This article was very interesting to me. The article Uses and Gratifications talked about why people use these Social network Services such as Myspace and Facebook. It gives a little background on how Myspace came about and what the original uses for the site were. It also gave background on how Facebook started and how it went from a Harvard.edu- only Social network, to a public social network that now has millions of network members. The article really analyzes why people use these social networks. It is said in research that college students spend about 100 minutes per day online. That to me was a very interesting observation because just looking at myself, I can say that I do spend about 100 minutes online. Thetry article also talks a lot about motivations for using these social networks. Entertainment was among the reasons repeatedly stated for using social networks. I believe entertainment is a big reason why people use networks like Facebook and Myspace. Speaking from personal experience, when I am bored I go on my Facebook just to look at my networks activity. Also social interaction was stated to be one of the motivational categories for SNS use. Many people i know go on Facebook just to talk to new girls. People like to reach out on there and make new friends.
One thing i found very funny was seeing the study done on the 50 undergraduate students. The results brought about a few reasons why people use Social networks. One of the reasons was curiosity about others. This made me laugh because when i was in a relationship while being a user on Facebook a while back, I know that I was always on my girlfriends page trying to see what she was up to. Also just with other females that i have been interested in, i would go on their Facebook pages and see what they were all about and what they were up to. This article analyzed Facebook and Myspace very well. I feel like it did a good job of trying to answer the questions it was seeking.
I now know how old I am... My wife has a Facebook page and I *never ever* go see what she's up to. Either I don't care or, I don't care. Your mention of checking up on your girlfriend cracked me up when I asked myself the related question about my wife.
ReplyDeleteAt any rate, I didn't know about how MySpace started either, so I liked this section. I had followed FaceBook for a long time before I was able to join, so was fairly up to speed on this. Except, I was not aware that it started at Harvard (no, I have not yet seen Social Network).
I agree that it answered the question fairly well. I would have actually been surprised if the result had been something like, "totally no - these folks get nothing but wasted time out of this." I'm not sure that's also not the answer in reality as we are not really making anything. I consider that we are, dancing on the grave of Silicon Valley
Good post Beef31,
ReplyDeleteI like your honesty when talking about checking up on your girlfriend. I can definitely relate to that, although I must say that only negative things have ever come of it. I also found it interesting in the article about how it says that we use SNS because of the ability to instantaneously be entertained and be socially interactive. For me it definitely rings true and is one of the main reasons I use facebook. When I go on facebook, I can have a social interaction through chat, while at the same time be entertained by going through various people's profiles. Facebook and other SNS do truly bring many different aspects of communication and entertainment right to your fingertips.
Beef31,
ReplyDeleteI enjoyed the begging of this article as well. MySpace was the first social networking site I ever joined it’s interesting to see how the rankings of these sites have changed till today. In the article it rates MySpace as the number three most visited site, while Facebook was number seven. Today Facebook has jumped in front of MySpace and is probably the number one most used social networking site. I would agree that most people use these sites as a form of entertainment. I know that when I get bored of doing homework, I end up on Facebook browsing through my home page, just so I can be entertained for a couple minutes.