Lecture Three - Media, New Media, Social Media

Today we were introduced to the some themes from Internet studies. Briefly these were broken down into:

Virtual Communities
Individual Identity
Shared Interests
Social Media

Virtual Communities: were first introduced by Rheingold in 1993. He identified how people, who may be isolated due for various reasons such as social awkwardness, could connect with similar people on the Internet. These became known as virtual communities.

Individual Identity: Turkle 1995 identified how the Internet allows people to be different to who they are in real life. For example people can misrepresent their attractiveness, their sex. This phenomenon has allowed people in ways never before available to be ‘whoever they want to be’.

Shared Interests: Since the late 90’s there has been a shift away from the shared interests groups of virtual communities to what is called ‘Egocentric Networking’ where ‘You’ are the common interest.

Social Media: These are essentially Social Networking sites such as Facebook, MySpace etc. as well content sharing communities such as Flickr, Deviant.art, YouTube etc. Due to the huge popularity of these sites, we spent some time on this area focussing on aspects such as privacy. Many people don’t know that the stuff they post on-line actually often becomes the property of the site not them. This has huge implications for intellectual property law etc.

We then discussed Twiter and the supposed mundane nature of the communication that takes place on Twiter. One point worth noting is that we generally have used technology in the same way. Meaning we don’t always talk about weighty issues when we speak on the phone to our friends, so why should Twiter be any different.

We also watched a couple of videos about social networking sites such as Twiter. The great catch phrase I took away was from this was:

I am talking to no-one and everyone…