The vehicle for these changes is the Internet. Increasingly, it is the “third place” (the first and second places being home and work) where people connect with friends, watch television, listen to music, build a sense of togetherness with people across the world, and provide expressions of ourselves which are themselves forms of communication. As more people turn to the Internet for professional and social purposes, we are seeing new means of communication, new places to communicate, and new avenues of interaction unfold at a rapid pace.
New means of communication. Internet calling services like Skype or Yahoo! Voice turn a computer, a webcam and a headset into a video phone. Blogs, while not new, have grown in usage over the last few years and are now a common way for many people to communicate their ideas to a broad audience and, in most cases, to hear back from that audience. Both Internet calling and blogs are relatively easy to accept, because they are based on understood models (telephones and magazine columns).
It is more difficult to grasp the potential implications of forms that are not modeled on a comfortable, twentieth-century mode of communication. One such example is Twitter: Twitter users post short messages that usually have to do with whatever is happening to them at the time—whether it is intellectual, practical, social, or professional in nature—to create an ongoing log of activity across a community at the minute-by-minute level. Twitter is controversial precisely because it does not have an elder analog; it is a cousin of instant messaging, but its broadcast nature marks it as a different type of communication. Twitter has been described as fun, trivial, innovative, addictive, a waste of time, and potentially a powerful social networking tool; but its implications for teaching, learning and creative expression, if any, are not yet fully understood.
New places to communicate. Increasingly, a computer with an Internet connection is the locus of a range of interactions in a variety of media and a gateway to an array of social spaces for work and play. Social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace and virtual environments like Second Life and World of Warcraft have become online meeting spaces where users—members, residents, or players—can interact and express themselves. These spaces give people a way to represent themselves (a profile or an avatar or both) and various means of communication ranging from text and voice chat to public message boards and/or private messaging. They offer a way to keep in touch with existing communities that users belong to offline, such as social and professional groups. They also make it possible for people who would not normally communicate more than a few times a year to keep in touch—colleagues met at conferences, for instance, or friends met through the online community itself.
Sites like YouTube and Flickr represent another forum for online communication that is centered around sharing, preference, and popular culture. Visitors can browse movies (in the case of YouTube) or photos (in the case of Flickr), express personal preferences, add commentary, and upload their own creative work. YouTube is also a repository of popular culture in the form of newscasts, television shows, movies, or music videos that are of current interest. The kinds of interaction that occur on these sites center around shared interests and include not only verbal commentary, but commentary in the form of original or derivative works based on popular pieces.
These online spaces draw people—and can keep people—in numbers. Facebook claims 45 million active users, nearly half of whom are associated with an educational institution.
Second Life lists over a million logins in the past two months, with between forty and fifty thousand people online at any given time; World of Warcraft has over 8 million active subscribers worldwide. YouTube serves over 100 million videos per day. In a recent NMC survey of educators using Second Life, 49% reported that time spent in Second Life has replaced their TV time, indicating that some online activities are compelling enough to displace traditional leisure time activities. One of the reasons people return to places like these is because of the interactions they can have there, both social and professional. Whether it is as simple as checking back to see what other comments have been added to yours or as involved as attending a workshop or presentation in a virtual world, the nature of the attraction lies in the connections between people that these online spaces afford.
Commentaire posté par The New Media Consortium, aujourd’hui à 20h46 Social Networking, the “Third Place” and the evolution of communication, 2007. www.nmc.org/pdf/Evolution-of-Communication.pdf
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Oldenburg points out the valuable psychological, social and political functions served by places commonly referred to as “hangouts”. Second, he gives us a call to action, for all of us to work in the face of the private commercialization of space to preserve existing third places and to develop many new and better ones. Bloggers did just that when they banded together for the Save The Internet Campaign for Net Neutrality. [www.savetheinternet.com] Why is all this on a technology blog? I think that MySpace and online social networks are the Third Space hangout for most young Americans. Therefore, designing online social networks, or leveraging them, takes knowledge about Human Factors Engineering and the social structures of Third Places. I think properly designed networks are part of the key to restoring our civic democracy [www.the-future-of-ideas.com]
Commentaire posté par Fred Gooltz, aujourd’hui à 20h50 The Internet as Third Place, Advomatic, Fred Gooltz’s blog, 2007. www.advomatic.com/thirdplace
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The Internet is the Place.
The vehicle for these changes is the Internet. Increasingly, it is the “third place” (the first and second places being home and work) where people connect with friends, watch television, listen to music, build a sense of togetherness with people across the world, and provide expressions of ourselves which are themselves forms of communication. As more people turn to the Internet for professional and social purposes, we are seeing new means of communication, new places to communicate, and new avenues of interaction unfold at a rapid pace.
New means of communication. Internet calling services like Skype or Yahoo! Voice turn a computer, a webcam and a headset into a video phone. Blogs, while not new, have grown in usage over the last few years and are now a common way for many people to communicate their ideas to a broad audience and, in most cases, to hear back from that audience. Both Internet calling and blogs are relatively easy to accept, because they are based on understood models (telephones and magazine columns).
It is more difficult to grasp the potential implications of forms that are not modeled on a comfortable, twentieth-century mode of communication. One such example is Twitter: Twitter users post short messages that usually have to do with whatever is happening to them at the time—whether it is intellectual, practical, social, or professional in nature—to create an ongoing log of activity across a community at the minute-by-minute level. Twitter is controversial precisely because it does not have an elder analog; it is a cousin of instant messaging, but its broadcast nature marks it as a different type of communication. Twitter has been described as fun, trivial, innovative, addictive, a waste of time, and potentially a powerful social networking tool; but its implications for teaching, learning and creative expression, if any, are not yet fully understood.
New places to communicate. Increasingly, a computer with an Internet connection is the locus of a range of interactions in a variety of media and a gateway to an array of social spaces for work and play. Social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace and virtual environments like Second Life and World of Warcraft have become online meeting spaces where users—members, residents, or players—can interact and express themselves. These spaces give people a way to represent themselves (a profile or an avatar or both) and various means of communication ranging from text and voice chat to public message boards and/or private messaging. They offer a way to keep in touch with existing communities that users belong to offline, such as social and professional groups. They also make it possible for people who would not normally communicate more than a few times a year to keep in touch—colleagues met at conferences, for instance, or friends met through the online community itself.
Sites like YouTube and Flickr represent another forum for online communication that is centered around sharing, preference, and popular culture. Visitors can browse movies (in the case of YouTube) or photos (in the case of Flickr), express personal preferences, add commentary, and upload their own creative work. YouTube is also a repository of popular culture in the form of newscasts, television shows, movies, or music videos that are of current interest. The kinds of interaction that occur on these sites center around shared interests and include not only verbal commentary, but commentary in the form of original or derivative works based on popular pieces.
These online spaces draw people—and can keep people—in numbers. Facebook claims 45 million active users, nearly half of whom are associated with an educational institution.
Second Life lists over a million logins in the past two months, with between forty and fifty thousand people online at any given time; World of Warcraft has over 8 million active subscribers worldwide. YouTube serves over 100 million videos per day. In a recent NMC survey of educators using Second Life, 49% reported that time spent in Second Life has replaced their TV time, indicating that some online activities are compelling enough to displace traditional leisure time activities. One of the reasons people return to places like these is because of the interactions they can have there, both social and professional. Whether it is as simple as checking back to see what other comments have been added to yours or as involved as attending a workshop or presentation in a virtual world, the nature of the attraction lies in the connections between people that these online spaces afford.
Commentaire posté par The New Media Consortium, aujourd’hui à 20h46
Social Networking, the “Third Place” and the evolution of communication, 2007.
www.nmc.org/pdf/Evolution-of-Communication.pdf
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Oldenburg points out the valuable psychological, social and political functions served by places commonly referred to as “hangouts”. Second, he gives us a call to action, for all of us to work in the face of the private commercialization of space to preserve existing third places and to develop many new and better ones. Bloggers did just that when they banded together for the Save The Internet Campaign for Net Neutrality. [www.savetheinternet.com] Why is all this on a technology blog? I think that MySpace and online social networks are the Third Space hangout for most young Americans. Therefore, designing online social networks, or leveraging them, takes knowledge about Human Factors Engineering and the social structures of Third Places. I think properly designed networks are part of the key to restoring our civic democracy [www.the-future-of-ideas.com]
Commentaire posté par Fred Gooltz, aujourd’hui à 20h50
The Internet as Third Place, Advomatic, Fred Gooltz’s blog, 2007.
www.advomatic.com/thirdplace