[tech] Hypothesis: What Facebook/MySpace Is
OK, a lightbulb just went off in my head. I think I have had a sudden insight into just what Facebook/MySpace are, as used by the vast majority of their users, in their social ecologies. This is my hypothesis:Imagine that the Internet is a college dorm. Your Face/Space page is your dorm room door. You know, with one of those corkboard-whiteboard combination thingies on it.
Actually sitting and talking with someone in your dorm room? That's IM. Or txting.
Nobody expects their dorm room door's corkboard to support actual, you know, conversation or chatter. It's one's asynchronous presence for when one is away. It represents you when you're not IMable.
Face/Space makes no sense to those of us who don't use IM as our primary internet medium. The dorm-room-door function of Face/Space only makes sense in a primarily IM-based/mediated culture, as a secondary, compensatory medium, to complement IM in its weaknesses (synchrony, lack of pictures and gizmos, graph opacity.)
LJ works quite differently; LJ is not the door, LJ is the room. We use LJ closer to the way kids use IM that to the way kids use Face/Space.
Can any Face/Space users confirm or deny my hypothesis?
EDIT: Guys, I'm not asking how you use it. Most of you are primarily (duh) LJ users, thus definitionally disqualifying you as examples of the phenomenon under discussion. But if you use Face/Space regularly, you probably have developed as sense of how it is typically used by those people who rely on it.
Actually sitting and talking with someone in your dorm room? That's IM. Or txting.
Nobody expects their dorm room door's corkboard to support actual, you know, conversation or chatter. It's one's asynchronous presence for when one is away. It represents you when you're not IMable.
Face/Space makes no sense to those of us who don't use IM as our primary internet medium. The dorm-room-door function of Face/Space only makes sense in a primarily IM-based/mediated culture, as a secondary, compensatory medium, to complement IM in its weaknesses (synchrony, lack of pictures and gizmos, graph opacity.)
LJ works quite differently; LJ is not the door, LJ is the room. We use LJ closer to the way kids use IM that to the way kids use Face/Space.
Can any Face/Space users confirm or deny my hypothesis?
EDIT: Guys, I'm not asking how you use it. Most of you are primarily (duh) LJ users, thus definitionally disqualifying you as examples of the phenomenon under discussion. But if you use Face/Space regularly, you probably have developed as sense of how it is typically used by those people who rely on it.