Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
network spaces MySpace or Facebook reveal something about the
way in which Web 2:0 is being used. Browsing on either is a fasci-
nating, if rather voyeuristic, experience. Individual users' webpages
can be customised, and contain personal information, pictures of
friends who are also on MySpace, accompanied by a message stating
how many friends the user has, and displays of often rather intimate
email messages from those friends. (When it first started, one of the
people identified as a founder of MySpace, Tom Anderson, would be
the first 'friend' each subscriber had online. By clicking on a link on
each page it's possible to see pictures of and links to all of a user's
friends, with Tom always among them. Thus the satirical/ self-pitying
t-shirt slogan 'Tom is my only friend'. By spring 2008 Tom had
221,036,100 friends. (Following the purchase of MySpace by Rupert
Murdoch's News Corporation, 'Tom' is now a corporate identity
rather than a reference to a specific individual.) The customization of
the page by users and presentation of personal information act as a
kind of visible self creation. The messages are also links to the other
users' own webpages, which means that it is possible to browse
across complex webs of connections. In MySpace there are also links
to music, or to videos from sites such as YouTube. Both MySpace and
FaceBook offer a glimpse of a new kind of community, one no
longer bound up with physical location, but created through shared
interest in and self-definition by media.
As both
The Observer
article and the experience of looking at pages
in MySpace or FaceBook suggests, there is a strong incitement to
narcissism in much of what the new media are offering. Blogs and
podcasts seem to offer a means to literally realize Andy Warhol's
much quoted prediction of the coming celebrity culture, that 'in the
future everybody will be famous for fifteen minutes', and in a sense
this future is already with us, with developments such as YouTube
and other similar websites. Never one to miss a trick, Apple
Computers has released a software suite called 'iLife', which combines
their iPhoto, iMovie, iWeb, iDVD and GarageBand programs and is
