July 4, 2007
my friend adam passed along this insane job description for “social media officer” at the university of toronto.
Experience:
Minimum five years experience working in the field of new media from a content perspective, including web design/architecture, preferably in a large organization. A high degree of knowledge of and experience with “Web 2.0” tools (Wikis, RSS, Podcasting) is essential as is intuition for continued developments in new technologies — especially “Web 2.0” and “Web 3.0” technologies. (Intuition about the possible direction of “Web 4.0” is also important) Equally essential is a high degree of demonstrated, successful project management experience.
what? did they read some joke about web 3.0 and think it was serious? the term “web 2.0″ was used to describe changes on the web after they happened. you can’t just talk web 3.0 or web 4.0 into existence. besides, web 2.0 basically means everything and nothing, using it as a naming convention is like building your house on sand.
remember the hype and vapourware and non-existant business models of the 90s that led to the first dot com crash? yeah. this isn’t a good sign.
fono says: man, this means i can’t make jokes about web 3.0 anymore. to be leading edge you really have to talk about web 27.0 now.
Tags: web2.0, thesis
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July 1, 2007
remember internet explorer versus netscape browser wars of the mid 90s? myspace is copying facebook and adding applications.
so, get ready for the social browser wars - facebook versus myspace!
Tags: myspace, facebook, thesis
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June 28, 2007
rhiannon sawyer, a fellow graduate student in sydney, is writing her thesis on friending on myspace. she tells me she has just started conducting interviews with myspace users, and is finding “that everyone has their own definition of friendship on MySpace and that often they don’t actually call it that… Businesses and individuals seem to be the only ones who think of their friends as more than just contacts, artists see their friends as either collaborators or fans and myspace then just becomes a forum for discussion and to come together around a particular interest.”
this is stuff i’d observed before, and it mimics the findings of the survey fono and i did for our livejournal friending paper a few years ago. but something clicked when i read rhiannon’s email. before, i was obsessed the kinds of social consequences result from the design of social software (ie LJ DRAMA) but now i’m realising what’s really fascinating about social software might actually be obfuscated by the use of the “social” descriptor. is social software really social before it is anything else? we all go to the movies together and share an experience with everyone else in the theatre, but does that make it a social experience? do we just use the term social because the technology involves interacting with other people, but really, we’re moving towards something else?
danah boyd and others have written about autistic or socially-inept social software, referring to the fact that social networking sites force users to interact with each other in ways that would seem socially inept in any other situation. for example, forcing binaries on your relationships with others - are we friends, yes or no? in her 2004 piece on the subject, boyd argued that this sort of design was problematic for users (forcing people to act as if they had mental disorders, even!) and needed to be overcome by listening to users and trying to mimic the fluid and multiple way in which people actually interact.
im beginning to think that what we’re doing on these sites isnt really about replicating offline relationships and interactions as the original designers of social networks had in mind. i mean, if thats just what it was, why do we need to do it both online and off? i’m thinking that social networking sites are scratching another itch of ours. i’m not sure what, but i think it has something more to do with communication flows and distribution channels and less with other things we associate with socializing, such as building trust or providing support. think about twitter, for example. one would assume people would use it to say where they are so their friends could join them. but it seems that people are using it more like a microblog, to tell the world what theyre doing for the sake of it, rather than with the purpose of meeting up. think, too, about how much of the literature about social networking is about identity management, construction and articulation, especially for teens on myspace. sure, identity construction is an element of socializing in the conventional sense, but is it the defining element or activity? i’d say no, and i think that indicates that social networks are really about something other than, or beyond, what we understand as social. and i dont think we know what that something is yet.
all this leads me to wonder:
are friending and networking just metaphors we used so we could use an existing and familiar concept to explain this new and unfamiliar way of interacting and communicating?
do we finally understand what it is that we are actually doing on social networks enough now that we can go beyond an old metaphor?
Tags: socialsoftware, livejournal, socialtechnology, friending, myspace, thesis
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June 26, 2007
kinda old in internet time, but what the hay:
HYPERCAMP: super mega two point oh! (it makes me exhausted just looking at it). kinda an accidental commentary on the blogging/web 2.0/web conference culture eh?
Tags: hypercamp, web 2.0, web2.0, thesis
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May 21, 2007
the other day, i went to a workshop for phd students. no one was sitting there on their laptops half listening while they blogged or looked at web comics. everyone was sitting attentively, making notes on paper, with pens!
i told this story to luke last night. i was telling him about how perth has not yet been taken over web 2.0 craziness that is going on in north america. i’m not talking web 2.0 just in terms of flickr and wikipedia and round corners and crazy colours and folksonomies and all the other usual suspects (they aren’t really big yet here either), but the greater cultural movement surrounding it all. it’s what i can only describe as the web 2.0 hipster culture which i was happily partaking in until i ran away to perth to do my phd. it’s people working at starbucks on their on their black macbooks covered in stickers of web 2.0 and open source brands. its the workaholism, the capitalist leftism and the melding of the gift economy with for-profit enterprises. it’s the the blurring of personal and professional, of leisure and work. it’s having your friends and people you know professionally adding you on facebook. it’s the “unconferences”: barcamp, torcamp, drupalcamp, campcamp, all with 5000 pictures taken with digital slrs complete with the official tag on flickr. 
its the implicit belief running through all this that old power structures are being overturned, that we’re fighting the man. when in reality, old hierarchies and power structures are being reworked and reproduced. web 2.0 brands are the new man.
i have a complicated relationship with web 2.0 (both the tools and the culture). i loved sxsw (which i would argue is the king of all web 2.0 conferences), it was the most amazing week of my life and i met incredible people. i love my macbook with all my stickers and my slr and my flickr account and my livejournal. i’m addicted to checking all my digital hang outs to see if anyone has commented on a photo or added me as a friend. but when i use the term web 2.0, but cringe a little each time. i didn’t really know why before, but now i realise i’m totally complicit not only the left’s overwhelming lack of critical analysis of web 2.0, but an often unquestioning endorsement of its ideologies and brands. sure, the ideology behind web 2.0 is openness, participation, empowering the user, but lest we forget that most web 2.0 services (save wikipedia) are for-profits, and run by either google or yahoo. all good lefties should know the problems that come with big corporations and for-profit orientations. we didn’t like nike for selling us a lifestyle rather than a shoe, which was made in a sweatshop. i articulate my identity with my choice in web 2.0 services and how i use them (and whose stickers i put on my laptop), just like i buy starbucks so i can walk around with the cup looking hip, or nike shoes so i can feel athletic. google has 10 years of my search history and myspace owns my profile. yahoo helped send a chinese journalist to jail. why are we any less angry, or at least less critical? how did we forget all the anti-branding, anti-consumerism, no logo stuff from the 90s? is it because we really are consuming ideas and symbols in the truest sense, rather than physical commodities?
along with these more abstract economic, political and semiotic issues, web 2.0 technology and culture are further facilitating the very real encroachment of work into every other facet of life. being in such a completely different work context of a phd in a city like perth really helped me to see this. at first it annoyed me that i couldn’t get wifi in the cafes and my internet access sucked. it drove me crazy that i actually had to go out in the real world to find stuff, rather than find the information online. and i didn’t like it that no one used upcoming or flickr. but then i realised why this was the case i saw that this lack of 2.0 was actually a really good thing. perth is a really laid back place. people go to cafes to relax, not work, so they don’t care that there’s no wifi. there isn’t even a starbucks here. everything closes around 5 or 6 most days. there are lots of holidays where nothing is open and the few places that are charge a 15% holiday tax because the poor souls who have to work that day have to get paid shitloads for their trouble.
as my friend collette noted, wifi is both a liberator and an enslaver. if its possible to do work anywhere because of wifi, then it becomes expected. if you can do things so much faster because you can just do a search for it online, then you’re expected to do everything quickly. its expected you’ll do so much more everyday. you get 5000 emails instead of talking to people in person or on the phone.
one of the few critiques of web 2.0 culture that i’ve come across is tiziana terranova’s Free Labor: Producing Culture for the Digital Economy, which offers an amazing analysis of the political economy of web 2.0 (ironically, before the term was even coined), including a discussion of this shift in work culture. she argues that the process of the “social factory” (made popular by the italian autonomists) can be seen in the digital economy - “work processes have shifted from the factory to society, thereby setting in motion a truly complex machine.” this shift was made possible materially and ideologically by the internet (and i would argue, even more by web 2.0):
The expansion of the Internet has given ideological and material support to contemporary trends toward increased flexibility of the workforce, continuous reskilling, freelance work, and the diffusion of practices such as “supplementing” (bringing supplementary work home from the conventional office).
but the worst part, for me at least, is that web 2.0 culture and tools turn leisure into work. the entire web becomes a professional space. there are no boundaries between work and leisure when everyone you work with is using the same services as you. everything you do online becomes peformative. adding photos to flickr, editing your facebook profile, bookmarking something on delicious, updating your blog. all of these things are part of your digital resume. and if you aren’t participating, you’re a nobody.
there’s a glamorization of all this work as leisure too. critiquing don tapscott’s “digital economy,” terranonva offers some insight into why this might be the case:
For Tapscott, therefore, the digital economy magically resolves the contradictions of industrial societies, such as class struggle: while in the industrial economy the “worker tried to achieve fulfillment through leisure [and]… was alienated from the means of production which were owned and controlled by someone else,” in the digital economy the worker achieves fulfillment through work and finds in her brain her own, unalienated means of production.
knowingly or not, i think we’re increasingly finding (or being told to find) fulfillment through work, so we work all the time. if we believe that work is fulfilling, then who needs leisure? this shift in thinking isn’t new, but its being accelerated and magnified by web 2.0 culture and tools which provide both the ideology and the material necessary for work as life. alienated or not, i don’t think this was what marx really had in mind.
this is why i love being back at school here in perth. the web has become a leisure activity again. i don’t feel like i need to spend all my time managing my digital identity. i don’t get 5000 emails a day or have work conversations on msn in the middle of the night. my leisure time is my own. i have the space and the time to think and digest and live.
but, as i was telling all this to luke, i looked at upcoming and saw that perth’s first barcamp is happening in june. and my heart sank. my little refuge will soon no longer be. but im going, of course. i can only hope that we can do web 2.0 hipsterdom here with a good healthy dose of perth culture.
Tags: web2.0, web 2.0, curtin, thesis, australia, barcamp, perth
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May 8, 2007
plazes: yet another way for self-surveillance mechanism that also incorporates the every addictive element of collection that turns games like world of warcraft into crack.
basically, you collect internet access points, and it plots it on a map and you can show your friends and have it automatically update to your msn or skype name. part of the fun is getting ones that no one else has yet. i wish i had this when i was traveling (esp in nigeria). i wouldve levelled up for sure.
Tags: privacy, selfsurveillance, plazes, thesis
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May 8, 2007
i talked to greg early this morning about jack layton being on facebook. he told me kinda fearfully (or maybe its just me projecting) that he thinks facebook could get so big it just never goes away. like email or msn messenger. he pointed that facebook is moving upwards, age wise, which is usually an indication of the ubiquity and maturity of a technology. everyone i know knows of someone’s parent joining, and a lot of older people i wouldn’t expect to join now have facebooks. and then there’s all the canadian politicians. its always the kids who are early adopters, but once your grandma is on it, its totally part of the everyday.
once facebook reaches a critical mass and has so many people, says greg, why would anyone switch? it would be nearly impossible to compete with facebook once everyone is on it, since any SNS’s value is mostly derived from the size and activity level of its user base. besides, why would you give up your 7000 wall messages and 500 meticulously tagged photos that your friends tagged of you. it’s not like switching from msn to yahoo messenger, cuz you have digital artifacts and relationships that aren’t really portable. sure you can import your photos to something else, but you can’t reproduce the social capital created by having your friends tag you in photos and then being able to show off how many photos you got tagged in on your profile.
on the other hand, toronto has the biggest facebook network in the world, so greg’s experience could either be the leading edge, or an exaggeration of the rest of the world’s use. they don’t use facebook here in perth like they do in toronto, where they are absolutely nuts for it. you meet someone once and they add you. people you went to school with when you were two and haven’t seen in 20 years add you. people who wouldn’t even talk to you at the mall add you (this has happened to me). here in perth, on the other hand, no one really cares. even at uni.
Tags: facebook, greg, thesis
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May 7, 2007
i found an amazing article today on the political economy of facebook, myspace and the other usual suspects written by ryan bigge (former adbusters staffer before kalle lasn went apeshit and turned the mag into an antisemitic brand of shoes).
basically, bigge argues that use of social networking sites can actually be seen as unpaid work. in using such facebook et al, we’re essentially producing a stream of self-surveillance that can be monitored, repackaged and sold. for example, taken collectively, we’re voluntarily producing huge databases of our preferences that are a marketers dream (think recommendations on amazon.com - customers who bought this also liked…) its the darker side of web 2.0’s utopian wisdom of crowds that created wikipedia. but also more broadly, the entire value of facebook is entirely in its users and the networks they’ve created, without any financial compensation. writing in the same vein as bigge, fred scharmen notes that even on flickr, the users are creating all the content that drives visits to the site, which in turn provides the eyeballs that can be sold to advertisers. did you know myspace also claims ownership of its user’s profiles? so even your online identity is commodifiable content.
the big takeaway for me though was the realization that this could be why we all resent facebook, but still use it. we’re aware on some level that something isn’t right, that we’re giving away something we shouldn’t be. but if we opt out and refuse to use facebook, we’re essentially a nobody. as bigge puts it: “In this environment [Facebook et al.], the digital enclosure generates increasingly polarized options: either the constant, self-generated surveillance of the type described by Stites or the self-negation (“You don’t exist”) that social network avoidance entails.”
bigge also points out the gaming-elements in social networks that make them similar to WoW which i mentioned earlier, and brings this into his analysis of the political economy of social networking:
But digital gardening, like its soil-based equivalent, requires commitment and effort. The
question becomes: are MySpace users at all aware of the political economy of the space in
which they operate? As Kline, et al. (2003) demonstrate, the line between work and play in
the video game arena grows increasingly fuzzy. Wittel (2001), meanwhile, argues that “The
assimilation of work and play corresponds with the blurring of boundaries between work
and private life, between colleagues and friends.”
One can draw parallels between the effort required to invite friends into your MySpace
network and the repetitive work involved in collecting gold in online gaming environments
like EverQuest or World of Warcraft. Cassidy (2006) quotes different Facebook users:
“I remember people competing to see how many ‘friends’ they could
accumulate and how quickly, and tracking how many ‘friends’ they shared in
common with other ‘friends’,” [Olivia Ma] said.
Hilary Thorndike, a schoolteacher who graduated from Harvard in 2005 and
still uses Facebook, has more than eight hundred friends on the site. “I always
find the competitive spirit in me wanting to up the number,” she wrote in an
e-mail.
Williams (2005) underscores this narrative of accumulation:
Seabron Ward, 19, a student at the University of Colorado at Denver, said that many students consider it a status symbol to build a big friend list. ‘This one guy on my list has a thousand,’ she said, a bit enviously. ‘I only have 79.’
so while the gaming element explains why we’re all addicted, the problematic political economy of facebook is what makes us hate it.
Tags: myspace, worldofwarcraft, wow, facebook, web2.0, thesis
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April 20, 2007
i’m obsessed with how people (myself very muchly included) are obsessed with facebook and world of warcraft. meta-obsessed, if you will. i became fascinated with both independently, but the more i use both the more i see some interesting similarities between the two (and a lot of interesting contrasts, which i will probably write more about later). the main similarity is the addictive game elements in both, even though facebook is not officially a game.
i had this revelation as i read this line from the semiotics of simcity: “The moment [the game] is no longer interesting is the moment when all its secrets have been discovered, its limitations exposed”
both world of warcraft and facebook are so addictive and absorbing because the limitations of both are few and ever expanding. world of warcraft has an insane amount of armor/weapons/clothes/pets/food to find, monsters to kill, lands to visit, and quests to complete. and once you’re done all that, you can get the newly released expansion pack. similarly, facebook offers the promise of finding or being found by a new friend, or having another photo of yourself tagged, or being mentioned in a note, or having something new written on your wall. but in both facebook and world of warcraft, its no a known, specific goal that is appealing, but the endless stream of new and unknown potentials, of rewards that we can display for everyone to see, but only by continuing to log in. these rewards big enough to keep us interested, but small enough to leave us unsatisfied. and we keep at it because if we don’t, there’s the possibility of missing something.
this type of collection-based game design has becoming increasingly popular too… think nintendogs, animal crossing and of course pokemon. its interesting to see it employed in a non-game website such as facebook.
in an even further blurring of games and “real life,” justin hall, one of the pioneers of blogging, created a game that kind of runs between WoW and facebook. he calls it passively multiplayer online gaming. basically it keeps track of what websites you look at and you level up based on certain criteria, such as how many reference sites you look up. its super alpha right now and appears to be down as i write this, but check it out. its a really interesting idea.
Tags: worldofwarcraft, wow, facebook, thesis
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