hours in front of the television. Mission accomplished, or so I thought for the first twenty minutes. I began to feel uncomfortable. Something was gnawing at the back of my mind. Something was out of place…or perhaps it was that everything was in it’s place – and a little too conspicuously. By the end of my two hours in front of the tv I had counted almost a dozen product logos and heard references to a few others… I can now say with all certainty that, superheroes and co.: use Hummers, BMW’s, Mercedes Benz’s, Audi’s and Rolls Royce’s to get to their destinations; tinker on dell computers; get a hold of their friends on the latest LG and Nokia phones; etc., etc., ad nauseum.
Now, I absolutely was not surprised by the looming corporate presence in this sure-to-be summer blockbuster. What disturbed me most, however, was the thought that, “For each product that I barely managed to identify, how many more did I only subconsciously register?”. I mean, it’s not like I set out to count ®’s and ©’s, and maybe I was a bit more keen on these things because of our recent class topics, but such marketing saturated entertainment really makes me question how much of what I do/buy is self-motivated.
I recently finished watching Merchants of Cool and I couldn’t help but be deeply affected by it. I am a part of the generation that was under that documentary’s microscope. At the time it was filmed (2001) I’m sure I fit some of the pop-cultural profiles/psychological landscapes they sketched out. And I’m sure this is no less true of someone outside that generation (no man is an island. We all react with/against our peers in some way), but it hit particularly close to home because I remember those particular popular phenomena as they occurred. Again, the question here really isn’t matter of taste (the 1960’s gave us the Beatles, while the 90’s gave us N’Sync, etc.) but of personal politics and how I transmit/absorb those ideas.
There was an interesting part of the documentary where they covered the work of “cool hunters” – people in marketing who go out and photograph what’s the hippest style of the moment. They report their findings to a client (for a fee, of course) and those clients, in turn, create an ad campaign based on this “newly discovered” trend. This is a system where the “underground” is exploited for profit, and the only reason we pay them any mind is because we see ourselves in the media.
If identities are fabricated and sold by near-omnipotent corporations, are we all a part of commerce whether we like it or not? And is there such a thing as a genuine expression of one’s self? The sad truth is, I don’t think there is. Our outfits are never truly unique because we’ve bought the clothing at a store. Every haircut has been had, every band has a following. We are all apart of some demographic.
So maybe the important thing isn’t trying to form an identity in spite of marketers, but finding others to identify with. Merchants of Cool spent a lot of time discussing the ways in which conglomerates benefit from our participation, but it seems as though there is at least one way we can benefit from our interaction with them.
Now, I absolutely was not surprised by the looming corporate presence in this sure-to-be summer blockbuster. What disturbed me most, however, was the thought that, “For each product that I barely managed to identify, how many more did I only subconsciously register?”. I mean, it’s not like I set out to count ®’s and ©’s, and maybe I was a bit more keen on these things because of our recent class topics, but such marketing saturated entertainment really makes me question how much of what I do/buy is self-motivated.
I recently finished watching Merchants of Cool and I couldn’t help but be deeply affected by it. I am a part of the generation that was under that documentary’s microscope. At the time it was filmed (2001) I’m sure I fit some of the pop-cultural profiles/psychological landscapes they sketched out. And I’m sure this is no less true of someone outside that generation (no man is an island. We all react with/against our peers in some way), but it hit particularly close to home because I remember those particular popular phenomena as they occurred. Again, the question here really isn’t matter of taste (the 1960’s gave us the Beatles, while the 90’s gave us N’Sync, etc.) but of personal politics and how I transmit/absorb those ideas.
There was an interesting part of the documentary where they covered the work of “cool hunters” – people in marketing who go out and photograph what’s the hippest style of the moment. They report their findings to a client (for a fee, of course) and those clients, in turn, create an ad campaign based on this “newly discovered” trend. This is a system where the “underground” is exploited for profit, and the only reason we pay them any mind is because we see ourselves in the media.
If identities are fabricated and sold by near-omnipotent corporations, are we all a part of commerce whether we like it or not? And is there such a thing as a genuine expression of one’s self? The sad truth is, I don’t think there is. Our outfits are never truly unique because we’ve bought the clothing at a store. Every haircut has been had, every band has a following. We are all apart of some demographic.
So maybe the important thing isn’t trying to form an identity in spite of marketers, but finding others to identify with. Merchants of Cool spent a lot of time discussing the ways in which conglomerates benefit from our participation, but it seems as though there is at least one way we can benefit from our interaction with them.
Tuesday, March 10, 2009
vision of the future...from the past
in 1993, when the middle school me wished for a phone i could plug in to a tv on which i could chat my friends up, at&t had the bigger picture in mind.
like jessie's video about newpapers on your computer screen (gasp!), it's scary how close this company nailed present day communications.*
*it should be noted that at&t likely had sources tipping them off to these inventions...like the developers in their employ. the marketing is a bit disingenuous (and what marketing isn't?), in that it implies these technologies will simply come about in the future and does not disclose the efforts and money they are spending on producing such products. interesting none the less.
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