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.
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.
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.
source One of the reasons I’ve moved away from Hotmail and yahoo is that they became slow and clogged up in spam.
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 It’s a question of practicality and it’s already an out of date claim.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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.