[Air-l] social network migration
David Brake
d.r.brake at lse.ac.uk
Wed Jun 20 02:40:53 PDT 2007
On 19 Jun 2007, at 23:08, Martin wrote:
> When I did research for my MSc dissertation the young people that I
> interviewed were all on www.bebo.com (Ages from 11 to 15). This was
> two
> years ago, the older of the group have migrated to myspace, but
> this also
> drags the younger members along with them.
In my sample of (ten) MySpace users I interviewed quite a few of them
used to be Bebo users (both Martin and I are in the UK where Bebo is
more popular for younger kids than it might be in the US for
example). My interviewees said if I remember that they moved because
of the more customisable profile features of MySpace and because
there were more bands on MySpace but I imagine the perception that
Bebo is for younger kids may have something to do with it too. I
personally suspect that much of MySpace's current userbase is likely
to abandon it in favour of Facebook (or blogs or nothing) as they age
and it will be dependent on attracting a continual stream of new high
schoolers.
While thinking about SNSes I wonder how long it will take for senior
academics to take to SNSes and which one they will pick - Facebook is
an obvious possibility but I suspect the difficulty of having to
project one image for one's students and another for fellow academics
will be too hard to overcome. LinkedIn seems too corporate-focused to
me. Has anyone seen any signs of academic-focused social networking
sites that might take off?
---
David Brake, Doctoral Student in Media and Communications, London
School of Economics & Political Science
<http://www.lse.ac.uk/collections/media@lse/study/
mPhilPhDMediaAndCommunications.htm>
Also see http://davidbrake.org/ (home page), http://blog.org/
(personal weblog) and http://get.to/lseblog (academic groupblog)
Author of Dealing With E-Mail - <http://davidbrake.org/
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