Great fast paced talk from Danah on the dynamics of MySpace. Precis below.
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MySpace is a unique marketing space.
What changed is the visibility of what is going on in the teenage space.
Teenager is a manufactured marketing term (before the term, they were called young adults)
Once they are a demographic we start to advertise to them
For teenagers, it is critical to their teenage life to participate, no MySpace ID and you don’t exist
Lets start with friendster – launched 2002, self defined freaks, geeks and queers
Friendster didn’t like this, and the users rebelled
Friendster started to kill of ‘bad’ profiles
MySpace went after the guys that got kicked out, particularly targeting musicians
Music is cultural glue for young people
The 20+ age limit on clubs limits access to teenagers
15 year olds look up to 18 year olds, 18 year look up to olds to 20 year olds
MySpace dropped the age limit
Now MySpace became a way to engage with their friends
The made a ‘mistake’ and allowed people to post raw HTML in forms
Cut and paste drove adoption (arrggh, the blink tag)
Now you have demographics and dating profiles added to the site
You can articulate your friends list and they can comment on you
Friends are “attention trust” friends rather than real friends
The new top 8 (my top 8 MySpace friends)
Removing somebody from your top 8 is a classic passive aggressive powerplay
Upper left hand corner (my significant other)
A way to establish my status
Its socially awkward to establish status to face to face
What are the social norms online?
Four properties unique to mediated existence, persistence, searchability, replicability (cloning), invisible audiences
Teenagers want to create an environment based on an imagined social audience
They are engaging in a public life with two populations, those who want to have power over them (parents, teachers) and those who want to prey on them (marketers)
How to get people to add you to their friends network (so you can market to them)
Now you have 2000 messages from ‘fake’ friends
Mobile is the future
All our media will converge (phones, web, TV)
We assume net neutrality, that’s not the case on mobile (you can’t invite all your friends)
Copacetic 