Music downloads - Paying and not paying with social capital

Image source: Author's photo

For those who download music illegally, what is the value of a paid digital download? Recent studies seem to suggest a highly subjective moral value, but is that the same economic value we once attributed to CDs, cassettes and vinyl?

I've heard various people suggest that the experience of purchasing and listening to a physical album (discussions with record store employees, looking through the liner notes and artwork, listening with others) does not compare to a digital download. Yet there is a culture associated with downloads. People derive social capital from sharing music for download because others respond, discussion is generated, and people are exposed to new music.

The music industry isn't going to be able to turn the social capital of music into premium content, but could they monetise it? Ping, iTune's inbuilt social network, is Apple's attempt to derive sales from the social value of music. It doesn't introduce any new premium content, but it does provide a new arena for digital music culture to play out, one where social content is linked to legitimate downloads.

Because it doesn't eliminate illegal music sharing or introduce new premium digital content, Ping is not a premium paywall but a "paycorridor". The social capital generated by Ping users guides them away from illegal downloads and towards the iTunes store.

Importantly, artists (or at least their PR) are users of Ping. The point of connection betweens fans and artists is a potential site for future premium content.

Privacy on SNS

As we live in the digital age, people pay more attention to the privacy on the internet and social network sites such as facebook in particular. From the reading ‘Facebook’s Privacy Trainwreck’, Danah Boyd mentioned that “News Feeds” on Facebook made aggregating information more accessible and visible to everyone and pointed out how this new feature expose information in public. But, as long as you control privacy how much and what you are going to share, I don’t think this new feature is a big problem as a privacy loss.

I have an account on Facebook and whenever I log in to facebook, News feed provides me information about what my friends have been up to and with whom they accepted as “friend” lately which helps me keep tabs on them. Usually I use facebook only to interact with friends I already know, and I don’t want to all the materials and information I share with them to be available for anyone to see. So I checked my privacy settings on facebook and made sure that all materials I have on SNS is only available to me and my friends.

I guess many people fear of what other people may think of their actions on facebook or on any other SNS. If people don’t want to lose their privacy and not get embarrassed, they may need to check their facebook for any inappropriate postings and also untag themselves from the drunken photos.

To sum up, I think it is our responsibility to limit and control personal information on the internet. SNS user should control their own privacy settings and more cautions should be taken when they posting some personal details on internet.

Meaningful Relationships

The Dunbar Number - I didn't know existed before attending the lecture on Online Social Networks. However, the concept is a unique one - that one can have a meaningful relationship with only 150 people at a certain point in time. 150 is a big number if looked at in terms of having a meaningful relationship in person; especially nowadays when people hardly seem to have time for themselves.

But if 150 is applied to social networking sites, it doesn't seem that big number, or does it? For a lot of people this number wouldn't seem big considering the number of 'friends' they have on their friend's list on social networking sites; some people have more than 500 hundred friends, which seems quite unreal if looked at interms of having being able to have a "meaningful realtionship". And then for some people this number wouldn't seem really big as their purpose for joining social networking sites is to establish relationships beyond their "real life relationships".

The context in which people place the quantitative value of The Dunbar Number I think, completely depends on what they the term 'friend' on social networking sites constitutes to. Or even on what Judith Donath puts it as, Strong and Weak Ties; Strong ties being the close network of friends and Weak being the acquaintances. She however the idea about strong and weak ties in to a different direction; but just in realtion to The Dunbar Number, Donath's idea gives one a lot of flexibility regarding the formation of "meaningful realtionships" on SNS.

Never thought that facebook would have a gender divide!

Today's lecture discussion about male and female users using Facebook differently seemed quite interesting. There actually is a gender divide when I think about it, though not very obvious all the time.

The biggest difference I noticed was in terms of the status updates. The status updates of my female friends tend to be more emotional; about what they're feeling at the moment or what has their day been like - the majority of them tend to be quite 'whiny' - though some might not agree with this, still being whiny seems like quite a girl thing to me. On the other hand, the status updates by male friends usually tend to be one liners or one words and have nothing whatsoever to do with their feelings!

Another thing that I've noticed is that it my female friends use Facebook much more than my male friends. By this I mean, they update their status more often, use facebook chat more often, publish wall posts, use an uncountable number of applications and games and do tons of quizzes. And these quizzes and applications are usually the ones which predict their future or give them some sort of detail about their love life or the lack of it. The males seem to do much less of all the things just mentioned and it's pretty great to have that because then my news feed isn't filled with completely irrelevant rubbish - no insult intended. And one other weird observation - guys tend to swear more on facebook than girls when writing on people's walls or updating their status. I found this interesting because I do have a few female friends who swear but even they don't do so on facebook.

Something to think about maybe?!