Assignment 3 Due July 11^th - If you don’t have a Facebook or MySpace page, create one. Then, think about and write about what you reveal or distort in such potentially anonymous communication.

 

Could this be the kind of assignment I’ve been waiting for my entire life? Someone is asking us for our social networking accounts instead of sending out a random friend request? As a publicity and promotions guru, I am particularly proud of my adeptness in this arena and I could link to a whole host of social networking sites that many people have never heard of. For instance, has anyone in class heard of Cyworld and their 22 million users in Korea? How about in the land of pale skin and bad teeth? Ireland and the UK are totally loving Bebo right now. I sign up for them all, build a quick profile and if the site takes off in a couple of years (like say, Twitter or Digg) then I am already a longtime user with an established profile. If the social networking site dies, and 95% of them do, then nobody loses. Did you know even Kettle Potato Chips had a social networking site at some point? Fail! Fail!

            First some background on MySpace. Check out my page if you like, definitely add me as a friend if you want to: http://www.myspace.com/suicidebook

 

I discovered MySpace through an A&R promotion person that was affiliated with the division of Sony, where I was working at the time. Since all these new bands were using it to let people access their music in the music community, I created my own profile, a vanity page for my novel which was published in 2004. I am proud to say that I was the very first novel on MySpace. At one point I had close to 10,000 friends, and that was back in the good ol’ days when friends were friends and not some teenage kids ‘bot designed to promote his cut-rate midget pornography site to a million people a day.

So, I got completely to MySpace addicted in 2005, talking and meeting with people and really helping establish myself in the burgeoning, yet tight-knit community of writers who were trying to find a common home on the web. Like a great book, I couldn’t put the damn site down. I used MySpace at work and then stayed up on it too late at night, only to get up bleary eyed and go to work the next morning where I would MySpace (used it as a verb there) the day away. It was an amazing tool to reach out to people and that personal connection helped my novel make it to the Amazon top 1000 books once or twice before falling into obscurity. Without MySpace as a promotional tool I would have never reached that large of an audience. It’s helped me become a better writer and also guard what I write carefully because I know my audience intimately.

 

Facebook (and its cheap looking Atari 2600 graphics) and others came along and I adapted to those sites too, each time adding more and more personal information. Wood and Smith say that “Whether or not we are consciously aware of it, we all tailor our communication behaviors to the settings around us. Both what we say and to whom we say it are influenced by social behavior (p.81) Different networks expect different personalities to emerge. If you are using these sites to promote a book, then you have to tailor your image to the audience. Even with nothing to sell, you are still selling yourself and do the same thing. So be sure to add me as a friend on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/people/sam_paul/19718199)

But things are changing rapidly. The wind shifted. MySpace and Facebook are losing popularity for a reason. A social storm has been brewing for years. To quote Postman from our reading this week, “…the genie that came out of the bottle proclaiming that information was the new god of culture was a deceiver… it gave no warning about the dangers of information glut…” (p. 60) The people who set the social-networking trend have grown sick of these sites. Gladwell’s hushpuppies aren’t cool any more. The novelty wore off when you wound up realizing you were having a chat with your neighbor in the trailer park who was advertising themselves as a self proclaimed super-model (ala Paisley). Within a confined network, we could accept some exaggerations, with a little contact you could see-through, and accept, these transgressions. However as the number of people compounded, the lies did as well. We’re overwhelmed by the glut of people and now my lies have to top your lies in order to get the same amount or less attention from the other bees in the proverbial hive.

Now articles are focusing on the necessity of having REAL social networking, especially in business. Sites like LinkedIn try and get around this, but even our resumes are padded and therefore that site is guilty of the same thing. Sites are going to have to find smaller and smaller niches to get advertising dollars and sustain themselves.

 

Please click my links! Enjoy the weekend. –Sam Paul

Sam-

WOW, you really know your stuff when it comes to on-line networking! I think you had a coupld of really great points though in that lies do have to continuously be created in order to cover up the previous lies and it's a vicious cycle until you have no idea what's true and what's not. Sad really...

It's great that you were able to use these sights though to promote you're book, that's a purpose I hadn't thought of before.

I am however, still wondering how in the world you managed 10,000 friends?!?! The time you must have spent, like you said...

All in all though, I think you can consider yourself an expert on on-line social networking! Thanks for sharing all of you information!

I think it's great that you were able to use MySpace in such a positive way! It's refreshing, actually! I used to have a MySpace page, but I deleted it because I was tired of how juvenile it had become. I feel that MySpace has, for the most part, turned into a playground for pedophiles and hopeless teenagers. It still does have a niche for business networking though; my mom uses it for her business. Check it out - http://www.myspace.com/prossackdesigns

It seems that different countries are trying their hands at creating social networking sites. I've known about Bebo for a while, but I hadn't heard of Cyworld. Russia has one too, Vkontakte.ru. It's an exact clone of Facebook, and has over 14.5 million users.

I was also just wondering, do you have as many friends on the other sites as you do on MySpace?