[Air-l] A verb for using social networking sites

[Holly Kruse]

> Also on this campus, possibly because it is a small school in a small
> town and thus relatively isolated, MySpace is seldom mentioned. In fact,
> when I asked my internet class about it, that very unscientific sample
> reported that use of MySpace was considered somewhat deviant: "That's
> where the perverts are all hanging out." Some said they had used MySpace
> in high school, but graduated to facebook when they came to college.

I found that with my students many had been on MySpace but now focused on
Facebook.  They indicated that Facebook was where their cohort had moved, so
they moved too.  Many of them had been on Xanga in high school, then moved
to MySpace, and then to Facebook.  We discussed this in my CMC seminar, and
the students indicated that if some new site becomes the social networking
place to be, they would abandon their current loyalty to Facebook and move
to the new site.  Although this may be changing (with notes, etc.), Facebook
has for them certainly been more about the social network and less about
content: less "bloggy" than MySpace or LiveJournal or Xanga.

A pretty important caveat is that I have some students who are pretty
involved in local and regional music production and promotion, and for them
MySpace remains central, even as they also maintain "Facebooks," as they
would call their Facebook pages -- perhaps indicating that MySpace, for all
of its changes and problems over the past few years, remains the best place,
for whatever reasons, for bands to promote themselves and information about
music events to be circulated.


Holly

-- 
Holly Kruse
Faculty of Communication
The University of Tulsa
600 S. College Ave.
Tulsa, OK 74104
918-631-3845
holly-kruse at utulsa.edu or holly.kruse at gmail.com
http://www.personal.utulsa.edu/~holly-kruse