Wednesday, April 25, 2007

The Last? Le gasp!

Okay, my final definition of community is a group of interactive members with an organized system that differentiates not only between members and non-members but between how interactive members are.

Yes, I believe social capital can exist solely online. Take, for example, people who regularly play online games with other PCs (player characters). In order to play together, they must form trust. You aren't going to go questing with someone who's going to leave you halfway through because that's troublesome. PCs often "get to know" other PCs in games simply because it's easier to participate in higher levels of the game with others. As a result of this purely online interaction, a feeling of reciprocity will emerge whenever one of the players desires aid from the other.

Social networking online is part of the solution. People are very busy, be it with work or school, and they sometimes don't get to spend time with their friends. Online social interaction helps these people to keep in touch when they are unable to meet. It will not replace face-to-face interaction, like the telephone, the interent is merely a way to stay on the "up and up" with your friends.

Putnam's problem is that he uses the word "meet" as a clarifier for social capital. His definition as outlined on the site doesn't exclude online interaction, but some of his examples do. If you'll remember, Lin disagreed with Putnam's method of measuring social capital because of its emphasis on real life "meetings." If Putnam instead used a word like interact, then it wouldn't be an issue that separates real and virtual social capital.

Tuesday, April 3, 2007

MySpace is Fixable?

Proposed ways to fix MySpace and save it from the slow death it appears to be suffering now.

1.) Have those who work on it forced from their caves.

How can people working on the site know what's really wrong unless they've experienced it? Personal experience is very valuable, thus, one way to help save MySpace would be to have its workers exposed to the problems. This would help them gain a better understanding of the problem as well as see why/how said problem works.

This extends to error messages, the compatability issues between Macs and Windows, and what I call SPAM friend requests.

2.) Enact something to promote closeness between members.

At this point, it seems like the only thing that all MySpace members might get up in arms about would be a major, major change that went south (ex. like what happened with Facebook). However, surely MySapce still has the capability to offer incentives for competitions. A good competition offered to groups for some achievement in the name of MySpace would be good press and it would also cause any groups interested to grow closer as they worked toward a common goal.

3.) Have better user controls and make knowledge of these controls easy to come by.

The more control users have over the information they let others see, the safer they feel. However, just installing better user controls wouldn't be enough. The controls must also be easy to use and easy to find. If you have the capability of doing something, but it takes forever because it's hard to find out how, people will still be unhappy.