Tag Archives: social networking sites

Free labor? An attempt to determine the value of user generated content – for the user

Writings on the value of user generated content tend to stress the (market) value users produce for companies such as Facebook by adding content, labeling these activities as “free labor”. Assuming that there must also be something in it for the users generating the content, this text proposes ways to assess the amount of monetary and social value users gain from engaging in these activities.

The Future of Social Networking Sites

First of all, let me warn you that this week’s blog post is a bit more personal than my previous entries. Furthermore, I also fall victim to relating everything I write about social networking sites to Facebook, Twitter and Google+. This said, please join me on my journey through social networking land, towards a possibly clouded future.

Social death of social networks

The question I was asking myself recently is what makes a social network cool or uncool? Why there are social networks in which having an account is considered embarressing? Why there are exsisting social networks to which some people don’t even want to admit they are signed up?
In November 2006 in Poland a new social network was created.…

#You’re fired

Thoughts and funny incidents on… contemporary ways to lose your job

(  via Blogspot/ Wordpress, Facebook, Twitter)

There are many valid reasons for an employee to lose his job: the pretense of economic crisis, the company closing down, the employee’s lack of punctuality or failure to keep up with deadlines; to be more precise, there…

Truthy: Policing Misinformation, One Meme-ing Tweet At a Time

“Swiftboaters beware!”

The battle to control Congress is on and this election year the truth is about to get Truthier. Twitter – the social media network, twenty-four-hour news site, conversation and blogging platform, wedding and death announcement site, gossip patrol, and the general online information center that…

Please publish my thesis and make it true

We were told to start a Wikipedian adventure. Create an account and contribute to the knowledge of the world. The English Wikipedia has almost 3,5 million entries, so coming up with a term that no one has thought of writing about seems to be a great challenge. Luckily for me, I have been writing and thinking a lot about a specific way to study the personal data retrieved from social networking sites, which is called post-demographics. It is a new way, beyond the occasional demographics, to assess and define people and guess what, no Wikipedia entry has been made for it!

The Changing Power of Parents

Being present on a social network once was a way to escape parents’ attention. For many teens, home is a highly regulated space with rules and norms that are strictly controlled by adults. The internet is less regulated by social norms. Teenagers face a challenging dilemma on social networking sites. How can they be simultaneously cool to their friends and acceptable to their parents at the same time? Danah Boyd states:

“The power that adults hold over youth explains more than just complications in identity performance; it is the root of why teenagers are on MySpace in the first place.”

Thou shall not lie (on your online profile)


(Untrustworthy) Online Identities in Web 2.0

The example of Facebook

As new media history is being written at present time, the discourse keeps revolving around the notion of online identity and “personal privacy” issues that are connected to the usage of social networking sites. It is a highly debated issue whether the…

“The customers of this product also bought this, would you like it too?” [x] Not interested

When signing up for a service or installing software, have you ever read privacy policies that you had ‘to agree’ with in order to continue? You surely agreed, but what you have agreed with is probably a mystery. The fact that consumers deliberately do not pay attention or put effort in understanding privacy policies is a common idea as Stevenson (2005) shows in his ‘Whatever Button’ project. When the privacy policies show up ready to be check by the consumer, one simply scrolls down without looking, or clicks through the ‘I agree’, ‘I confirm’, ‘I accept’ button in order to receive the product as soon as possible: throughout the interactions in between, one would say; whatever. Companies deliberately make privacy policies not a Shakespearean-like poet to read, but rather a humongous text filled with jargon that even a law professional thinks is a horrible grind to understand. In this way, data about the body is increasingly flowing away from the individual it belongs to, resulting in some interesting developments such as new ways of perceiving identity.

You Look so Much Cuter on my Computer

Social networking sites are giving their users the opportunity to influence the attraction they exert on others by creating an online profile and a virtual identity that may in some cases strongly differ from real life. Through the use of social networking sites, users can not only show a multi-faced image of their identity, but they can also play with their personality and construct a new self that is freed from the physical body and an appearance in real life.