MySpace ethos more than marketing...
Moenk's piece on the game generation's social application of technology and its influences on Web 2.0 design is both insightful and uniquely refreshing. While everyone is talking about marketing on MySpace, Moenk focuses on the effect of the MySpace ethos on business culture as the game generation matures into their productive years.“They have relatively little generational consciousness,” writes political columist David Brooks about the game generation. Why? "[B]ecause this generation is for the most part not fighting to emancipate itself from the past.” This suggestion is provocative considering that while “the baby boom included the largest U.S. birth cohort to date, the game generation will ultimately outdo the baby boom in size, in scope, and presumably in influence,” notes John C. Beck and Mitchell Wade in their study of the game generation’s influence on organizational values in business. In fact, “the total size of the game generation is already greater than the baby boom ever was,” and the whole generation of gamers, “including X and Y and letters to be named later-simply approach the world differently than their predecessors.”
This generational amnesia is partly the result of the movement away from traditional forms of social capital towards weaker, and more numerous ties. Renowned urban planer Richard Florida notes that the fundamental social and economic changes that underpin the Creative Economy, demonstrate that in “virtually every aspect of life, weak ties have replaced the stronger bonds that once gave structure to society. Rather than live in one town for decades, we now move about. Instead of communities defined by close associations and deep commitments to family, friends, and organizations, we seek places where we can make friends and acquaintances easily and live quasi-anonymous lives. The decline in the strength of our ties to people and institutions is a product of the increasing number of ties we have.” Continues Florida:
"What appears to be self-indulgence to conservatives or devices of corporate oppression to liberals in fact turns out to be the result of the rational evolution of economic forces. Changes in taste and lifestyle that at first glance seem superficial and unrelated turn out to be rooted in widespread, fundamental economic change.”Excerpts and Highlights from Moenk's article:
While much of the discussion regarding social networks in the business community is focused on word of mouth marketing and user generated content, this trend has even greater ramifications for the way it will impact businesses internally.
Many analysts are of the opinion that applications of the future will be increasingly web based. While this idea has been met with much skepticism, Microsoft has aggressively begun to shift gears in order to adapt to these developments.
The timing for this is impeccable as Google is currently threatening to eat into their Microsoft Office market share with free web based solutions such as Google Writely and Google Spreadsheet.
Given that there are now web based alternatives to much of the productivity software that we use every day, how does this new generation of tools differ and improve upon what’s already out there? The answer lies, believe it or not, with social networking services like MySpace, social bookmarking sites like Yahoo’s del.icio.us, and peer to peer social networks like the blogosphere.
The most successful of these services are designed to be intrinsically social, while focusing on the utility they provide to individuals. Thus the web not only becomes a great place for individual productivity, but also real time group collaboration and community building around the information that is being interacted with. This balancing of needs between that of the individual and the group perhaps gives us an indication of what was missing in enterprise ‘groupware’ of the nineteen nineties.
In the past few years there has been a fundamental change in the way teenagers socialize which can be credited with two developments: the proliferation of cell phones, and the rapid adoption of the social networking sites MySpace and Facebook. The most profound ramifications of Web 2.0 won’t be fully felt nor understood until the MySpace generation begins to enter the workforce in the next few years. The current level of connectivity between students in high school and college is drastically different from anytime in the 20th century or even the first three years of the 21st.
In the Information Age where the adage "it’s not just what you know but who you know" is increasingly relevant towards maintaining a competitive advantage, today’s teenagers are learning and largely influencing the development of new networking practices that are foreign to current business professionals.
While the old paradigm of the web is focused on static information, the new web is developing into a dynamic collaborative medium where the social network is ubiquitous with content creation and information flows from person to person more efficiently with the individual in control of what they see and whom they interact with.
Email may currently be the most used application for collaboration because it is what the first generation of web users are familiar with, but as the MySpace generation begins to enter the workforce they will rapidly influence the adoption of tools that embody the collaborative social practices to which they are growing accustomed.
