NetworkNing or solitary spaces
It is unimaginable to study the new media without creating something within them. So I embarked on a new project today creating a network on Ning for Lithuanians studying and academics working abroad (it's in Lithuanian, so you don't necessarily have to head there).
The main reason for a social network of this kind was the fact that since we are a relatively small country and the numbers of students and academics heading abroad have been rapidly increasing, it has become hard to find them all in one place, get in touch and see what others have been working on. Moreover, there was a notion of patriotism tingling somewhere in the back of my head as academics previously have played a substantial role in establishing the country in the late 1910s and later on in restoring the independence and starting everything from the scratch again in 1990s. As a fellow student of mine told me a few months ago, when one comes from a minute and young country, one has a feasible chance to make some sort of a difference. Perhaps...
Anyhow, setting up a network on Ning allowed me to start getting some idea on how this budding social network(ing) site is working. While danah boyd and Nicole Ellison define
MySpace and FaceBook as social network sites that embed the social networks their users have developed prior to joining them, the developments I have noticed on Ning allow to erase the parentheses and consider the attempt to networking. The matter that interests me most is the nature of the networking and the threads that emerge within this practice.
The first look and in particular at the last results of the searches reveals that there is a lot of solitude on the networks launched on Ning yet - many of them, particularly the ones with the generic sky blue icon are networks of one person still. This poses two possible explanations - either that is because of Ning's relative novelty and the networks need some time develop or the fact that the people joining Ning consider the platform a possibility to establish a room of their own on the Web, which puts the practice of networking in a different and possibly questionable perspective.
Ning co-founder and CEO Gina Bianchini says that 65 percent of Ning's 500 000 social networks are being actively used with a new one springing up every 30 seconds. Since I managed to erase my bookmarks where I believe I had world-wide figures, I am left with the ones from the States and according toNielsen Online, Ning's year-over-year audience's growth for September was the third largest one after Twitter and Tagged among social network(ing) sites - 343%, 330% and 251% respectively. Ning had 2,955 mln users compared to Twitter's 2,36 mln and Tagged's 3,86 mln. On the average that leaves with 6 people per each Ning network, although, as I have said, many of the ones I found were still underdeveloped and included only one person (and since they were not updated regularly with posts, photographs or videos didn't function as blogs either). The cemetery of attempts... However, some of the more popular ones (a feature Ning offers by random order?), such as I see color have over 60 000 members.
Interestingly, during one of my first encounters with Ning, I randomly searched for networks revolving around the axis of adult-content trying to see whether sex indeed is the forbidden fruit we are all after in the virtual (the first question my avatar was asked on Second Life was 'So, do you wanna have sex?').
While the official Ning blog claims that adult-oriented networks must have a warning page and that they don’t show up in the search results on Ning.com, a quick search by entering various words for male/female genitalia results in dozens of raunchy networks and one doesn't have to look far to find those that are public, appear on the search results and have no warning pages about adult-oriented content.
Since Ning's main money making machine is GoogleAds, such networks have become a cause of serious headache and as of the 1st of January, as Ning blog states, they will no longer support adult social networks on the Ning platform.
From what I have observed so far, it seems that Ning is first of all becoming an ethnographic case study of what Hugo Liu calls taste performance. Unlike FaceBook where the textual plays a major role in displaying one's profile and the bonds with the other users, Ning like MySpace offers the possibility to manipulate the template visually - a feature that in MySpace serves a major tool in constructing one's space. However, while MySpace and FaceBook firstly serve as quintessential platforms for 'friending' rather than making connections with strangers (I find FaceBook more like a pin-up board), the networking priority on Ning is questionable, as solitary notworking is still very evident. It will be interesting to observe whether Ning will evolve into a networking platform and how it will continue to develop. And I will let you know whether my network will develop into a networking practise or I will be doomed for solitude.
The main reason for a social network of this kind was the fact that since we are a relatively small country and the numbers of students and academics heading abroad have been rapidly increasing, it has become hard to find them all in one place, get in touch and see what others have been working on. Moreover, there was a notion of patriotism tingling somewhere in the back of my head as academics previously have played a substantial role in establishing the country in the late 1910s and later on in restoring the independence and starting everything from the scratch again in 1990s. As a fellow student of mine told me a few months ago, when one comes from a minute and young country, one has a feasible chance to make some sort of a difference. Perhaps...
Anyhow, setting up a network on Ning allowed me to start getting some idea on how this budding social network(ing) site is working. While danah boyd and Nicole Ellison define
MySpace and FaceBook as social network sites that embed the social networks their users have developed prior to joining them, the developments I have noticed on Ning allow to erase the parentheses and consider the attempt to networking. The matter that interests me most is the nature of the networking and the threads that emerge within this practice.
The first look and in particular at the last results of the searches reveals that there is a lot of solitude on the networks launched on Ning yet - many of them, particularly the ones with the generic sky blue icon are networks of one person still. This poses two possible explanations - either that is because of Ning's relative novelty and the networks need some time develop or the fact that the people joining Ning consider the platform a possibility to establish a room of their own on the Web, which puts the practice of networking in a different and possibly questionable perspective.
Ning co-founder and CEO Gina Bianchini says that 65 percent of Ning's 500 000 social networks are being actively used with a new one springing up every 30 seconds. Since I managed to erase my bookmarks where I believe I had world-wide figures, I am left with the ones from the States and according to
Interestingly, during one of my first encounters with Ning, I randomly searched for networks revolving around the axis of adult-content trying to see whether sex indeed is the forbidden fruit we are all after in the virtual (the first question my avatar was asked on Second Life was 'So, do you wanna have sex?').
While the official Ning blog claims that adult-oriented networks must have a warning page and that they don’t show up in the search results on Ning.com, a quick search by entering various words for male/female genitalia results in dozens of raunchy networks and one doesn't have to look far to find those that are public, appear on the search results and have no warning pages about adult-oriented content.
Since Ning's main money making machine is GoogleAds, such networks have become a cause of serious headache and as of the 1st of January, as Ning blog states, they will no longer support adult social networks on the Ning platform.
From what I have observed so far, it seems that Ning is first of all becoming an ethnographic case study of what Hugo Liu calls taste performance. Unlike FaceBook where the textual plays a major role in displaying one's profile and the bonds with the other users, Ning like MySpace offers the possibility to manipulate the template visually - a feature that in MySpace serves a major tool in constructing one's space. However, while MySpace and FaceBook firstly serve as quintessential platforms for 'friending' rather than making connections with strangers (I find FaceBook more like a pin-up board), the networking priority on Ning is questionable, as solitary notworking is still very evident. It will be interesting to observe whether Ning will evolve into a networking platform and how it will continue to develop. And I will let you know whether my network will develop into a networking practise or I will be doomed for solitude.
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2 Responses to "NetworkNing or solitary spaces"
http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/theeditors/2008/12/theres_been_discussion_see_eg.html
Will Mumbai live updates on twitter make a difference how mainstream media will deliver and gather the news in the future?
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