“Think of these activities as lying under a Coasean floor; they are valuable to someone but too expensive to be taken on in any institutional way, because the basic and unsheddable costs of being an institution in the first place make those activities not worth pursuing.”
— Here Comes Everybody by Clay Shirky.
“Judith Donath, who founded MIT’s Sociable Media Group and wrote The Social Machine, predicts that text will be a less and less important part of our asynchronous communications mix. Instead, she foresees a “very fluid interface” that would mix text with voice, video, sensor outputs (location, say, or vital signs), and who knows what else.”
This generation of newborns is the first to be brought up by parents who grew up with facebook. This results in the fact that nearly half of the newly born babies is visible online within the first day after birth. I wouldn’t want that, but my research showed differently. A lot of people didn’t think of it as a problem, as their kid was part of their lives. The only negative thing mentioned, was the fact that the baby has no say in it. This resulted in the making of four baby-products, with which the baby can put himself online. To make people think about the use of social media, and how this influences the life of this new generation. What is considered to be okay, and when does it go too far? And, even more important: who is in charge of that decision?
- Laura Cornet: New Born Fame
“Hit the “acknowledge” button—or the fave, like, or the A-OK—and a quick, auto-generated email would go out to everyone on a message’s thread. Older software would show that message as a regular email, with text like, “At 12:34, Robinson Meyer acknowledged your message.” But newer clients could render it as a single line at the end of the sender’s message, perhaps with all the acknowledgers folded into a sentence as they are on Facebook: “Robinson Meyer, Adrienne LaFrance, and Megan Garber liked this.””
Email is actually a tremendous, decentralized, open platform on which new, innovative things can and have been built. In that way, email represents a different model from the closed ecosystems we see proliferating across our computers and devices. Email is a refugee from the open, interoperable, less-controlled “web we lost.” It’s an exciting landscape of freedom amidst the walled gardens of social networking and messaging services.
All true, but email didn’t start out this way.
There are at least six distinctive structures of social media crowds which form depending on the subject being discussed, the information sources being cited, the social networks of the people talking about the subject, and the leaders of the conversation. Each has a different social structure and shape: divided, unified, fragmented, clustered, and inward and outward hub and spokes.
Pinterest may have passed Twitter in popularity in the U.S. according to new figures out last month from Pew, but globally the social network to watch may be Facebook-owned Instagram. According to research published today by the GlobalWebIndex, Instagram is growing the fastest of all social media sites worldwide, increasing its active user base by 23% in the last six months.
From my own observation, the interesting thing about the growth of Instagram is that people aren’t using it purely as a photo sharing app - its also a communication tool, with a thread anchored by an image that might not actually be a photo.