Natasha Would Like to Invite you to Become a Social Site Addict!

By Natasha Spillane 40973744

Long gone are the days where you would look up an old friend in your address book and sit down and write them a letter, telling them how things in your life are going and asking them how they are going. Then having to wait who knows how long for them to reply. You could of course give them a phone call every once in a while to catch up. But who needs to do that these days when we have all these social sites that connect us all together.
With sites such as Facebook, Twitter, FlickR, Google Calender, Myspace, Web Messenger, Bebo (and the list goes on) we have no excuse not to keep in contact with all of our friends and family. In fact it becomes almost impossible to hide away from them when you are constantly updating all of the profile's that you have. Its sad I know, but I don't remember the last time I spoke to my grandmother in New Zealand, I just talk to her on Facebook and she has the opportunity to see what is going on in my life. Since enrolling in Social and Mobile Computing I have signed up to the following sites listed and explained below, apart from Facebook which I was already a member of.


Facebook

Facebook is a social networking site originally designed for college students, that allows a user to create an online profile by adding information such as interests and pictures to your account. You then have the option of adding all your friends who also have profiles to your site and networking between your friends to find other friends that you know. It also allows the user to "tag" their friends in photos which they have posted on their profile. There are many applications involved in facebook, such as quizzes, games, horoscopes, vampires, ware wolfs, groups, hugs, kisses and of course super poke! There are way to many applications to name, but they all add some fun to face book, and despite how annoying they can get, you are bound to find a few of them actually fun.


Last.FM

Last.fm is a musical orientated profile, allowing the user to have an online music database of all the bands and artists that they love. By signing up to Last.fm, you download the software on your computer and create your own Last.fm stations and tune into personalised radio of all the music that you love. It also loads all the songs you have on your itunes or windows media player onto your profile and puts them into an order of most listened to. Each time you tune into last.fm and listen to a song, its called "Scrobbling", which means the name of the song and artist is sent to your last.fm profile. When you scrobble last.fm recommends artists that you might like to listen to and puts it on your profile for your friends to see.


Twitter

Twitter is a site that allows the user to notify their friends and family and followers of what they are doing at anytime time via Internet or your mobile phone. Each time you send a text to twitter it automatically updates your status on your profile, and sends a message to all of your followers who have notifications turned on. Once you are following your friends and they are following you (with notifications turned on) it becomes almost like a chat room in a sense with people actually talking to everyone as a group. Twitter also allows you to send messages directly to a person without everybody who is following you, seeing what you wrote to them. Like most of these sites, Twitter is very addictive, I think because of the mobile aspect of it as long as you have your phone with you, which most people do these days, you can twitter anywhere!


FlickR

FlickR is an online photo sharing site run by yahoo, which allows you to upload all of your photos onto the web. Like most other profile sites, you have the option of making your profile public or private. However by having your profile set to public, you become apart of the photo community, where people can comment on your photos or even tag you in them. It also provides the data of when the photo was taken and on what sort of camera was used. A lot of FlickR users use the site for posting pictures into their blogs and sharing with friends and families. Personally I prefer just to upload all of my happy snaps to facebook, where all of my friends can see and for showing off the photography and images that I think are fantastic, I add them to Deviant Art, where people can comment and critique.



Blogger

Blogger is an online blogging site which acts like an online diary, allowing the user to post blogs about whatever they like. It seems like everybody these days is jumping on the blogging wagon and its becoming a popular way of submitting assignments in many university's. Blogger is a nice and simple site with many helping features for basic html coding. E.g how to make something a link, or how to make the text bold. This is very helpful for users who aren't familiar with html code. The user can change the way their background looks as well as uploading pictures and videos. To be honest though I have never really felt compelled to "blog" on any of the sites that allow it. E.g. Facebook, Myspace etc. I'd much rather keep my own old fashioned personal diary and write on paper, but we are all different and somethings work better for others.


Del.icio.us

Del.icio.us is like having an online personal assistant keeping a record of all the sites that you really like. Del.icio.us helps users keep book marks of all the pages which you have tagged and organizes them into different folders relating to the topic. Its very handy if you are trying to find out some information or are looking for a particular kind of website or even just an easier way of "surfing the web". No longer do you have to go to Google and type in a word to find something cool. It becomes social in the sense that you can add your friends/users to your network and then they can go and check out what sites you found useful of just plain cool, without having to physically tell them.


Focus
The addiction. What is the point of all this?
I remember one night when I was "doing my assignment" my dad came into my room and saw me on MSN, Myspace and Facebook. He said "Natasha you are addicted to these stupid sites". Of course I objected and told him that I wasn't and I hadn't been on long I just signed on to check something. But he is absolutely right. Why do we become so addicted to social networking sites?

Reflection
I have always been fairly active in the world of social sites since I first got the Internet. It stared when I was about 13 and started going on the msn chat rooms and having a hotmail account and adding all of my friends and chatting all night long to them. I then progressed into Deviant Art where I got the chance to express myself via submitting some of my art works online and becoming involved in a community who also shared some of the same interests as me such as photography and digital art. Then came along Myspace where I spent so much of my time tyring to make my profile look the best out of all of my friends. Never until now did I realise just how much time I actually wasted on these social sites.
Not only are they distracting but absolutely addictive. I don't remember the the last time I went online and didn't automatically open a tab for at least Facebook, Myspace, Gmail and Deviant Art. It becomes a force of habit.

"For many moderate to heavy users, checking their MySpace or Facebook account has become an automatic and compulsive behavior, with some participants reporting they log on up to 20 times a day," Mr Cole said. [1]

"The thing that makes social networking so sticky is that there are so many paths you can take. You'll be on one friend's profile and then you click on their friends, and their friend's friends. It's never ending." [1]

As much as I hate to admit it, I find it difficult to go more than a day without checking my facebook profile with out becoming agitated. It seems checking who has left me a message on my page, or has commented on the new photo I added is somewhat rewarding and its depressing that I (and I know I'm not the only one) depend so much on keeping in contact with my friends via these websites.

Discovering Twitter was probably not the best site for me to "have" to sign up to. At first it took me a while to get used to Twitter because didn't completely understand the point of it. However as I discovered it's only fun when you have friends (as most things in life are). The simple rule of "Less is More" is defiantly a key factor in why Twitter works so well.
"Now, wait, if Twitter is a social community in itself, why do we not see Twitter vs. MySpace? Or Twitter vs. Facebook? Well, because Twitter is so simple. Yes, you have a page to yourself with a personal design and it requires a separate account than other social communities, yet all there really is to do is post your status, and reply to others. Simple, and as well integrate-able with your profiles on other social websites. How genius, eh? You don’t see Facebook allowing you to integrate your Facebook status into your MySpace profile, do you?" [2]
Of course Twitter isn't for everyone, and neither are any of these social sites. I could not tell you how many text alerts I have received while I have been writing this blog and the amount of times my boyfriend has wanted to through my phone against the wall.

As for Last.fm, I guess you could call it addictive, but not in the sense of having the urge to check out your own profile and who has made comments and who has the same interests in music as you, but rather a good source of just listening to new music. I turn Last.fm on pretty much every time I get on my computer, just for the free music. This could be because I haven't yet really explored the community that are involved within the site. However I do find it pretty amusing to snoop through peoples profiles and look at what they have listened to the most and have a little giggle when the top artist is Paris Hilton.


FlickR and Blogger, for me aren't really as addictive, probably because I use up all my Internet time on the other sites. Nether less to say they are both still very useful and serve their purpose well, but maybe they aren't as addictive because they are not as "popular" as the profile sites. This is why Del.icio.us is so popular because it enables you to to see what’s trendy, what’s popular and what’s emerging. Like Last.fm I guess you could call Del.icio.us addictive if you had the urge to find new and exciting websites and check out what your mates have been looking at.



Conclusion

"Socialolism is a strong addiction to Internet applications of social nature. Malignant versions of Socialolism arise just in that times when the affected person has many boring things to do (e.g. Work), even when that things are important." [3]
Apart from this assignment being a complete and utter distraction, I have gained a lot of knowledge as to why people become so addicted to these sites. If you are not active on any of these sites then chances are you probably wont care much about what is going on in this wonderful world of social networking online. However if you are fairly active on these sites then chances are you will become more and more addicted to checking your profiles and seeing who is doing what. It becomes almost a second nature just to sign in and have a bit of a snoop around and see whats going on in people's lives. Maybe for some people this is just a cry out for social activity despite it being via text and not actually in person. If the rest of society became as addicted as some of us are to these sites, then what does that hold for the future of the next generation and their ability to interact with people in real life, rather than hiding behind an online identity such as Facebook or Myspace. Who knows what other forms of social sites will emerge in the years to come and what effects they will have on people in the world. So there is no real cure for social site addiction the main thing that needs to be accentuated is there needs to be balance between online socializing and real life socializing. The addiction to social sites is like any other addiction, you must have self control! Resist the temptation! So what if you didn't get a chance to reply back to your friend's comment they left you last night. It's not going anywhere!


References


http://www.news.com.au/story/0,23599,22705712-2,00.html [1]


http://wisdump.com/web/why-twitter-is-so-addicting/ [2]

http://holbreich.de/2007/12/socialolism/ [3]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FaceBook>

http://www.last.fm/help/

http://twitter.com/faq

http://help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/go/mobile/flickr/flickr-01.html

http://andywibbels.com/post/1094