The March-April 2008 (Vol. 9, No. 2) issue of Forum, a publication of the University of the Philippines (UP), has an article on pages 4, 5 and 7 titled “Hanging out with the I.T. crowd: Navigating the tangled web of social networking,” an online version of which is available. (The online version, however, does not have my picture which appears on page 5 of the print version.)
The author interviewed me about Friendster and social networking sites. Here are the excerpts:
According to Prof. Danilo Arao of the College of Mass Communication, an active user of the social networking site Friendster since 2003, social networking sites have “evolved into something that integrates the various aspects of online life.”
He points out that registered users on Friendster, for example, can send each other messages, upload photographs and videos, and maintain a blog, almost cutting away the need for accounts on other web services. And with a built-in audience, social networking sites have become, for most Filipino users anyway, a primary tool for communicating with a large group of people all at once.
“Since my network has grown to include not only friends and colleagues, but most of my students as well, it has become an effective way to disseminate information,” Arao says, adding that he uses his Friendster account to circulate electronic copies of his newspaper columns and other bits of information he believes his “friends” should know about, such as announcements from the University or his college.
But aside from these features that make it easy for users to communicate with each other, most if not all social networking sites are looking for ways to expand how their users can use their services. Most recently this has come in the form of applications or “apps” from third-party developers that users can install on their profiles. These “apps” range from the functional, like a calculator or a window to display news and weather reports, to the whimsical like a virtual fish tank.
Online presence for dummies
The introduction of SNS has undoubtedly led to the democratization of online presence. It has allowed people, even those who would not be otherwise that way, to be constantly online, maintaining personal websites and turning their SNS accounts into their virtual homes.
Arao, who teaches online journalism and web authoring, layout and design, attributes this to the ease of setting up an SNS account. “You just sign in and then, as they say, you just follow the dotted line,” he points out.
In the early years of the World Wide Web, having an online presence came with a list of demands. One needed to pay for a hosting service, buy a domain name, and know “hand-coding,” as Arao puts it, using web programming language like HTML and CSS (or pay someone who knows “hand-coding”). Today, having a web page of one’s own takes just a few clicks. Users can even customize the look of their profile or web page, changing everything from the colors and font used to the layout of the page. Best of all, it’s free.
If you want to know the academe’s view about social networking sites, I hope that you’ll find time to read the article. Thank you for reading!