Comments on: Response to danah’s MySpace essay

By: jimmyb

jimmyb — Mon, 03 Apr 2006 23:19:24 +0000

danah,
i wasn’t suggesting that there was some pure uncommercial public space for kids to ‘hang out’, rather, that your evocation of the MySpace experience was somewhat utopian. I stand by that. youth culture has always negotiated commerciality – in fact commercial fashion thrives off youth culture and always has. going forward i’m just unsure that we’re not losing some critical distance from potentially disarming marketing strategies in what is an increasingly opaque social structure [in phenomemon like MySpace].

By: zephoria

zephoria — Sun, 02 Apr 2006 19:31:04 +0000

Btw: i don’t have a good term for it.

As for the critique regarding Murdoch… Frankly, for the last 50 years, youth have been treated as consumers by every capitalist institution on the planet. This is nothing new and it’s only getting worse. They’re used to it and they’re determined to do their thing in the midst of it. They use what’s sold to them as cultural objects and they repurpose them to build identity. I’m certainly not a fan of Murdoch, but to think that the only valid youth culture is that which sits outside of corporate manipulation is foolish.

Lots of folks have made money off of youth communities doing their thing (and even more want to). I’m not entirely thrilled with that dynamic but if the alternative is no place to gather, i’d rather them hang out amidst all of the folks trying to sell them things.

By: Photar

Photar — Sun, 02 Apr 2006 08:10:05 +0000

So many of the definitions of idle apply to myspace. But probably entirtainment-oriented is the word you’re looking for.

By: Ben

Ben — Sat, 01 Apr 2006 04:33:06 +0000

Nah, hanging out on a website isn’t a “process” because it’s a non-linear experience, with many spontanious diversions, useage of the back button, etc.

By: Ron Metcalfe

Ron Metcalfe — Fri, 31 Mar 2006 20:42:00 +0000

Ben said: “task-orientated experiences verses what I can only describe as a ‘hanging out’ experience (danah, please give me a term of this!)”

Isn’t the term you’re looking for “process”? That is,
task-oriented experiences versus process experiences – where process is about the experience of getting there rather than the end result, or task.

By: Photar

Photar — Wed, 29 Mar 2006 23:35:48 +0000

http://www.jwz.org/doc/worse-is-better.html

By: Headshift

Headshift — Wed, 29 Mar 2006 17:20:17 +0000

Midpoint at the BBC Innovation Labs…

Al Davidson reports back from the midway point of the BBC Innovation Lab on “making it people-shaped” and “making it beeb-shaped”…

By: jimmyb

jimmyb — Wed, 29 Mar 2006 16:25:59 +0000

Danah’s paper has certainly got some air-time. Your comment on user-centric design was interesting – in the sense that you design for different needs.. but the need for creating an ‘identity’ out of various images, audio and video files as well as text and friends – just a bunch of uri’s – is that the need is so fucking simple. It just doesn’t ‘help’ in design terms does it?

But actually by inadvertently not making it really simple, by actually having design ‘quirks’ the service has spun out well. There’s a sense of satisfaction, perhaps, in its rather geeky early 90s aesthetic and social structure – “cool new friends” etc. And then it struck me… they’ve inadvertently kept this as an ‘edge’ in aesthetic terms. And as Seth Godin has stated “it’s at the edges that people notice you”. Perhaps we should stop trying to design for perfection with UCD methodologies and build for ‘imperfection’ – so long as you keep the technical solution flexible you can adapt quite rapidly…

Aside from this Rajat has an interesting comment on the fact that some of the MySpace inhabitees are going to be mighty embarassed in future years when all this stuff is still ther ein the archive a la usenet groups… which offers potential service ideas around ‘cleansing’ identities etc.

Lastly, Danah’s paper is, as othere have stated, a bit utopian in its evocation of the MySpace experience. After all the power relationship, the structures that allow their agency to develop are under the control of Murdoch and manoey making data devils. Murdoch’s a bad man right Ben?

By: Photar

Photar — Wed, 29 Mar 2006 05:30:04 +0000

The problem at least in the US is that parents are taking less and less responsibility for their kids and they expect schools to teach their kids everything.

And so, if parents don’t want to take responsibility they diserve to have their govenment come in and fsck everything up.