Facebook and Myspace – buckets of lemmings?

Kent asks a genuine question on his blog about the popularity of things like Facebook and Myspace.

What is so much better about Facebook (and MySpace and other similar platforms) than an ordinary blog on a popular platform- say WordPress?

Maybe it’s just that the likes of Facebook, Myspace are seen as a ‘place’ to go, a ‘place’ to belong, to identify with, whereas blogs are seen as distributed individual spaces.

I wrote something about my own experiences of that phenomenon back here – neo community.

It’s easier to forge cross connections (technologically and socially) in a place where everyone is in the same bucket. Much of the connecting is done by the blog bucket machine. With individual blog platforms it’s more on the individual to form them. Who was it that said ‘freedom is hard’.

I remember hearing something in a youth leadership meeting that the question “who’s gonna be there” is more important than “what will we do there?”

Maybe that’s true no matter what age we are.

Well, to some.

Maybe some for whom freedom is too hard.

Maybe it’s just that the pull to belong is stronger than we realise and we’ll put up with anything to get it.

Dave

PS: I think the ‘freedom is hard’ bit came from a statement about a book on the state of Iraq.

[tags]facebook, myspace, kent newsome, blogging, social, belonging, freedom[/tags]