I'm not a user of social networking sites, but I still know the general vernacular of Facebook. MySpace, however, is a different story.
The article about Friendster and MySpace by Danah Boyd educated me a lot about some of the features of these SNSs. One of the things I found most 'fascinating' - or in other words, difficult to believe it actually existed - is the MySpace Top 8.
I understand little kids' notions of 'best friends' and 'bestest friends' and the ranking of friends that seems to be synonymous with female cliques. I get all that. But I truly don't understand the creation of an online system that would encourage what is very often self-esteem damaging behavior.
What adult in their right mind would implement a system like this?? If they wanted to make the Friends that are contacted most often easier to access, they could mark those Friends in a way that only the user could see, not everyone else as well.
What's honestly the point of this?? Boyd's article states that users will often use their Top Friends "as a way to both demarcate their identity and signal meaningful relationships with others." Which to me, more or less says, 'here, this is who's the most important to me and these are the people I'm proud to be associated with.'
What do you think about this MySpace feature? Do you think it's one of the factors that led to the downfall of this SNS?
No comments:
Post a Comment