Tuesday 1 December 2015

From Self-Coding Super Stars on MySpace to Passive Lurkers on Facebook

In the reading Mobile Web 2.0, Goggin explores the evolution of the mobile web and the social and cultural implications it has had on society.

Since the worldwide adaption of the Internet in the 80’, Internet uses ahve undergone several radical changes. For many of us 90’s kids, our first experiences on the web were on social media platforms such as MSN and MySpace. Both of these mediums necessitated a highly engaged user experience. On MySpace, users had the ability for full-scale personalization as they could code in backgrounds, buttons, and icons to build their profile pages. While, the whole premise of MSN was active real-time engagement with other users.

Eventually, we moved away from these veteran platforms to embrace new forms of social media such as twitter, Facebook and Instagram. Today, social media users on these platforms are taking a more observatory role. Recently, Ad Week posted an article, which discussed how in Q3 only 34% of Facebook users shared something on Facebook. Even with Facebook’s attempts to stimulate their audience probing them to share movements from “5 years ago”, users are not biting.

This is extremely detrimental to Facebook’s business model, as it capitalizes on all of the un-paid content their billions of users produce daily. If users stop producing content, our newsfeeds will become nothing more than cluttered as spaces. So, why have people stopped posting content on Facebook? I argue that today, most of Facebook’s users have vested years establishing their presence on this platform, and so the need to affirm one’s self or lifestyle simply may not be as tenacious.


We've gone from self-coding super stars on MySpace to inactive lurkers on Facebook within a decade. Could passivity be the future of mobile web 3.0? 

1 comment:

  1. I think this post is really interesting! To me, it makes sense that people are posting less on Facebook since there are an increasing number of platforms available that make Facebook irrelevant.

    For example, statuses are no longer necessary as a result of Twitter, people would rather post the single best photo of an event on Instagram than upload an entire album containing unflattering photos on Facebook. I also think it is important to consider how old Facebook is. The Internet is exciting because there are constantly new innovations available for us to participate in, Facebook has been essentially the same platform since its introduction, so I think people have gotten bored with it. Especially since it is so prevalent in our society that it's a platform our parents and grandparents are now using.

    I think "Web 3.0" will continue to introduce new communication technologies and platforms, and a big aspect of it will be the quick turnover of the new platforms.

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