A Child of Our Time

Another week, another abstract. Continuing with the same theme, social media, with a finnish article by Katri Lietsala and Esa Sirkkunen:

Talking about social media
(in Social Media: Introduction to the tools and processes of participatory economy, 2008)

The structure of the article is quite simple. Lietsala & Sirkkunen start by defining how they understand the term ‘social media’, and then specify the different components social media consists of. After this, they process these components more thoroughly, constructing six different genres of social media.

Defining the components

Before defining the term, the writers successfully invalidate the resilient idea that social media would be the starter of a new era, even a revolution. Previous media forms have not been any less social than the contemporary ones, the forms of sociality have just been different. Thus, Lietsala & Sirkkunen suggest social media to be used as an umbrella term under which one can find various and very different cultural practices related to the online content and people who are involved with that content. I couldn’t agree more since I see social media as simply doing what is natural for us humans: being social.

Going through the defining features of social media, Lietsala & Sirkkunen find five main characteristics and five minor ones. The main characteristics they define are as follows: there is a space to share content, the participants in this space create, share or evaluate all or most of the content themselves, the space is based on social interaction, all content has an URL to link it to external networks, and all actively participating members of the site have their own profile page to link to other people, to the content, to the platform itself and to the possible applications. The minor features also occur quite often but are not, according to the writers, obligatory for something to be social media. The minor features are: the space feels like a community, people contribute for free, there is a tagging system that allows folksonomy, content is distributed with feeds in and out the site, and the platforms and tools are in development phase and changed on the run.

While I find these characteristics to be correct, they do rouse some questions. For example, how do the writers define a participant, or a user? Although Lietsala & Sirkkunen do not downright define these, they do examine the difference between the terms ‘prosumer’ and ‘produser’, and find the latter to be more accurate since it emphasizes the users’ activity in producing media, not just consuming it. Another term pair the writers discuss is ‘social software’ and ‘social media’. They make an interesting notion on this one, pointing out the obvious difference between the two; social media is the content, while social software is simply the technological enabler.

On top of these, I really liked Lietsala & Sirkkunens’ notion on what social media actually signifies; without the interaction between people, platforms would be empty and could not succeed even with the most amazing software.

About genre and genres

For Lietsala & Sirkkunen, genre is not just a certain type of text, but rather a way to understand, classify, express, interpret and produce content, and the social relations coded in these conventions. This might be quite a broad definition, but I find it a lot more functional than most of the definitions I’ve come across before.

Based on the defining components specified earlier, the writers find six different main genres of social media. The first one is content creation and publishing tools, including production, publishing and dissemination. The second genre is content sharing, meaning users sharing all kinds of content with peers. The third one is social networks as in keeping up the old and building new social networks, promoting oneself, and so on. The fourth genre is called collaborative productions, meaning participation in collective build productions, while the fifth is virtual worlds, including play, experience and life in virtual environments. The last genre is add-ons – software that transforms a service into a feature of another site or adds new use-value to the existing communities and social media sites through 3rd party applications.

Lietsala & Sirkkunen state that various genres signify that users can choose between varieties of activity types and user roles and thus we now have lots to choose from compared to traditional media. Social media might not be starting a new era, but it definitely enables a whole new level of sociability and participation that older media could only dream of.

References

Lietsala, Katri & Sirkkunen, Esa (2008) “Talking about social media”, in Social Media: Introduction to the tools and processes of participatory economy. Tampere University Press, p. 17-28. http://tampub.uta.fi/tup/978-951-44-7320-3.pdf

Breath of Life

Time to try and revive this blog. I’ll start off by posting some abstracts we are supposed to do for one of our master courses.

I’ll start off with

A Quick Look into the Article:

Social Network Sites: Definition, History, and Scholarship

by danah m. boyd and Nicole B. Ellison

Sites designed for social networking are quite a young internet phenomenon, and an even younger one research-wise. In an introductory article for a special theme section of the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, danah m. boyd and Nicole B. Ellison aim at providing a conceptual, historical and scholarly context for the phenomenon they call social network sites or SNSs.

The authors define social network sites as web-based services that allow individuals to construct a public or semi-public profile within a bounded system, articulate a list of other users with whom they share a connection, and view and traverse their list of connections and those made by others within the system. Terms and definitions are always debatable, but I find this one to be quite good. The definition is very comprehensive but at the same time also confined enough, thus preventing excessive debating over the matter, although everything can of course always be debated if one wants to.

Previous Scholarship

Although the authors first describe the history of SNSs and then move on to describing the various scholarships that focus on studying the phenomenon, I felt going through the latter first fits my purposes better.

There are four scholarships presented in the article. Research focused on impression management and friendship performance, research on networks and network structure, research on bridging of the online and offline social networks, and research on the privacy issues that SNSs and other similar sites rouse. The authors also mention a growing body of research on other aspects of SNSs, such as the possible educational elements of SNSs.

Not being familiar with the history of SNSs research, nor the contemporary situation, I was quite surprised that such a young field is already so well defined, albeit not necessarily on a more general level. Young fields are obviously prone to terminological issues, and especially the idea of online and offline social networks – or online and offline life in general – is quite problematic. The line between the two is very porous, and as the authors note, most of people’s online social activity in fact circles around the same people as their offline social activity.

History

For me, the history-section of the article was the most interesting and educating, mostly due to being very US-centric.

According to the authors’ definition, SixDegrees.com, launched in 1997, was the first recognizable social network site. Although each of the three features described in the definition existed in some form earlier, SixDegrees was the first one to include them all. From the launching of SixDegrees in 1997 to the beginning of the next wave of SNSs in 2001, a number of community tools began supporting various combinations of profiles and publicly articulated Friends.

The next wave of SNSs started – in theory – with Ryze.com in 2001, but in practice Friendster was the one that really kicked it off. Launched in 2002, Friendster was a social complement to Ryze.com, and designed to help friends-of-friends meet. In 2004, Friendster’s popularity surged, and the site encountered technical and social difficulties. From 2003 on – when Friendster was starting to have difficulties – many new SNSs were launched. Most took the form of profile-centric sites, but there were also so-called passion-centric SNSs, and as the social media and user-generated content phenomena grew, websites focused on media sharing also began implementing SNS features. At the same time, blogging services with SNS features became popular, and SNSs were gaining popularity worldwide.

The latest wave in SNSs was started by Facebook. Although the history part thus far was very educating for me, this part was the most intriguing. Albeit having some sort of an idea of how Facebook, the mass media of our time, had started, I had never really looked into its history before. It was fascinating to realise that Facebook, among many other similar sites, started in 2004 as a very restricted site for Harvard students and employees only, but expanded to it’s present day vastness within just a few years. While this seems to be the trend of SNSs these days, some sites explicitly seek narrower audiences. Some intentionally restrict access to appear selective and elite, others are limited by their target demographic and thus tend to be smaller.

The authors state that while websites dedicated to communities of interest still exist and prosper, SNSs are now primarily organized around people, not interests. According to them, this more accurately mirrors unmediated social structures, where “the world is composed of networks, not groups”, as they so felicitously quote Wellman in his article Structural Analysis.

It should be no surprise that the internet, built by people, for people, used by people, is all the time evolving towards the same models and structures that the offline world operates with.

References

boyd, d. m., & Ellison, N. B. (2007). “Social network sites: Definition, history, and scholarship”. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 13(1), article 11. http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol13/issue1/boyd.ellison.html

Wellman, B. (1988). “Structural analysis: From method and metaphor to theory and substance”. In B. Wellman & S. D. Berkowitz (Eds.), Social Structures: A Network Approach (pp. 19-61). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.