Re: [Air-l] social network migration
On 19 Jun 2007, at 23:08, Martin wrote:
When I did research for my MSc dissertation the young people that I interviewed were all on www.bebo.com (Ages from 11 to 15). This was two years ago, the older of the group have migrated to myspace, but this also drags the younger members along with them.
In my sample of (ten) MySpace users I interviewed quite a few of them used to be Bebo users (both Martin and I are in the UK where Bebo is more popular for younger kids than it might be in the US for example). My interviewees said if I remember that they moved because of the more customisable profile features of MySpace and because there were more bands on MySpace but I imagine the perception that Bebo is for younger kids may have something to do with it too. I personally suspect that much of MySpace's current userbase is likely to abandon it in favour of Facebook (or blogs or nothing) as they age and it will be dependent on attracting a continual stream of new high schoolers. While thinking about SNSes I wonder how long it will take for senior academics to take to SNSes and which one they will pick - Facebook is an obvious possibility but I suspect the difficulty of having to project one image for one's students and another for fellow academics will be too hard to overcome. LinkedIn seems too corporate-focused to me. Has anyone seen any signs of academic-focused social networking sites that might take off? --- David Brake, Doctoral Student in Media and Communications, London School of Economics & Political Science <http://www.lse.ac.uk/collections/media@lse/study/ mPhilPhDMediaAndCommunications.htm> Also see http://davidbrake.org/ (home page), http://blog.org/ (personal weblog) and http://get.to/lseblog (academic groupblog) Author of Dealing With E-Mail - <http://davidbrake.org/ dealingwithemail/> callto://DavidBrake (Skype.com's Instant Messenger and net phone) Please access the attached hyperlink for an important electronic communications disclaimer: http://www.lse.ac.uk/collections/secretariat/legal/disclaimer.htm
David Brake said:
While thinking about SNSes I wonder how long it will take for senior academics to take to SNSes and which one they will pick - Facebook is an obvious possibility but I suspect the difficulty of having to project one image for one's students and another for fellow academics will be too hard to overcome. LinkedIn seems too corporate-focused to me. Has anyone seen any signs of academic-focused social networking sites that might take off?
I don't know about 'senior' academics, but there are increasing numbers of PhD students and early- mid-career academics on facebook, as far as I can tell. Or is that just projecting? ;) It has certainly taken off in my network of colleagues (which admittedly consists of a lot of new media scholars), more so since it was made available to non-US universities. In fact I have the feeling more of those colleagues are on Facebook than were ever on MySpace. (and many of the facebook members are also linked-in members). I think the introduction of applications has been a big attraction recently, creating the right kind of 'buzz' around the scholarly digerati. I'd be interested to know if there's less take-up in the UK? Also, Facebook has much more powerful privacy controls than anything else I've personally used, amounting to 4 privacy levels: a 'public' view, a view for members of your networks who are not your friends, a level for friends only, and the ability to set up a 'restricted' view and to select which friends see the full view, and which ones see only the restricted one. And within that, there is the ability to tweak which elements of your user profile are visible or invisible within each of those levels. Cheers Jean -- Jean Burgess Postdoctoral Research Fellow ARC Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation (cci) Queensland University of Technology Blogs: http://creativitymachine.net http://propagatingmedia.com
I would say that are a number of academics in my own department and other similar who all use facebook to some extent. Some use it to keep in touch with people (ex students for example), some use it as a general communication tool (in the same way myspace is used) and some use it to share things. The thing I like about Facebook over Myspace is I can post links to news stories, webpages etc and easily draw in the other web2.0 apps I use. Facebook also seems (in the Uk at least) to be the social networking tool of media types, especially in the light of the commments of the BBC's head of world service news, Richard Sarmbrook, who said he got more news via social networks than traditional media (http://www.journalism.co.uk/news/story3342.shtml) Regards Rich Jean Burgess wrote:
David Brake said:
While thinking about SNSes I wonder how long it will take for senior academics to take to SNSes and which one they will pick - Facebook is an obvious possibility but I suspect the difficulty of having to project one image for one's students and another for fellow academics will be too hard to overcome. LinkedIn seems too corporate-focused to me. Has anyone seen any signs of academic-focused social networking sites that might take off?
I don't know about 'senior' academics, but there are increasing numbers of PhD students and early- mid-career academics on facebook, as far as I can tell. Or is that just projecting? ;)
It has certainly taken off in my network of colleagues (which admittedly consists of a lot of new media scholars), more so since it was made available to non-US universities. In fact I have the feeling more of those colleagues are on Facebook than were ever on MySpace. (and many of the facebook members are also linked-in members).
I think the introduction of applications has been a big attraction recently, creating the right kind of 'buzz' around the scholarly digerati.
I'd be interested to know if there's less take-up in the UK?
Also, Facebook has much more powerful privacy controls than anything else I've personally used, amounting to 4 privacy levels: a 'public' view, a view for members of your networks who are not your friends, a level for friends only, and the ability to set up a 'restricted' view and to select which friends see the full view, and which ones see only the restricted one.
And within that, there is the ability to tweak which elements of your user profile are visible or invisible within each of those levels.
Cheers Jean
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There is a popular idea that MySpace is the teen site. It allows teenagers to express themselves, find music whilst they don't care that the navigability is horrible and the social design far worse. Whereas the simplicity of Facebook is embraced by sensible adults who have grown up a bit and now don't want to see profiles with white text on a white background. However, when speaking with some teenagers recently I found out a lot of them rejected MySpace because they didn't know what to do on it either. The poor design affected them too. The complaints were that they didn't know what to do on MySpace, the pages were ugly and all their friends were on Facebook. These teens were from the preppier end of the social spectrum. Tom -- Tom Shelley Project Red Stripe Tel : + 44 (0) 782 441 5491 team blog : www.projectredstripe.com/blog personal blog : www.fedoralreserve.wordpress.com
I have just started to follow this thread, so forgive me if this is a repeat. I have found Facebook to have taken off recently in the Toronto community. The huge size of the Toronto FB community is now well known: http://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=2398302130 I bridge two communities -- academic and interactive private sector. The interactive types scorn myspace because of its horrible UX. Facebook however is widely praised for its innovative interface, its use of latest fast-loading front end coding (e.g., DHTML), and its recent opening of its API. I find interaction designers frequently use Facebook as an example and an exemplar of good UX. Now for the scholarly types, this community seems to be a bit more fragmented. I know many of these people who have accounts on myspace and even friendster, in addition to Facebook. I personally have an inactive friendster account that never ceases to amaze me when I get notices that someone actually was there. These are slowly dribbling off. I also find it interesting that NONE of my academic friends use Linkedin, but my private sector contacts consider it de rigeur. If we are to adapt Goffman's notion of "the front," I believe each "place" has its own "scripts" that are attractive to some and unpalatable to others. Perhaps the linkedin front is too "business-y" for sociologists.
Now for the scholarly types, this community seems to be a bit more fragmented. I know many of these people who have accounts on myspace and even friendster, in addition to Facebook. I personally have an inactive friendster account that never ceases to amaze me when I get notices that someone actually was there. These are slowly dribbling off.
there are at least a few people from aoir that i've found on: tribe friendster facebook myspace linkedin ryze orkut [a site i've forgotten the name of...] and probably a significant number of other sites that i don't know about. I have friends from several different demographics on each of them. When folks try to compress a site into "teens go here" and "latinos mostly go here", they generally miss out on the fact that these sites are HUGE - so huge that there is a broad spectrum of behavior present on ALL of them. Surface-level characterizations are great, yes, but there's a lot of nuance in people's behaviors and networking patterns - that is easily missed. --elijah
participants (6)
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David Brake -
elw＠stderr.org -
Jean Burgess -
Richard Berry -
Sam Ladner -
Tom Shelley