Article from Miranda Divine in the SMH today…. some interesting points!

In a speech to the House of Lords last month, an Oxford University neuroscientist, Susan Greenfield, warned about the effect on the brain of friendship through a screen on MySpace, Facebook, Bebo and Twitter. They can effectively rewire children’s synapses, “infantilising” the brain and eroding attention-span and empathy.

So what do you think?

Excellent article on generational attitudes to social networking and the concept that once information is in the wild on the internet it will always be findable through Google.

Published in NY Mag. Author is Emily Nussbaum.

MySpace is an interesting e-commerce model. Merlo (2006) describes these sorts of sites as sharecropping systems where the the users provide free labour to build sufficient content to make the system economically viable. I do believe the following is an insightful comment:

“To put it a different way, the sharecroppers operate happily in an attention economy while their overseers operate happily in a cash economy. In this view, the attention economy does not operate separately from the cash economy; it’s simply a means of creating cheap inputs for the cash economy.” – Merlo (2006)

… but the term sharecropping is a negative concept and implies a form of debt slavery hence I’d say this is not really appropriate to social web experiences. since it infers the wealthy owner of the property unduely profits from the labour of the worker.

I work for the RTA and one of our communications channels happens to be a myspace profile visible at http://www.myspace.com/rtaslowdown. Now for the RTA this is a small but important channel to get the message of road safety out to the youth market and to allow them to raise issues with the Authority. While the RTA also has websites specifically targetting young drivers this outpost in the myspace community established in October 2006 allows informal communication with a key driver demographic. So, does this myspace profile rate as a ebusiness model for the RTA? My answer would be yes, its about pushing the road safety message which is a primary goal in the RTA corporate strategy.

Refs:

Mello, John P Jr.; (29/Dec/06), The Social Web: Sharing or Sharecropping?; http://www.ecommercetimes.com/story/54903.html