::fibreculture:: Facebook group

[Jill Walker Rettberg]

Speaking of the oddities of grouping differenet kinds of friends on  
Facebook, another issue is that people actually use it very differently.

Robert Scoble (ex-blog-evangelist for Microsoft, co-author of Naked  
Conversations) joined Facebook recently and is treating very  
differently to the college students. He doesn't see it as a social  
network, but as a medium. He's encouraged all his blog readers to  
"friend" him on Facebook and his profile is like social networking on  
crack, it's just full of applications and videos and shared blog  
posts and so on. He's almost (or maybe he actually has) hit the top  
limit for friends - you can't have more than 5000, it seems.

The point is, Scoble uses Facebook to broadcast stuff. And what he  
points out is that it's two way in a way blogs aren't. If you see  
Scoble's feed (because you're his "friend"), he'll see yours too.

This excerpt from Sebastien Provencher's blog describes it pretty  
well. The post is title "Robert Scoble is Media"

> It made me wonder: why would Robert Scoble accept “friends”  
> invitation from people he does not know? Why do you want to be  
> connected to people you don’t know and alert them to stuff you’re  
> doing? And then it hit me! Robert Scoble is media. He’s building  
> his own broadcast network. He understands that media is completely  
> fragmented and, by participating in all these new social  
> communication vehicles (blogging, Twitter, Pownce, Facebook), he’s  
> aggregating readers and viewers,
> thereby increasing his penetration and his worth as a media. I’m  
> convinced Robert reaches close to 100% of all early adopters in  
> Silicon Valley (and a good chunk in North America). He now has  
> tremendous influence on “influencers”.
>
> Now, I finally understood why I invited people yesterday to connect  
> to me in Facebook. I am media as well. By writing the Praized blog  
> every day since October 2006, I have become media. And if you are  
> media, you want to build up your “circulation” to increase your  
> influence and by extension, your value. But be aware: you have to  
> accept the reciprocal conversations though. Robert Scoble receives  
> updates from 1253 Pownce friends and 2702 Facebook friends. The  
> noise level is very high. This conversation is not unidirectional.
http://www.praized.com/blog/social-networks/robert-scoble-is-media/
Robert Scoble himself rapidly posted a response, stating that he  
agreed entirely:
http://scobleizer.com/2007/07/14/

Here's a followup from Sebastian, noting complaints from Scoble's  
"friends" that his feed is filling up their Facebook.
http://www.praized.com/blog/social-networks/i-told-you-robert-scoble- 
is-media/

Jill

> Interesting to me for lots of reasons is boyd's essay on the class  
> distinctions between Facebook and Myspace (I never know exactly how  
> to capitalise the dotcom brands properly and I work in this field:  
> FaceBook? myspAce?)
>
> http://www.danah.org/papers/essays/ClassDivisions.html
>
> Here's a sample:
>
>> "The goodie two shoes, jocks, athletes, or other "good" kids are  
>> now going to Facebook. These kids tend to come from families who  
>> emphasize education and going to college. They are part of what  
>> we'd call hegemonic society. They are primarily white, but not  
>> exclusively. They are in honors classes, looking forward to the  
>> prom, and live in a world dictated by after school activities.
>>
>> MySpace is still home for Latino/Hispanic teens, immigrant teens,  
>> "burnouts," "alternative kids," "art fags," punks, emos, goths,  
>> gangstas, queer kids, and other kids who didn't play into the  
>> dominant high school popularity paradigm. These are kids whose  
>> parents didn't go to college, who are expected to get a job when  
>> they finish high school. These are the teens who plan to go into  
>> the military immediately after schools. Teens who are really into  
>> music or in a band are also on MySpace. MySpace has most of the  
>> kids who are socially ostracized at school because they are geeks,  
>> freaks, or queers."
>
> Also worth checking is the level of methodological heat she  
> received for writing this essay.
>
> None of which is to say FB is a bad place for FC, but it may say  
> something about the "us" of FC that we are having this conversation  
> about Facebook in a way that we weren't about MySpace... and what  
> we might be able to do to affect the context that is suggested by  
> boyd's comments (remembering with fondness white Australia's long  
> history of sardonic critiques of anyone too up themselves).
>
> Regards,
>
> Danny
>
> --
> http://www.dannybutt.net
>
>
> On 9/08/2007, at 4:55 PM, Lisa Gye wrote:
>
>> Hi Tom
>>
>> perhaps you might be interested in Danah Boyd and Nicole Ellison's
>> draft introduction to their forthcoming issue of the Journal of  
>> Computer
>> Mediated Communications which is focussing on social network  
>> sites? It
>> provides an excellent overview of what people are doing with these
>> platforms now -
>> see http://www.danah.org/papers/worksinprogress/SNSHistory.html
>>
>> I guess I'm interested not so much in what people are doing but what
>> they might be able to do in the future. What are the limits and
>> possibilities of such systems? As people interested in researching
>> network culture,  it makes sense to me to engage with these  
>> platforms,
>> IMHO.
>>
>> Cheers, Lisa
>>
>>
>>
>> Lisa Gye
>> Lecturer in Media and Communications
>> Swinburne University of Technology
>> http://www.sportswithoutborders.net.au
>> http://www.altx.com/ebooks/ulmer.html
>> http://www.lisagye.net
>> Tel: +613 92148345
>> The cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity.
>> Dorothy Parker
>>
>>
>> Swinburne University of Technology
>> CRICOS Provider Code: 00111D
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