[Air-L] WHAT IT FEELS LIKE TO GO VIRAL

[Shriram Venkatraman]

*WHAT IT FEELS LIKE TO GO VIRAL*


*Daniel Miller*


I guess most of you will have seen some items of news based on my initial
blog about Facebook no longer being cool amongst teens. It was not just NBC
TV news, I had emails from Taiwan to Chile telling me it was out in local
languages. I have now published a new blog post called Scholarship,
Integrity and Going Viral athttp://blogs.ucl.ac.uk/social-networking/ which
reflects on the experience and responds to some of the criticism. Actually
I entirely stand by my original assertion. My ethnographic research has
shown that in terms of coolness the phrase `dead and buried’ was not an
exaggeration. The statistics may not help, the teens don’t leave Facebook,
they keep it for family connections. But they stop using it to communicate
with peers. The schools know this perfectly well. They communicate with
pupils through Twitter, never Facebook. If you doubt me, just ask the
teens. The problem was that journalists used that phrase to refer to the
prospects of Facebook as a company, while our research shows that in some
of our other fieldsites such as India or Brazil there is no evidence for
any decline in its attraction amongst teens. But you might look at the new
blog post because it is a salutary lesson in keeping control over what you
post. Journalists constantly try and persuade you that you `need’ to sex-up
your academic language, but you just might want to resist this.





Thanks,
Shriram Venkatraman

www.gsmis.org
http://www.ucl.ac.uk/social-networking
@UCLSocNet