Lecture 3 Summary

this lecture focused on New Media: virtual community and individual identity, and Internet Studies: Web 2.0 and Social Media.

Social Media includes what people do on the Internet and in particular for business.

• Howard Rheingold wrote a book about this called 'Virtual Community' in 1993 which he also coined the term of.
• the definition of Virtual Community is when people carry on public discussions on the Internet long enough, with sufficient human feeling, to form webs of personal relationships.
• in the 1990's the Internet was not so widely known about.
• Rheingold wrote this revolutionary book which wrote about connecting people on the Internet with similar interests.
• Its a book about what happens when people chat on the Internet and form friendships, from a human perspective.
• Focuses on what people are doing as a group.

Individual Identity

• elaborates on people's behaviour in groups, and focuses on people's individual use of the Internet.
• Turkle (1995) wrote the book 'life on the screen', writing how;

The Internet has become a significant social laboratory for experimenting with the constructions and reconstructions of self that characterize postmodern life. In its virtual reality, we self fashion and self create.

• This book was about the way that people present themselves online. People choose to display certain things about themselves to create a particular identity.
• People can be anonymous on the Internet.

• Shared interest was one of the biggest factors of the Internet when it was first established.
• Nowadays however, the focus is more on the individual rather than people with similar interests.
• this idea is called 'Ego-Centric Social Network', where 'you' are now the centre of the group.
• Barry Welman said in his book that we are no longer individuals but are 'networked individuals'.

• Web 2.0 was introduced in 1993 in the USA and 1995 in Australia.
• this was introduced in part because of the 'dotcom crash' or 'dotbomb' of the year 2000.
• Tim O'Reilly was the founder and wanted to restore people's faith in the Internet.
• He proposed using the net in new ways such as easy blogging.
• he invented World Wide Web version 2.0 and marketed this as a new era in Web history.
• the focus in Web 2.0 was for business conducted online where the emphasis was on the user experience.
• its feature included; folksonomy, and organising knowledge such as 'tags' or posts on items.
• it involved user-generated content: where people make things such as photos or videos and put them on the net. Henry Jenkins (2006) refers to this as 'participatory culture'.
• open API: means sharing data openly between services on the Internet. Different websites can 'talk' to eachother and share information.

• Social Media includes webblogs/blogs and all variations of this such as Twitter.
• Social Network Services include Myspace and Facebook
• Content Sharing Communications include anywhere where people are uploading pictures or videos etc such as Flicker or Youtube.
• Economy of Accumulation asks who has information about you and what can they do with it?
• Attention Economy asks 'who wants your eyeball' or who wants your attention at their site, and what do they want you to see or do?

• there exist significant privacy issues on the Internet including what is mentioned above in regard to Facebook and Myspace etc.
• Specifically. the gathering and use of your information that you have put online.