New Sense of Community

Tips to survive in the 21st century
1) Don’t put up anything up you wouldn’t want your grandparents to see
2) keep your friends close, keep your online friends closer
3) To impress the opposite sex don’t get a haircut-change your profile “pic”
Today, we find community in cyberspace as telecommunications connect users through computer mediated communication. These tips suggest how new media has influenced the nature of our social lives as modern culture now communicates through online communities.
Danah Boyd explores these online communities called social networking sites concluding, “Friendship helps people write community into being in social network sites.” Through these imagined egocentric communities users are able to express who they are and locate themselves culturally (Boyd, 2006). The definition and function of community has evolved as new media and telecommunications allow ideological communities, a new sense of connection, and a place for conviviality. Today, communities exist locally, regionally, nationally, and across the world resulting in globalisation and a new sense of community.
New media, telecommunications, and online communities reform our notion of emotional connection, support, and communication by providing the means to reach others in profound ways. Users now experience a shared emotional connection through social networking sites, blogs and chat rooms.
Ray Oldenburg suggests for all people there are three places in our lives- where we live, where we work, and the place we go to for conviviality aka the “third place”. This third place is described as a “home away from home for playful conversations. Today, computer mediated communication is our ‘third place’ facilitated by social networking sites such as Facebook, Myspace and Twitter. “What suburbia cries for are the means for people to gather easily, inexpensively, regularly, and pleasurably -- a ‘place on the corner,’ real life alternatives to television, easy escapes from the cabin fever of marriage and family life that do not necessitate getting into an automobile”(Oldenburg, 1991). This generation expects services such as Facebook, because it is always open and always on. Statistics on the official website reveal there are 300 million active users, its fastest growing demographic is those 35 years and older, people spend more than 8 billion minutes each day (world wide), 70% of users are outside U.S., and since its December 2008 debut more than 15,000 websites, devices, and applications have been implemented proving it is a perfect example of our new found “third place”.
Facebook creates a sense of community and conviviality as it allows us to connect with others globally on all levels. The site facilitates a network of networks through status updates, commenting, messaging, creating photo albums, tagging photos, poking, instant chatting, video sharing, joining/creating groups, and instant mobile uploads.
The function and definition of community has changed as limitations such as privacy and ethicacy issues have affected the user’s online experience. Previously communities functioned as dependable, locatable, and quick response support groups but now communities are often unreliable, global, and delayed in response. The U.S. Computer Emergency Readiness Team cautions users from providing too much personal information, warning even though the internet provides a sense of anonymity, the lack of physical interaction provides a false sense of security causing us to naively trust our so called “friends” online.

As Boyd notes a users list of friends defines the audience that they believe they are addressing whenever they modify their profile or post a bulletin. Our sense of community has changed as we now recognize “social networking sites are not just a friends-only space; they are a public space with assumptions about the scope of that public.” With social networking sites, our community is our audience. Today our community is not a private source of support, it is more like a gossip column facilitated by the newsfeed to find juicy info about those ‘searchable some ones’ or anyone in the network.
So what does all this mean for businesses, organisations, and industries?
One industry monumentally affected by our new sense of community is advertising, as social networking sites, new technologies, and user generated data bring new opportunities and challenges. Nowadays, Advertising surfs the web as we do. A recent study by comScore found social media sites represented 21.1% of U.S. internet display ads in 2009 with MySpace and Facebook accounting for more than 80% of those ads as they can deliver high reach and frequency to target segments at low cost (Oreskovic & Lewis, 2009). Social network sites being high traffic, always on, and always available provide a bargain means for advertisers to reach consumers. E-Marketer recently released statistics showing how social network users talk about companies and brands, proving social network marketing is possible: 52% become a fan/follower of some other company/brand, 46% said something good about a brand/company, 23% said something bad about a company/brand, 18% promoted some other company/brand, and 12% promoted their own business. (Corwin, 2009) Today advertisers live in a dog eat dog world thriving off vision, imagination, and innovative minds. The alpha dogs today include the media agency OMD and Medialets, an analytics and advertising agency pioneering the world’s first shakable ad for Dockers, prompting users to shake the phone in order to set the on-screen freestyle dancer in motion. Using Medialets platform, the ad leverages the iPhone SDK allowing ads to tap into the phones GPS, accelerometer, and microphone, with the ability to work without signal. Other companies using Medialets innovative platform include a soda company that created an interactive bottle of soda that is motion-sensitive (the user shakes up the bottle and it splashes all over the screen) and a car rental company that can determine if a user is outside their typical geography and serve a CPA ad (Perez, 2009). http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/the_future_of_advertising_is_shakable_and_location_based.php?sms_ss=email
As society evolves our sense of community evolves, as we find ourselves lost in cyberspace. Social network sites aka online communities form a false sense of reality as many view their friends as an audience or public- unlike traditional communities, which viewed their friends as a support group. Advertisers react to this new sense of community by strategically placing types of products in these online spaces, while also trying to come up with the next best thing to catch consumer attention, interest, and support.
As technologies advance and online communities grow advertisers go to new heights to grab our attention, and shakeable ads seem just the beginning…as many say it’s a dog eat dog world out there and advertisers don’t want to be left in the doghouse.