It was reported on alexa.com that Facebook was the highest visited digital social networking site followed by Twitter then MySpace. I do find this shocking as I thought MySpace would be 1st or 2nd, I also find the results shocking because I never really thought of Twitter as a social networking site. Social media has developed greatly in the last decade, the first of its kind was a website called SixDegrees which ran from 1997 to 2000 but the website made no profit as it was purely experimental and had a lack of clear revenue model, unlike most sites on the internet today have a advertising strategy.
The characteristics of social media have been described as ‘imagined egocentric communities’ that have a ‘need to belong’. As Web 2.0 is described as ‘participatory culture’, we create our Data Doubles on our Facebook sites, as we looked at our data selves online at our friends’ it was hard to think of them as the same person, with all the photo shopped pictures and confident posts etc, much of what we see online is exaggerated.
As a part of this week’s reading I read ‘the Introduction: “Worship at the Altar of Convergence” by Henry Jenkins 2006, in his reading he explains what Convergence is. “Welcome to convergence culture, where old and new media collide, where grassroots and corporate media intersect, where the power of the media producer and the power of the media consumer interact in unpredictable ways”. In the book he mentions a story that circulated in 2001, where Dino Ignacio high school student experimented with Photoshop using images of Osama Bin Laden, he then posted it on the internet innocently. When a researcher used this image for professional work there was a huge effect, Sesame Street threatened to take legal action and no one would have guessed that “from his bedroom, Ignacio sparked an international controversy…he ultimately decided to dismantle his site” explaining “I feel this has gotten too close to reality”. Jenkins continues to speak about
The characteristics of social media have been described as ‘imagined egocentric communities’ that have a ‘need to belong’. As Web 2.0 is described as ‘participatory culture’, we create our Data Doubles on our Facebook sites, as we looked at our data selves online at our friends’ it was hard to think of them as the same person, with all the photo shopped pictures and confident posts etc, much of what we see online is exaggerated.
As a part of this week’s reading I read ‘the Introduction: “Worship at the Altar of Convergence” by Henry Jenkins 2006, in his reading he explains what Convergence is. “Welcome to convergence culture, where old and new media collide, where grassroots and corporate media intersect, where the power of the media producer and the power of the media consumer interact in unpredictable ways”. In the book he mentions a story that circulated in 2001, where Dino Ignacio high school student experimented with Photoshop using images of Osama Bin Laden, he then posted it on the internet innocently. When a researcher used this image for professional work there was a huge effect, Sesame Street threatened to take legal action and no one would have guessed that “from his bedroom, Ignacio sparked an international controversy…he ultimately decided to dismantle his site” explaining “I feel this has gotten too close to reality”. Jenkins continues to speak about
1. Media convergence
2. Participatory culture
3. Collective intelligence
And that “convergence is, in that sense, an old concept taking on new meanings”. We see this all around, we are all a part of fan culture, taking on something original and turning it into a new idea, whilst doing this now we all feel that we can publish it on the internet, maybe because we feel we can do it anonymously, or perhaps innocently, others do it purely to offend. Another way of explaining convergence is to look at a mobile phone, now different inventions like digital cameras, games, television, laptops are all loosing business because we can now do it all on a mobile phone, just look at the image below as evidence.
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