Experiment with Online Communities
It has now been one month since I started my “experiment” with social networking and online communities. The experiment involved trying out Flickr, Ustream, WebShots, and Twitter to see if I could figure out was all this talk about online communities and social networking was all about.
I had checked out each of these four “communities” to greater or lesser degrees prior to this experiment, but I was never able to grasp the social networking aspects by just “checking them out.” That’s why I decided to go ahead and sign up for the ones where I didn’t already have a login and try to get better acquainted. Maybe, by doing that, I would finally be able to figure out what the attraction was.
The most significant observation after a month of this experiment is that I can rank the level of engagement I have experience with each of these networking serices:
Twitter has turned out to be enormously engaging. It’s amazing how many possible uses for it there are, depending on who you “follow.” (It’s also amazing how quickly one can gain “followers.”) I decided who to follow by choosing a few people who I already knew were on Twitter and then adding some of the people they followed.
From doing this I found that there are many professional writers and journalists who use Twitter to promote their other work. The fun part is that there are a lot of tech writers who use Twitter in conjunction with other new media. As a result, it’s been almost irrestible to become totally immersed in Twitter and all that flows it.
I started using Ustream more when a live streaming event was announced on Twitter. There is a chat room with Ustream which usually has many of the same people in the chat room for each event, making it an online community of sorts.
It hasn’t been so easy to experiece the community aspects of WebShots or Flickr. Perhaps it’s because Twitter and Ustream have kept me so engaged that I haven’t spent much time getting acquainted wth anything else. It may also be because I haven’t been taking to many photographs lately.
I would like to be able to spend the next month becoming more acquainted with the online communities and social networks built around WebShots and Flickr. May is always a good month for taking pictures, so maybe I will be more motivated to spend less free time online and more of it capturing the outdoors with my camera! Stay tuned!
When Communities Collide
What happens when a committed agitator finds a new new group of people to antagonize?
I’m new at this. I’m new to blogging, new to social media. I am new to a lot of things on the internet except podcasts. That is, in the sense that mp3 media was available before the iPod was invented. It wasn’t as portable in space before iPods, but mp3 media has always been time-portable. Probably ten years ago, if I missed a radio broadcast that I wanted to hear, I could usually find it in the mp3 archives and listen to it later.
Since then, the array of podcasts (or mp3 downloads) has broadened well beyond recordings of broadcast radio shows. The range of podcasts I listen to has broadened slowly since those days when I first started downloading This American Life many years ago. It hasn’t even been a year since I finally found the former TechTV folks reincarnated in the various netcasts available from Leo Laporte’s tWiT.tv domain. Shortly after that, I finally discovered where to find podcasts at iTunes.
I recently discovered Twitter and it has led me to an even broader range of podcasts and blogs to follow. One of them was NewsGang, which led to TheGillmorGang. I usually look forward to listening to the NewsGang phone call each day but when I logged into its ustream simulcast last Tuesday, I wasn’t sure what to think. A semi-professional heckler using the moniker Prokofy was in the process of doing all she could to antagonize the host, the guests, and probably anyone who was listening. I even found myself responding to her baiting techniques in the Ustream chat room posting poorly thought-out comments back to her.
I’m not sure why I continued to listen, much less respond in an arena where I am a quiet listener. I find the conversations on NewsGang interesting and sympathetic to many of my own views. I wondered if perhaps it was a generational thing that held my interest in the way Prokofy presented her views. Her profile indicated she was 30 years old, but she sounded more like a teenager posing as a someone older.
It turns out, according to Encyclopedia Dramatica, Prokofy is 50 years old and works as a Russian translator at the UN.
I found that although I didn’t want to “reward” her by following her on Twitter, I did want to get a better idea of who she was. Of course she had a blog, so I looked at it a bit to see how she perceives the world she lives in. It’s an angry world. She seems to be a well-spoken, melodramatic writer, but her account of her phone call to NewGang was so distorted that I could only wonder what distortions were in the other posts on her blog. I’ve observed some of her exchanges with other people on Twitter and it’s pretty clear that notoriety is what she’s after. Now here I am, adding to it.
What was most remarkable was how the unusual, reflective mood I was left with 2 days later was apparently shared by the regular callers and the host on NewsGang. Prokofy’s attacks in her blog post were so personal and so vicious and it seemed clear that most of the people on the call (as it’s called) had probably read it. It was insulting to everyone involved, at least I found the things she said in her post a lot of insulting venom.
I suppose there are plenty of people who occupy their minds with the paranoia evident in her words. In fact I know that there are plenty of paranoid people in the world. It’s a sad thing, really, that someone so articulate can be so twisted.
Hopefully, that’s enough and this ugly side of me that wants to observe her self-destructive actions online has been satisfied. Surely, future NewsGang simulcasts and podcasts will return to the usual topics, espeically when there is so much going on. Hopefully, I can return to being a quiet newbie who feels an affinity for the people and ideas presented on NewsGang.
