If you read back to my very first post on New Media Mogul you’ll find my thoughts on Facebook and the way social networking is changing our lives and the way we communicate. Now in a competition sponsored by Sprite called ‘The Truth’ a satirical and humorous take on life in five years time is presented, as we run our lives exactly like we run our Facebook and MySpace pages. The scary thing is that I think these guys are onto something, but anyway, enjoy!
Posted in Social Networking
Tagged communication, facebook, myspace, Social Networking
I was listening to the Huey Lewis song ‘Happy To Be Stuck with You’ and the line that goes ‘We share the same phone number, all the same friends and the same address’ got me thinking. Couples who are living together are really not so inexorably linked as they once were – they might still share a landline number and a physical address, but almost certainly they will have their own mobile phone number, their own email address and individual access to other communication services such as social networking sites. I don’t actually know whether there is any research that demonstrates the effect of this move towards communication infrastructure that is individualised and unshared on how people form relationships and maintain them, but it seems interesting to me.
It’s also a segueway into a discussion about what is happening to the media landscape. Just as couples sharing a house used to be limited to sharing the same communications infrastructure, and as Huey Lewis suggests, this made them happy to be stuck together, perhaps it was also true that these same people were happy to be stuck with the services of various media companies because there were so few alternatives. Now that there are alternatives, it will be interesting to see how fickle the loyalties of media consumers will become, and how fractured the media landscape will become, as large operators are replaced with a myriad of small operators.
We’ve already seen The Bulletin shut its doors for the last time, and reading between the lines, it seems that the fickleness of media consumers was to blame for the demise of this once extremely influential publication, with PBL Media citing falling circulation numbers as more and more people turned to the Internet for their news and opinion. It begs asking this question then – what are people looking for in their media and is continued excellence in production of innovative and original content the key to survival in the digital media age?
Posted in New Media
Tagged communication, huey lewis, New Media, pbl media, Social Networking, the bulletin
When The Matrix was released in 1999 it seemed like fantasy. The idea that a computer program would be in control of everything and humans were just the battery cells powering the computer as they were plugged into a virtual reality simulation that occupied their minds seemed unbelieavable. Although this scenario is not something that’s ever likely to occur, sometimes when I look at the evolution of Facebook I wonder if the creators of The Matrix might have had more prescience than we might have otherwise thought possible.
Now don’t get me wrong, I’ll be the first to admit that I’m a huge Facebook addict – I generally check it several times per day, using both my computer and my mobile phone to do so but sometimes it gets me wondering. It gets me wondering about how radically the software is changing the way I communicate with my family and friends, and just how beholden I am becoming to this program.
For example, I don’t really need to ask my friends how their days have been anymore, instead their Facebook status will let me know. If it tells me that ‘Clare has had a crap day’ then I know that something has happened to my girlfriend today and she probably needs cheering up. Likewise I’m less inclined to ask my friends how their weekends were – if I wasn’t already doing something with them, then chances are someone took along a digital camera and has already uploaded photos so I can see exactly what went on. Even relationships don’t warrant as much discussion as they used to – if my friends happen to break up with their partners then Facebook will tell me so and likewise if they find someone new in their life, Facebook will tell me that too.
There’s a satirical graphic doing the rounds on the Internet at the moment, entitled ‘Pensionbook’ that is meant to be Facebook when Generation Y grows old, with recent deaths instead of birthdays and colostomy bag applications and as ridiculous as this is, it gets me wondering about how communication practices are evolving for my generation. First of all mobile phones came along and we’ve become integrated with them, to the point that most people cannot leave the house without one. Now Facebook has come along and is available on any device that can establish an Internet connection and launch a web browser. It seems as though along the way, communication has been grossly simplified.
Perhaps this is a good thing in this fast paced world we live in, and perhaps Facebook allows us to pay more attention to the people we care about in our minute amounts of spare time by concentrating the happenings of our lives into a news feed. Then again, Matrix style, we could be becoming increasingly dependent on the application until one day we won’t be able to do anything unless Facebook says so.
