Following on from my essay, I think Murdoch's purchase of myspace.com is very shrewd. Now he gets it, certainly following his recent lament on Media Corp.'s earlier Net illiteracy. What's the biggest, most-established community-forming .com out there on the block at an affordable price? We'll buy that one. If he follows through and executes well, his competitors should be very scared. James Enck has often lamented, for example, the unidirection nature of Sky TV's broadcast network in a conversational era. Now you can see where the backchannel is coming from. I'm impressed at his adaptability. The customers want a sense of meaning in life through participatory media? Then that's what we'll sell them!
One last anecdote. I once watched a presentation by the founder of popular pre-teen/teen site Habbo Hotel. It's a strange but immensely popular 3D chat cum semi-structured virtual reality. Paraphrasing inaccurately, he said one depressed, overweight, spotty, teenage girl said that it was the first time she felt she could truly be who she really was without being judged just by her appearance.
Cathartic or confirmatory? I'll let you be the judge.
Posted by Martin Geddes at 12:53 AMTrackBack URL for this entry:
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