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8. July 2009 – 10:31 by Bengt Feil (TuTech Innovation GmbH)
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“Many of us believe that technologies can be these great equalizers”. This statement by Danah Boyd at the Personal Democracy Forum 2009 holds true. Many of us do believe that technology can be an equalizer but it seems that this believe may not be true for popular social networks such as Myspace and Facebook.
According to Ms. Boyd Myspace can be called the “ghetto of the digital landscape” while Facebook is frequented by the “white, educated and privileged”. Besides the fact that there are very different demographics on these two social networks it has also been found that the divide between these user groups is very hard to overcome. Ms. Boyd goes so far as to state that: “There’s a cultural wall between users” and “If there’s no way for people to communicate across the divide, you can never expect them to do so.” This shortened result is based on a four year dissertation study called “Taken Out of Context – American Teen Sociality in Networked Publics” and is summarized in her paper for the PDF “The Not-So-Hidden Politics of Class Online”. Read the rest of this entry »
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23. June 2008 – 11:36 by Bengt Feil (TuTech Innovation GmbH)
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This is the title of the book written by Clay Shirkys discussing the development of the internet towards a user generated web – nothing new on first glace. This topic has been discussed for a long time already but the dimensions of these developments have changed dramatically over the course of the last two years. Websites which are based on content and activity produced by users have found their way into the mainstream. This is clearly visible for the English speaking net. In Germany this trends seems to be strong too.
Among the Top 50 websites of the world (End of 2007) are 15-20 (depending on the used definition) which almost exclusively depend on user generated content. To put this into perspective: DIGG.com counts 26 million individual visitors on its site per month and is on rank 32 of the top 50 list. Websites like Myspace, Wikipedia or Youtube are much higher in the ranking.
If one takes a look on such ranking for German websites one could assume that this trend is not reflected here. Among the Top 50 sites (AGOF) there are eight which are mostly user generated. But this angle does not take into account that most of this kind of usage form German users happens on English speaking and especially American websites. 3.6% of all Myspace users and 7% of all visitors to Wikipedia.org are from Germany. Keeping this in mind this kind of internet use seems to be in the mainstream in Germany as well.
Of course not all of these users are active in the sense that they provide content themselves but the importance of user generated media for the net is obvious. Maybe Clay Shirky should call the second version of this book “Here is everybody”!
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