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One of the things that surprised me when I was at SxSW Interactive last year was how all these people, who’s generally personally and professionally invested in “new media,” practically lived and breathe Twitter. While most of my friends, generally considered to be normal everyday people, never heard of it (at the time, it seems yet even more ubiquitous now). I can kind of understand why. A regular person probably looks at something like Twitter and says, “What’s the point?” It’s true that it doesn’t seem like much at first, but it was like my first experience with MySpace when it just got off the ground. I signed up, but I knew no one on it at that time, and thought “What’s the point?” Once you get a small network of friends on it, it’s appeal becomes much more apparent.

ANYWAYS, I said all that to say this: here is a neat little video explaining Twitter in Plain English. I think it’s part of a series of videos that explain web phenomenons to regular people (which, clearly us internet people are NOT).

Tags: twitter

I ran into this interesting essay about what happened to Friendster and the subsequent rise of MySpace. The essay is written by a woman named Danah Boyd, who I have heard speak on a panel one of the times I attended SxSW Interactive. She is a PhD candidate at the School of Information at UC Berekley and specializes in social culture and identity on the internet. I remember being thoroughly impressed with what she had to say when I heard her speak. She has great insight into the social phenomenons on the internet.

It’s a bit on the long side, but her essay entitled “Friendster lost steam. Is MySpace just a fad?” is very good if this stuff fascinates you like it does me. Granted, the essay is a year old and people are a little less panicked over MySpace now, and some would argue that Facebook is more popular now, but the essay is no less relevant.

That’s a small nod to those down with The Folds(TM).

Here’s an article about race and Second Life. I don’t have a lot to say about it, but I find this kind of stuff extremely fascinating.

So, I finally signed up for a YouTube account. I recently acquired a video capturing device, so I’ve started uploading some clips from stuff I recorded onto video tape that I didn’t think were already out on YouTube land. You can see what I’ve put up so far here.

When I was in high school, the internet had become vastly popular, but not quite to to the point of being ubiquitous. Almost no-one I knew had any sort of broadband connection, and instant messaging had only been around for a couple of years, so it still seemed a little novel. None of my peers had mobile phones, and there were certainly no popular social networking sites that everyone had to be on. It’s amazing how in such a short time (seven years?) the norms of communication, one the internet and off, have changed and altered the social climate.

The idea of allowing teenagers to have access to these tools kind of blows my mind, too. High school is already a huge social pressure cooker. When these things become a “requirement” to be considered as a part of society, it could considerably alter the way teens perceive relationships and what it means to have a meaningful relationship with other people if they feel they have to depend on these tools. In fact, I’m pretty sure my generation didn’t come out of it completely unscathed, and we didn’t have half of what is availabe now. I can’t imagine how different things would be among me and my peers in high school if we had access to this stuff on a near constant basis.

While this stuff has been on the back of my mind for sometime, the catalyst for this post was this article on how some youth are rethinking how online communication plays a part in their lives. Most of the people in the article are college students or people in their 20s, though, and for the most part are mature enough to realize such things. I wonder what high school students would have to say about such things.