I was really excited to see Danah Boyd on our reading list because even though some of her research has already become a little outdated, I find it extremely insightful. In fact, last year someone in a Sociology class of mine passed me along this link (http://www.danah.org/papers/essays/ClassDivisions.html) to a blog post she wrote that continues to make me view social networking sites in a totally different way. Before I read it, despite my love of Facebook, I always felt like the website was a little elitist. I used to describe wall posts as twenty first century calling cards for college students. When I read Boyd's article about the class differences between Facebook and MySpace, I felt like she was articulating everything I was thinking but didn't know how to really explain. If you enjoyed this week's reading, I highly reccomend you go check it out.
The essay she writes reminds me that as much as we would like it to be, the Internet is not egalitarian and I think that is a lesson we need to think about with this map to. Successful websites are about finding a niche. Which leads to some important questions we need to answer. Who is are audience going to be? The leaders of the organizations we put on the map? The people who need the help? Members of organizations looking for other places to get involved? Then, we need to figure out how we are going to target them.
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Your point about the class differences between Facebook and MySpace is soooooo true!!! And actually it follows the discussion too because it was interesting that at first FB was only for people with college email accounts. At this point, you could say there was somewhat of a "class distinction." However, when FB opened up to anyone and everyone, it definitely dropped in it's "elitist" category to something more like MySpace now. It's interesting how drastically the novelty of FB changed going from just college students to everyone.
ReplyDeleteYour questions are also things that I was thinking about. It's definitely important to consider our audience when making the map. It seems like we're almost catering to both groups, which may be hard to accommodate?