Class divide on the internet

Just who are the glitterati of the internet? The geeks? The bands? Who are the aristocrats? Mass owners of land in second life? A high-level dwarf in World of Warcraft? Hard to tell at this juncture, and I have little time to think about it at the moment.

Suffice to say, is danah boyd, a PhD student in the School of Information at Berkeley, has been looking into this realm for the last four years, and just the other day, one of her recent papers kicked up a right stink across the net…getting down to brass tacks and saying Facebook is for the wealthy, educated, middle-classes and Myspace is for every other deviant subculture under the sun. HAH, how I laughed.

I wouldn’t care to agree or disagree just at the moment, I wish I had more time to read her blog, it’s terribly interesting, and actually makes me quite jealous of her insight an the respect she commands. I’ll broach this subject again once I’m in possession of all the facts and can really hit it hard, in the time being I thought any readers might be interested in the argument itself, and the fuss it’s caused online.

On a side note, there are changes ahead, namely a re-design, it was always in the pipeline, as I don’t like these generic blogger templates, and now my designer friend has a bit of time on his hands he’s getting cracking. So things will go missing, stuff will appear, problems may strike, we’ll see how it goes.

More soon.

Presence updaters and Shane Macgowan

The social presence revolution is all starting to kick off as far as I’m concerned. Most people will only know about this though their facebook ‘Richard is doing blah blah’, and probably won't even realise they're part of a wider picture when they put on all manner of applications to their Facebook profile.

Alas, the real revolution is rocking this way, giving people the facility to see what their friends, loved ones, family members and even favourite personalities online, are doing at any given moment throughout the day. It’s 24/7 surveillance, except with this Big Brother, you can turn it off.

I currently rock Jaiku, Facebook and Twitter on occasion, although I’ve yet to set it up properly so my feed is coming off my Jaiku account. Robert Scoble, is pushing his omnipotence, the pros and cons of each part, on us with a recent blog post, he say’s there’s something interesting going on that we should all be aware of, I’m inclined to agree.

It’s a tough on to call though, whether it really will be incorporated by the masses or just left for us geeks who continue to believe we’re ‘right on the edge, above the curve, living in a technological space, right out of the box... man’ or whether the ‘normies’ will actually pick-up on any of this sort of stuff.

On a technological and hedonistic level, I believe it’s about staying in the loop, and having the facility to do it anywhere, any time, keeping right on top of what everyone is doing all the time. I was in a pub on Saturday somewhere in north London, good times, good music, reasonable prices and Shane Macgowan sat in the corner, HA. The point is I could have loaded up Jaiku, or Twibbler, geo tagged a post and let the friends that I have on my contact list know exactly where I was, what I was getting up to, and told them to get down for some awsomeness.

I didn’t as it happened as I was a little to drunk, and totally forgot about the ‘presence updater revolution’ at the time, in favour of some ‘real life’ hedonistic pursuits, one of which was losing my mind.

Where will it all go? Who knows? And in the light of wanting to keep these posts relatively short, I’ll end it there, leave the question open, and maybe address it again soon. Lets see how it goes.

I’ve got so much to talk about here at the moment but the lack of internet at my house is a serious drag on my want and ability to blog on a personal level. But there you go.

More soon

Anarchy in the social media

Ha, welcome to the party, pal!

One great article that recently caught my attention was over at mashable, concerning chaos within the social media, online communities, static-anarchy in an online space, freaks with keyboards, weird wired times.

The article is detailed and informative but doesn’t seem to get into the grit of these actions, these weird call to arms taking place over the internet, a movement spawning from an online space in a space – for all intents and purposes – that doesn’t actually exist, it’s a bunch of 0’s and 1’s.



One classic example is the Digg revolt of 2007, concerning a certain code that was deemed illegal by some company, somewhere. Digg quickly took down any stories pertaining to the code, for fear of being sued and taken out by the Mega-Turbo-Compu-Corp type organisation that owned it, or at least was threatening to sue.

This is where it gets interesting though, the Digg users fucking hated that, they ‘revolted’ against the establishment, against the people who were responsible for running their community, they didn’t give a shit if the community went down, as long as it was open, they fought for their freedom, to post whatever they wanted in an online community that was built on a system of open sharing. THEY FOUGHT WITH MIGHT, THE MIGHT OF THE GEEK.

And they fucking won-n-all, 24 hours after Digg said, ‘we’re taking this down because we’re worried about legal implications,’ the founder of the site said something like, ‘fuck it, if we’re going down we’ll go down with the users,’ which was a real turn up for the books. And now nothing seems to have happened about the whole situation anyway.

It’s a space where users have true power, because, in a lot of cases, and I hope more in the future, the Kings listen to their people and know what their people want in a truer sense than in real life. There’s a great saying by Plato that goes something like:

“There will be no end to the troubles of states, or of humanity itself, till philosophers become kings in this world, or till those we now call kings and rulers really and truly become philosophers, and political power and philosophy thus come into the same hands.”

Plato - Ages ago

Now, okay I might be getting carried away where, but the examples we’ve seen, with the likes of Facebook and Digg, have seen the need for change, and have taken on board the revolt, the opinion of the user. Granted there’s no lives at risk, and it’s all done behind the safety of a keyboard, but big things are afoot, and these are interesting times. There’s nothing more hedonistic to myself than freedom, and use technology to propagate and explore the concept of freedom is just totally outstanding.

Jump in with ideas and thoughts on the whole situation.

More tomorrow.