In just about the past decade, Youtube, Facebook, and eBay have revolutionized the way people use the internet. People used to be able to only look information up on the internet, posted by people who were tech savvy and at least knew how to write HTML. Youtube, Facebook, and eBay, which are all types of social networking or sharing sites, changed all that, allowing regular people who had an internet connection and a laptop to post information for the world to see. The difference between these sites lies in the types of social interaction they facilitate. Freespace 2, a video game I grew up with, also facilitated a social interaction much different from Youtube, Facebook, and eBay.
Youtube allows people to post videos of themselves and then receive feedback from other users. It provides people with a way to get their name out to the public, and more than a few budding musicians and actors have been "discovered" through Youtube.
Facebook provides a way for people to express themselves on the web to the people they meet out in the physical world. While video sharing has become a part of it, Facebook mostly lies within the realm of one's network, namely your friends, family, and school or company. Celebrities are an exception to this, but even then celebrities tend to have separate Facebook accounts for their friends versus their fans, or a separate Facebook page altogether.
eBay is particularly interesting, because it enables people to actually advertise, buy, sell, and bid over the internet. This is a buyer-seller social interaction that completely changed the way people use the internet. The internet was no longer just an information resource, but it became marketplace!
Freespace 2 also facilitates social interaction, but on a much smaller scale in comparison to the three sites mentioned above. Freespace 2 is a game about fighter pilots in space, but it is no an MMO. It can be played multiplayer with several computers over a network, enabling players to interact with others in the game, but not with a massive group of people. However, Freespace 2 and many games like it are interesting, because sites that came out of Freespace 2 have enabled a kind of massive social interaction to take place centered on the game.
These three sites and the video game all facilitate social interaction between people who could be physically distant, but virtually present.
I like your general idea of these four mediums that they've changed the way people use the internet and, I think, even people's life style. For our parents' generation, they watched videos by renting tapes, contacted their friends by looking through their old phonebooks, shopped among the real stores along the downtown streets and played card games with their friends without any digital animations. And it was hard to imagine that you could do all of them at home through a 13'inch screen right now.And the internet was original used for checking emails and for posting up some information. The inventions of these four classical interactive mediums have largely shortened the distance among individuals and enclosed the world under the virtual web. And they definitely emphasized the essense of internet,that is, the interactions among individuals.
ReplyDeleteIt's really striking to realize that the Internet no longer just facilitates interaction, but is a place for interaction just like a real-life coffee shop or classroom. Like you said in the case of eBay, the Internet is no longer just an information resource, but a marketplace! It can also be a school, a convention center, a place for public speeches and music performances. With stuff like video streaming and live chat rooms, the barrier between producer of content and consumer of content is practically gone.
ReplyDeleteI agree with Joy and Yuting that you make a good point in observing that the key thing that all four of those things have in common is that they changed the way that the Internet is used. I'm embarrassed to admit that this hadn't struck me before, but it makes so much more sense now why Wanda would choose those 3 sites + video games as things to talk about. They all changed how the Internet was used in a a different way.
ReplyDeleteIt is probably also worth noting that Facebook in particular has its own marketplace, and you can post videos on Facebook as well. Does this mean that Facebook would become the uber site, where because it offers similar functionality as eBay and YouTube, that those two sites will disappear? The common sense (and I guess right) answer is no; but why? I guess these four forms of media all illustrate the importance of specialization as well. YouTube specializes in sharing videos that anyone can watch, not just your friends, like on Facebook, that sort of thing.
I think it's interesting that you said Facebook is for people to connect with people that they actually know. I would say that's the case for most people (I'm pretty sure I'm only friends with people that I know in real life), but I think we all get those friend requests from people we've never met before. What about the possibility of people using Facebook as a way to meet people before physically meeting them? I've seen commercials for some sort of mini-documentary where a girl actually goes out and meets the people she's friends with on Facebook but has never met in person before.
ReplyDeleteI can't say as I really miss the "bad old days" of Geocities form-generated HTML and MS Frontpage atrocities laden with BLINK tags and random font sizes. Still, it always interested me how little knowledge of HTML it took before people would pride themselves on knowing it, or how little they would consider as a barrier when they wanted to publish something to the web. It's rather informative about the way in which most people approach technology. Or perhaps just about the fact that the human mind tends to chalk up any unknown as "here be dragons" until it's pushed through that first bit of learning. Reflects on things from basic literacy education to xenophobia and anti-immunization zealotry.
ReplyDeleteeBay changed things, sort of, although spam and commercial sites had been around for a long time. For one, it's the whole purpose of the .com TLD, and really the whole motivation for the WWW over older forms. The interface evolved to reach a wider audience, mainly because people with the money to make it so saw the potential for profit. But eBay certainly saw a new way to tap that potential profit, at a time when most of the players were running on rainbows and about to slam hard into reality.
Telepresence is a good angle, but sort of inherent in each as something that exists online. There's lots of potential to develop this idea further if you ever need a paper topic.
You analysis of the three websites was very thorough, but your comments about video games were particularly interesting in that you focused specifically on one game rather than the entire genre. Furthermore, Freespace 2 sounds like the precursor of Xbox Live, which can be seen as an entire social media to rival the previously-mentioned websites in its own right. Because I had never heard of this game (nor played one similar to it until very recently), I felt that this addition to your post contributed significantly to your analysis of these social mediums.
ReplyDelete@lkbower: I hadn't heard of that documentary! It sounds really cool.
ReplyDeleteI think Facebook created a different "culture" than chatrooms, myspace, and other sites that facilitate interaction between strangers. This culture probably came out of their marketing strategy -- primarily by word of mouth, mainly through students in college. The sense I get is that myspace mainly relies on famous and aspiring musicians, chatrooms tried to form common interest groups online, while Facebook built a framework for people to keep in contact as they network. I think the way that the girl in the documentary uses Facebook is different from the way most people I know use it.