Music downloads - Paying and not paying with social capital

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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.

To friend or not to friend. That is the question

Friends, they are our partners in crime, the people whom we love, support and laugh with. Friends pick you up on a bad day and lend a hand when you need one. Friends are the people we confide in, they lend a shoulder to cry on or offer an ear to listen to your problems. Friends are people who share our likes and interests, offer companionship and are people who we enjoy being around. They are the people we have grown up with, people who we have met from sport teams, schools and youth groups. Traditionally we would interact and communicate with our friends by seeing each other face to face, talking on the phone, writing letters, Christmas and birthday cards.

However, something that really interests me is the idea of online friendships and whether the dynamic of friendship has changed since the invention of the internet. If you think about it, social network sites like facebook allow its users to combine all of their networks and converge them into one space. Take my own page for example; I have 394 friends who include work mates, family and friends from the various schools I attended as well as friends who I have met online. Social network sites make it easy and effortless for individuals to keep in touch. By the click of a mouse I can see how my cousin in Russia is doing by looking at her status updates, or by viewing her pictures. I can send emails, virtual gifts and cards over the internet much like I would in times when these technologies were not available. I can instant-message and Skype my friends, talking to them in real time and be kept in the loop of what goes on in their daily lives.

The internet even allows me the opportunity to meet and become acquainted with people online whom I would otherwise not have the chance to meet outside of the cyberspace world. Can these people then too be classed as friends? Social network sites in general seem to encourage this kind of behaviour amongst its users. I would consider some people whom I have met through various blogs, websites and social network sites to be my friends as I am sure many other people have too.

What do you think? Has the idea of friendship and those who we regard as friends really changed all that much with the invention of the internet? If you think about it, we still do many of the same things to keep in contact with friends that we have always done, except now it is done online. Emails have replaced hand written litters as skyping and text messaging has replaced phone calls. In essence, it is very much the same. On the other hand, many of us today also have friends and contacts from places all around the world whom we have never actually met face to face but talk to regular basis. In this instance the concept of a friendship has changed dramatically as it challenges traditional notions of friendship. Is it the same or different? Looks like friendship is changing with technology too, do you agree?

Will Online Social Networking Sites Make Us Smarter?

Based on the whole Dunbar’s number concept, I did some extra reading on this idea and found that Robin Dunbar looked at primates and compared the size of their brains with humans. To cut a long story short, the larger the brain (or at least the neocortex area of it), the larger the average size of groups one can live in.

Human’s brains are larger than the primates obviously, yet with Dunbar’s number being around 150, does that also mean that Human brains hit a certain limit? That it simply cannot get any bigger? Perhaps with Social Networking sites it will. Perhaps the average size of groups with the online social networking addition can be 200, 500 or even 1000. Nevertheless, we may have to start measuring the average size of groups with a Dunbar 2.0 figure of maybe 700 (according to Dan Tapscott in “Grown Up Digital”, 2008).

You might think that maybe one doesn’t get smarter simply by having more friends surely? Well, think of it this way, say you have a group of friends called ‘group 1’, in ‘group 1’, you have two friends, friend A and friend B. In this group, you are unconsciously managing 3 relationships; your own relationship with friend A and friend B and what you know of the relationship between friend A and friend B excluding yourself. Simple enough so far, but what if you increase the number of friends in that group to 10, you now have to manage your own relationships with each individual and the pairs of relationships between your friends. As you can see, this will get horrendously exponential very quickly.

This applies in today’s world even more, with so many people flocking to online social networking sites and learning of ‘friends in common’ just adds to this. Making the concept of 6 degrees of separation a reality, perhaps not even 6 degrees, maybe less, perhaps 4 or 3 degrees, some suggest 2 degrees. With this smaller degree of separation, will this push our Dunbar number even further?

Like the song the Sherman Brothers once wrote for Disney, “It’s a small world after all”.

Social netwroks and the end of the world (as we know it)

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Social networking is the end of the world as we know it. At least that's what I think The New Zealand Herald is trying to tell me.
A July 13 article reports on the results of a Pew Research Centre survey about the internet's predicted influence on social relations over the next ten years. 85% of respondents believed that the internet would improve social relationships.

Doc Searls is part of that 85%:

"Hatred and distrust between groups have caused countless wars and suffering beyond measure," Searls said.

"Anything that helps us bridge our differences and increase understanding is a good thing."

Although Searl is speaking about the internet in general, The Herald lumps his statement in with "Mark Zuckerberg's belief that the internet and social media will bring the world closer".

Searl's quote recalls Vincent Mosco's discussion of the myths of "history-ending technology". Technologies ranging from the radio to the television were proposed to enable better social understanding (and even world peace) by crossing divisions of class, race and geography.

Many discussions about the potential of the internet forget that its technological precursors failed to ultimately transcend these divisions and end history as we know it. This is important to keep in mind, but should not stop us from being optimistic about the internet's ability to increase the civility of our interactions with people we don't know.

Will social networking services turn myth into reality? If social networks are to increase understanding amongst disparate groups, it must first bring these groups together.

Facebook is a largely civil communication environment, but focuses on connecting people who meet outside of Facebook. deviantART connects people for the first time, but these connections are defined by mutual creative interests. Both websites minimise the contact between disparate groups, lowering the opportunity for discussing differences.

Perhaps ten years could make all the difference. By building on Facebook's civil communication environment and letting any user answer questions and rate answers, Facebook Questions could start to increase understanding between differing strangers.

History tells us we should be both wary and optimistic about technological myths. It won't be such a big deal if the social networks myths are wrong - by that time we'll have all moved on to the next myth ;)