Social Media Wrap-Up: Jumping on the Bandwagon for Change

We’ve looked at blogging and emails and surfing and chatting,
Gaming and YouTube and SecondLife and passing.
But do you recall…the most famous social medium of all?

Facebook the popular website
Had a very big fan club
And if you ever saw it
You would join it like a shlub…

Honestly, everyone, I think we’ve talked a lot about Facebook. But a parting shot is necessary, I think, to bring the whole social media craze together.

That’s right, ladies and gents, it’s a social media wrap-up.

This is where I finally give Facebook credit for something—it’s ability to reinvent the social networking site all over again. Truth is, Facebook isn’t all that ground-breaking. You might recall its predecessor, MySpace, or its forerunner, Friendster. I’m told no one ever uses these social networking sites anymore (usually in a slightly puzzled and often deprecatory tone of voice) because they’re just “like, so last week.” Not so with Facebook.

Or is it?

I stumbled across a hilarious little video which seems to capture the spirit of the age of social media. It seems to suggest that Facebook, like MySpace and Friendster before it, is on its way out, soon to be ousted from online supremacy by SecondLife.

Whether this is true remains to be seen, but it brings up an interesting point when it comes to identity: mutability. Really, it’s just a fancy-shmancy word for change. Hey, Obama advocated it, David Bowie sang about it, and no one ever has it for a five dollar bill. Must be important, right?

Here’s the deal. As human beings, we’re always subject to change. Every experience we have, every choice we make, and every person we meet has some influence on the way we do things. The changes may be big or small, but the fact of the matter is, your identity is in a constant state of flux that can change at any given moment.

The same is true online. Our identities change with the times. The you represented yourself on friendster might not be the way you represented yourself on MySpace, or Facebook, or SecondLife. This not only reflects the differences in your chosen medium of social networking, but also the differences in you as a cyber-presence. You’ve grown and matured online just as you’ve grown and matured in real life. Your tastes have changed. You have new friends, new influences. You’re a new you.

Maybe we shouldn’t look at the constant mutability in social networking media as a bad thing. Maybe we should see it as progress. Maybe we should see it as a reflection of our growing maturity and sophistication online.

Or maybe, just maybe, we should see it for what it really is—change for the sake of change.

What do you think? Are social media reinventing themselves because of demand, or are they in pursuit of the Almighty dollar? Leave a comment and let me know.

I Tube, You Tube, We all Tube for YouTube

At this point, I’m sure almost everyone between the ages of 13 and 35 has seen the insanely popular music video Here it Goes Again by OK Go. And the Crying Britney Fan. And Ninja Kitty. And countless other inane yet admittedly amusing videos that owe their fame—or infamy—to the ever-popular YouTube.

Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past few years, YouTube is something of an Internet phenomenon. The video sharing website jumped into the cyber-scene in 2005 when three former PayPal employees, Chad Hurley, Steve Chen and Jawed Karim founded the site. By 2006, with its popularity growing by leaps and bounds, Google acquired YouTube for US$1.65 billion.

The site’s popularity is hardly surprising when we consider two important facets of human nature:

1. the desire for social interaction; and


2. the desire to gain recognition by making an utter ass of oneself in front of an international audience.

But perhaps more important is what we can learn about ourselves as individuals through YouTube.

First, the site allows anyone anywhere to see playlists that you have made. The wackiest, most disturbing video you only added because someone dared you to is part of your online identity by virtue of the fact that your playlists are public knowledge. This not only tells others that you have interesting taste, but it also tells you that you have a propensity to be swayed by others. YouTube is sort of like Facebook, then, since what you post can be affected by others’s perceptions and influences.

Second, YouTube taps into the desire for social interaction by allowing comments and giving users the ability to have “friends”—other YouTube users with profiles on the site. The number and type of these friends may indicate a friendly disposition, low self-esteem, the tendency to associate only with a certain type and many other aspects of identity. The ability to comment on videos adds an aspect of interactivity to the site as well as allowing users to create a persona through the choice of which videos they comment on and how they construct these comments. In this way, YouTube is like a chat room where the language you use says as much about your identity as the topic discussed.

YouTube also brings up issues of popularity. The number of views and favourites that a video receives goes a long way in manufacturing popularity. People are simply more likely to watch a video that many other people have watched, since the number of views seems to translate to an increased popularity. We can say that YouTube profiles are a bit like blogs, since the authority of the user often depends on others’ perception of what you say and what you like.

YouTube boasts many other features with diverse effects on cyber identities. While these are only a few, it gives us a good place to start when it comes to analysing such a complex medium. If YouTube is like Facebook, a chat room and a blog, all rolled into one, perhaps its success lies in its ability to combine aspects of other popular media and bring them all together in one friendly, easy to use service.

Or maybe it’s the appeal of sitting back and enjoying the show. With 200,000 of your closest friends.

Style Matters: Chat Rooms and Identity

You’ve probably grown up with at least one person scolding you, “It’s not what you say, it’s how you say it.” You’ve also probably dismissed it as ridiculous, if you haven’t outright ignored it. But it bears thinking about this old adage when it comes to analysing the effect that chat rooms have on identity.

Nowadays it’s more important than ever to pay attention to the language we use and the messages we convey in electronic forms such as chat rooms. Your sarcastic but harmless comment might just end up starting an Internet feud, and, hate to break it to you, but that joke is just not funny—I guess you had to be there.

This demonstrates the importance of language when it comes to identity formation online. Chat rooms are unique because they make it necessary for users to identify with a specific group and “act” accordingly. I emphasize the word act because of its two meanings in this context: first, as a conscious action, and second as a performance. In chat rooms, both of these aspects of meaning appear through written language. This is because users must choose which room to enter, and then, how to present themselves to the other users.

Internet users already construct some form of identity by choosing to enter a given chat room. Their choice can reveal hobbies, hidden talents, secret desires, professional skills and many other aspects of identity. In this way, the effects of choosing a chat room are like the effects of surfing the web—every decision tells something about you, whether you want it to or not.

Chat rooms also force users to construct identity through the way they communicate. This is largely contingent on the choice of chat room rather than the content of the communications themselves.

Consider this message:

I have been reading Kate Chopin’s The Awakening, and I am finding the prevalence of certain motifs to greatly enhance my enjoyment of the book.

A message like this would not be out of place in a chat room discussing literature seriously and maturely. We would expect the author of the statement to be an adult with a great deal of abiding interest in literature.

Now look at this one.

i hav 2 read kate chopin’s the awakening, and i’m findin lots of motifs which make it cool 4 me to read!

This kind of message is more likely to be found on a general discussion board. The author of this message would seem to be a teenager reading a book for class and discussing his or her homework. It does not diverge in content from the previous example, but the style is vastly different. While one level of meaning remains unchanged, a second implied level of meaning—one which constructs identity in the eyes of others—is completely different.

In this way, people can have multiple identities depending on the chat rooms they frequent, and these identities are evident through the way users express themselves. The adoption of these different identities is almost unconscious. It takes little or no effort on our part to switch codes or ways of performing and communicate in a different way.

We can see, then, that the choices we make even before we enter a chat room form an online identity that defines our interactions with others depending on the context.

Well, darn. Guess that means I should start capitalizing spell-checking my messages so I don’t sound like a thirteen-year-old girl…