Tagged: web 2.0

Opinion

towards theorizing an augmented reality

by nathan jurgenson Tim O’Reilly coined the phrase “Web 2.0”, and while the term has been differently used, I have boiled it down to the recent explosion of user-generated content (thus the focus on prosumption). This past summer, O’Reilly has declared another new era, what he calls “Web Squared”: “There’s […] a qualitative change happening as the Web becomes more closely integrated with the real world via sensor-based smart phone applications. Web Squared is another way of saying “Web meets...

Opinion

the prosumer and intimate profit

by nathanjurgenson Recently, this blog has focused on the labor of the crowds. I have posted that the “prosumers of the world should unite” and have continued to write on the topic. Bmckernan expertly handled the topic when discussing “light” capitalism and more recently pj.rey convincingly demonstrated that prosumption is a structural force at play in the death of old media. This post is driven by the recent announcement that Facebook, now nearly the size of the United States, has...

Opinion

the culture of efficiency

by nathanjurgenson I have a number of posts on this blog regarding the user-generated web (what has come to be known as Web 2.0), usually focused on social networking sites or the changing relations of production and consumption online, leading to the rise of prosumption and the prosumer (briefly, prosumption involves both production and consumption rather than focusing on either one or the other). Some of these ideas are published as a chapter in the new book, The Culture of...

Opinion

weightless capitalism

by nathan jurgenson Google announced that its new operating system, Chrome OS, will be free of charge. Further, it is designed to operate in the “cloud,” meaning that most of its functionality will exist online, using internet applications like GMail and Google Documents instead of programs installed on a hard drive (as Windows does). The free cloud-based operating system is designed to run on smaller, lighter “netbooks” -a bright spot in the computer market in these tough economic times. I...

Opinion

our digital culture of narcissism

by nathan jurgenson For many (especially youths and young adults), attempting to quit or never start Facebook is a difficult challenge. We are compelled to document ourselves and our lives online partly because services like Facebook have many benefits, such as keeping up with friends, scheduling gatherings (e.g., protests) and so on. Additionally, and to the point of this post, the digital documentation of ourselves also means that we exist. There is a common adage that if something is not...

Opinion

facebook, the transumer and liquid capitalism

by nathan jurgenson During this “great recession” capitalism might become lighter and more liquid while older and more solidified traditions wash away in the flux of unstable markets (potentially an economic “reboot,” similar to Schumpeter’s notion of capitalism as “creative destruction”). Zygmunt Bauman’s “liquidity” thesis about our late-modern world becoming more fluid seems relevant in light of the “transumer” and “virtual commodities”, both having received recent attention. The transumer (video) is, in part, one who encounters “stuff” temporarily as opposed...

Political & Economic Sociology / Science & Technology / Social Movements / Social Change / Sociology of Culture / Sociology of Media & Communication / Sociology of Organizations & Work

britannica is putting customers to work

by nathan jurgenson The very idea of Wikipedia -the open-source encyclopedia that anyone with an internet connection can edit- has sparked many discussions about knowledge construction, such as the politics behind truth, the social construction of knowledge, the tyranny of epistemic expertism or populism, and so on. In these discussions, the Encyclopedia Britannica is often posed as the antithesis to Wikipedia. So it came as big news earlier this year that the Encyclopedia Britannica, the model of old-school expertism, is...

Social Movements / Social Change / Sociology of Media & Communication / Sociology of Organizations & Work

The Facebook Privacy Fiasco of 2009

by nathan jurgenson All over the news the past few days has been the outing of Facebook for changing its terms of service so that it could keep its user’s data for whatever it pleased for as long as it pleased. Even if the user deleted their account. Next came the vast uproar to this move followed by Facebook’s backtracking, arguing that the wording was harsher than what they would actually do in practice. Under continued pressure, however, Facebook backed...

Social Movements / Social Change / Social Psychology & Lifecourse / Sociology of Culture / Sociology of Media & Communication / Sociology of Organizations & Work

prosumers of the world unite

by nathan jurgenson Lately, we have been doing lots of work, for others. For free. Millions of users of sites like Facebook and MySpace are clicking away at their profiles, adding detailed information about themselves and others. “We” are uploading content to sites like Flickr, YouTube, the microblogging service Twitter and many others, and our labor creates vast databases about ourselves –what I previously described as a sort of mass exhibitionism. Facebook’s profit model is built upon an ownership of...

Class & Stratification / Gender & Sexuality / Social Movements / Social Change / Social Psychology & Lifecourse / Sociology of Culture / Sociology of Law, Crime and Deviance / Sociology of Media & Communication

the (post-structural) new-media digital-divide

by nathan jurgenson A major study (.pdf) on the way teens use social networking sites suggests that, “…their participation is giving them the technological skills and literacy they need to succeed in the contemporary world. They’re learning how to get along with others, how to manage a public identity, how to create a home page.” [quote is from this article’s coverage] Parents can no longer view MySpace as just a waste of time. In fact, so important are the skills...

Social Movements / Social Change / Social Psychology & Lifecourse / Sociology of Culture / Sociology of Media & Communication

facebook, youtube, twitter: mass exhibitionism online

By nathan jurgenson Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook founder and CEO) said recently at the 2008 Web 2.0 Summit: “I would expect that next year, people will share twice as much information as they share this year, and [the] next year, they will be sharing twice as much as they did the year before.” The Web 2.0 summit discusses the user-generated web, and of sociological interest here is that when people are given tools to share information about themselves online, they do,...