{"id":36,"date":"2005-11-15T15:36:52","date_gmt":"2005-11-15T19:36:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/driscolldev\/2005\/11\/15\/ssa-user-defined-social-networkin"},"modified":"2005-11-15T15:36:52","modified_gmt":"2005-11-15T19:36:52","slug":"ssa-user-defined-social-networking","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/driscoll\/2005\/11\/15\/ssa-user-defined-social-networking\/","title":{"rendered":"SSA: User-defined social networking"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a name='a40'><\/a><\/p>\n<p>The most successful social networks appear to strike a balance between familiar content\/activity and abstract openness.  These sites seem to reflect the efforts of their users to push towards that balance.  A strange example of the evolution of the social networking ecosystem comes in terms of ethnicity and culture.  I was struck by Joe&#8217;s comments with regard to Phillipino people and <a href=\"http:\/\/friendster.com\/\">Friendster<\/a>.  I&#8217;ve observed the same phenomenon with the children of Brazilian immigrants and <a href=\"http:\/\/orkut.com\/\">Orkut<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>At the start of last year, my students used social networks that reflected their ethnicities such as <a href=\"http:\/\/migente.com\/\">MiGente<\/a>, <a href=\"http:\/\/blackplanet.com\/\">Blackplanet<\/a>, and <a href=\"http:\/\/asianavenue.com\/\">Asian Avenue<\/a>.  After a few months, I noticed that students were managing accounts on multiple services.  For example, out of a desire to better represent their offline networks, Latino students created profiles on <a href=\"http:\/\/blackplanet.com\/\">Blackplanet<\/a>.  By September &#8217;05, <a href=\"http:\/\/myspace.com\/\">MySpace<\/a> had trumped the competition.<\/p>\n<p>In fact, a student recently told me that <a href=\"http:\/\/friendster.com\/\">Friendster<\/a> is for white people and <a href=\"http:\/\/myspace.com\/\">MySpace<\/a> is for people of color.  In other words, despite the fact that every user&#8217;s first friend on <a href=\"http:\/\/myspace.com\/\">MySpace<\/a> is the ubiquitous dorky white guy, Tom, the users are defining cultural expectations of the space for themselves.<\/p>\n<p>(If this interests you, I stand by my call for <a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/driscoll\/2005\/08\/26#a34\">open social inter-networking<\/a>.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The most successful social networks appear to strike a balance between familiar content\/activity and abstract openness. These sites seem to reflect the efforts of their users to push towards that balance. A strange example of the evolution of the social networking ecosystem comes in terms of ethnicity and culture. I was struck by Joe&#8217;s comments [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":198,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[258],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-36","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-class-notes"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/driscoll\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/driscoll\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/driscoll\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/driscoll\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/198"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/driscoll\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=36"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/driscoll\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/driscoll\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=36"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/driscoll\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=36"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/driscoll\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=36"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}