mingli chng's List: First week stuff

• These things can have exponential growth. Then, if another community shows up  that has better functionality in some way, there can be a mass migration
• These things can have exponential growth. Then, if another community shows up  that has better functionality in some way, there can be a mass migration."
• connectivity is nice, but the Internet bust of 2000 showed that revenue is what  matters
• The popularity of social networking sites may also have unexpected consequences  for users. A gay student attending a Christian college was expelled after  administration officials viewed photos of the student in drag on Facebook.  Twenty middle school students in California were suspended after participating  in a MySpace group where one student allegedly threatened to kill another and  made anti-Semitic remarks. In Kansas, authorities arrested five teenagers after  one of the suspects used MySpace to outline plans for a Columbine-like attack on  the boys' school.
• "To create stickiness you must have functional value and also community value.

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• (A) Mutual interconnection of users in real time  
                   (B) Emergence of virtual communities  
                   (C) Individuals roaming the landscape of knowledge  
                   (D) Collective intelligence
• Virtual communities together form a social network which is superimposed on, and  complementary to, the network consisting of face-to-face communities.

• Internet would bring about the rise of a new "digital generation"—playful,  self-sufficient, psychologically whole—and it would see that generation gather,  like the Net itself, into collaborative networks of independent peers. States  too would melt away, their citizens lured back from archaic party-based politics  to the "natural" agora of the digitized marketplace. Even the individual self,  so long trapped in the human body, would finally be free to step outside its  fleshy confines, explore its authentic interests, and find others with whom it  might achieve communion

• The first stage, popular cyberculture, is marked by its journalistic  origins and characterized by its descriptive nature, limited dualism, and use of  the Internet-as- frontier metaphor. The second stage, cyberculture  studies, focuses largely on virtual communities and online identities and  benefits from an influx of academic scholars. The third stage, critical  cyberculture studies, expands the notion of cyberculture to include four  areas of study -- online interactions, digital discourses, access and denial to  the Internet, and interface design of cyberspace -- and explores the  intersections and interdependencies between any and all four domains
• The popular cyberculture writings were generally descriptive.
• took the form of dystopian rants or utopian raves.
• cyberspace to "a new economy, a new counter culture, and beyond politics
• important explorations into and observations about cyberspace
• cyberculture studies was well underway, focused primarily on virtual communities  and online identities
• the introduction of the Web was not only a technological breakthrough but  also a user breakthrough.
• • Critical cyberculture studies explores the social, cultural, and economic  interactions which take place online;  
     
  • Critical cyberculture studies unfolds and examines the stories we tell about  such interactions;  
     
  • Critical cyberculture studies analyzes a range of social, cultural,  political, and economic considerations which encourage, make possible, and/or  thwart individual and group access to such interactions;  
     
  • Critical cyberculture assesses the deliberate, accidental, and alternative  technological decision- and design-processes which, when implemented, form the  interface between the network and its users.
• Miller (1995) notes the ways in which the Net-as-frontier metaphor serves to  construct cyberspace as a place of manly hostility, a space unsafe for women and  children.
• addition to the Net as frontier metaphor, a dominant discourse found in  magazines and movies is cyberspace as boystown.
• testosterone-driven commercialism

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• What we need are antisocial networking sites! Sites where instead of a Friends  list, you can have an Ignore list.