Script for my Audio and Visual literacy project

Crigital Dommunication

The digital age is upon us. Everything moves so fast that we mere humans are just doddering along after it. Having started a digital communication course last year I now realise I had little idea what was going on, technologically, and over the last few months I have been made aware of the monster that is the rapidly growing world of digital tools. So I must admit to you all that I have become a complete addict, spurned on in life only to check my facebook every 5 minutes and get my fridge to do my shopping.

The things you can do in social networking are unbelievable. I am at this precise moment desperately battling with myself to NOT to click the tab on at the top of the page to go onto Facebook and play. From a consumers perspective we are kids in candy shops, absolutely spoilt for choice from the start. When researching this article I compiled a huge list of various social networking sites and I found that there are hundreds of these sites dedicated to various areas of interest. Music, dating, online gaming, chat, photography to name very few. They are aimed at all kinds of people and basically, if you are a person there is will be a social networking site for you.

My first journey into social networking started with Bebo. Some of my friends were on it so I wanted to see what it was all about. At first I was a bit cautious because I wasn’t used to having this kind of information made public. This was a whole new experience and I didn’t feel entirely comfortable about it. I was not used to the level of exposure! You have photos, personal information; conversations became public between all of your friends. Even something as banal as “I had banana on toast for breakfast”. Do you want to share that with everybody? At the time, the answer for me was no.

As a result my Bebo page looked extremely bare for quite a while. Then I noticed that you could look at others profiles and see what they were up to and before long I had photos and everything and its donkey on my site because I realised that you can be CLOSER to your friends and that you don’t add people who you don’t know. This is a whole new way of communicating with your friends, and what is amazing thing is that you can keep in contact with people that you wouldn’t otherwise. On my Facebook account I have loads of friends that I would not keep in touch with if it wasn’t for Facebook.

(Start Desktop recording)

“So this is the main Bebo page, you have your home page here, you have your profile here, this is the main place where you’ll be you have your profile photo so that your friends can recognise you, your basic information, hometown, gender, relationship status, what films or sports you like, what your interests are. You have two columns, on e has your friends on it for easy access to their profiles, you can search for new friends on here. You can personalise these areas with videos, you can have a white board which your friends can post drawings to. You can have areas with the bands that you like, applications you can use. As you can see I have quite a few, I have one to test my typing speed which as you can see isn’t very good! I have a mini profile here which has random questions for fun that some friends maybe wouldn’t know about you. Photo album, where you can share your worst drunken photo’s with! This is a great improvement to going round someone’s house and being attacked with photos; you can look at them in your own time and comment on what an idiot someone looks like (or how great they look depending!) You then have the comments column and this is where all the communication happens, if you post a comment on someone’s profile it will end up here. You have “love” you can give to your friends but only one a day! The little heart appears on the comment. I know, Awwwww! Got various other applications here, you can ad these things if you want but I’m more of a Facebook addict these days so I haven’t done much with it but I did use the blog function when I was losing weight and it was brilliant because it let them all know how I was doing and I got waves of positive encouragement back, which is priceless. So that’s it for the profile page, you have lots of other tabbed options here, your friends, you can view all your friends here, you can also see it they are online as well, for instant messaging. This is a new function, I only found out they were doing the chat thing recently, although I have found that they don’t tend to work very well, so I’m still sticking to messenger. There is Bebo mail which means you can mail your friends in bebo, a kind of internal mail, if you don’t want the message to be public. Then you have the explore tab which means you can look through videos, music, books, applications, find different skins. You can join or create groups which are random things generally like “I hate the Microsoft paper clip” or something serious like campaigning against a cause” so that’s bebo!

Facebook

So, my favourite – Facebook. The main features of Facebook are that you can add your friends, share info, photos, videos, status, and comment on such things, a wide range of applications, games, groups you can create or join. There is something for everyone. The status bar is the best thing about Facebook for me. You can let all your friends see what you’re up to, or how you are feeling or just a completely random statement. You can express your anger, love or indifference to the world, something you could not do before these internet sites came along.

So this is the facebook page as you can see it is very different from the bebo its allot cleaner I suppose, there’s not so many bright colours, you can’t customise your background, so it’s the same for everyone, but I think its better, it looks slicker that way. Again a profile picture, the wall where everything gets written generally, What groups you are joining, what applications you have used, all you video or music posts, your ever changing status mine at the moment is...... as you can see I’ve been playing pet society cos I love it! This is someone that I knew through work a probably 2 or 3 years ago and I would definitely not have kept in contact otherwise so that’s fantastic.
Facebook is great that way because it holds the most users in this country. A brief list of friends, various apps, my Pet Society which is my favourite app ever! I have been known to spend days on this at a time! Red dwarf app, I was very shocked that I was cat, I had no idea I was so self involved! You can post videos here and as you can see my friend Gavin has commented on it and banter ensues. Again Photo album, it’s very similar to Bebo, but I suppose the thing about it is that Facebook has a million more users than Bebo and more of my friends use it too. Bebo is very popular within the UK but Facebook is more popular worldwide. Here you can give more detailed information regarding yourself. You can give as little or as much info as you feel comfortable with. Schools you went to, groups you are a member of.
All you photos here, you can tag people in photos as well so if you only wanted to see pictures of me you can do that! This is great for seeing people you haven’t seen in a while. You internal mail again, and you have the Home tab which basically gives you a snapshot of what all your friends are up to, like their status, if they have joined a group etc, you can see any photos that have been added recently or any comments which have been made. So the amount you can do is just amazing. The apps on Facebook are a cut above. You can do the most random things like sending drinks to your friends or play Tetris against your friends who have the app. I’ll give you a quick look at Pet Society, my favourite all time application. The flash graphics are amazing and you can compete against your friends which is brilliant, my friend Kate just overtaken me but she will feel my wrath once this assignment is done! So this is an example of the standard of the apps on Facebook which are fabulous!

As for Bebo it’s a personal preference. I prefer Facebook because it’s not as loud the design is sleeker and clearer. There is too much noise on the bebo pages and I think this is because it is aimed more at teens. My friends being members of it is a big factor that made me want to join Facebook and I also think that is what drives people to join these networks. Friends drive these sites. Let’s face it you’re not going to join a network that you don’t have any friends on. Some people are of the opinion that we are missing out on seeing our friends but we aren’t with our friends all the time. I think it’s better that we are interacting with people whilst we are at home rather than sitting staring blankly at a TV screen. I have to say there is not much I would change about Facebook. I have to say when I first joined I thought it looked really plain compared to what I was used to on Bebo and I wasn’t quite sure what to do with it but over time I got used to it! All I have mentioned in the screen capture you saw there is a good thing. They are brilliant in themselves and they are constantly updating the site and users are creating new apps! You can publish what you want, not receive updates if you don’t want to you are in complete control and you can be entertained for hours. Which brings me to my next point, they are way too addictive. Take a look at this short film.

There is a growing anxiety that young people are spending too much time on these sites and the dangers that can occur. Some people are worried that people will be taken advantage of, but they need to be aware of the risks. However you conduct yourself on the outside, you need to apply the same rules on the web. The whole world is at your fingertips and its easy to forget where you are. Don’t give out too much information and you can always set your profiles to be private. Bebo have a function so that you can audit comments before they go live on your page. As long as you are in control you are responsible. It’s the same theory as talking to strangers in the street, you just don’t do it.


Although not everyone agrees with me; I will now quote a status update by my friend Ross Farquhar

“Ross hates how Facebook forces you to be introspective with your status and makes you avoid being even vaguely funny. The campaign for words before your name...”

So now you have seen what these networks are like and how they are used, let’s talk a bit about the implications these networks have on our lives.


Of course this area extends past these two sites, the scope is HUGE! The different kinds of interaction go on and on. However digital culture goes beyond social networking. All the programs we use daily to listen to music, watch television programs, send email, forums, blogs, posting our creations, the internet in general form our digital culture. Its popularity is souring due to the sheer amount of different things you can do on the web. It is also changing rapidly. TV is starting to suffer as a result of the masses turning towards the web to catch their favourite television shows. The fact that you can watch what you want when you want is dragging people from their comfortable sofas to their desk chairs. Although in my opinion that is why TV will never be replaced because sofas are more comfy and believe me I’ve tried to sit at my desk all day and it is not comfortable! I say that though in the future if TV is to survive as a medium it will have to fully become TV on demand. The BBC are worried that the younger viewers who will soon be buying a licenses will not want to pay for television they can watch online. As for the rest of the channels who rely on advertising for their funding are losing out on the younger audience age group.

I have to say that my ideal night in these days is MSN messenger, Facebook (and Pet Society of course) and a DVD, TV or music on in the background. No wonder our electrical bill has risen dramatically over the last few months!

As I progress through my education and thereafter embarking on a career, social networking sites as well as music interfaces will have a huge impact on my exposure to the musical world. You can publish anything from home recordings to an accomplished piece to be released through music social music networks. On various sites the listener can vote on different tracks and make comments about them. My music will be able to reach millions of users all over the world, so this is a benefit that is essential to getting my music heard.

If they don’t already, I think that in the future record, film and television companies will simply look online for new talent rather than listening to demo tapes brought to their offices etc. The challenge for the talent is to make their Myspace page the most eye catching, which is one of the ways different media are blending together in our new digital world.

Well I’m nearly there; I have managed to stay away from Pet society enough to write this, so I am very proud of myself. I fear we may have to setup a social networking rehab centre for addicts like me! Seriously though I can’t wait to see what the digital future holds.

I am getting a new ipod touch for my birthday and I have asked my mum to confiscate it because there is no chance I will pass this module otherwise. It’s a slippery slope. In a few years I will find myself picking through trash and hanging around the outside of internet cafés begging for spare change.

Digital culture is our culture.