danah boyd has posted a very useful starting summary of academic articles related to social networking and internet communications.
danah’s work in this area has been very useful in considering and bringing some sense of rationality to the hyped media interpretations of the MySpace phenomenon. Others, particularly Stutzman and Ellison who focus on the more ‘confined’ and ‘purpose-specific’ Facebook are also worth investigating.
I’m of two minds when it comes to applications of social networking tools within museum and gallery environments. On one hand, such tools could feasibly allow museums to become the nodal point for specific community interactions around their collections – for example, at the Powerhouse Museum, it would be logical to set up a system to facilitate online interactions between railway enthusiasts and our substantial actual locomotive and also model railway collections. On the other hand, though, my research and theorising leads me to agree with boyd (2006) and others that the primary function of social networking tools is communicative, not informational. If this is the case, then with regard to railway enthusiasts, we would be more likely to end up having to manage and maintain a communication nexus for such audiences with little return to the museum in terms of information sharing and acquisition etc.
The other issue for museums setting up their own systems is that of promotion. How does someone choose which, of many, social networking services to use? The answer, I think, lies in a mixture of application, geography, and existing real world networks. Facebook works because it is very specific in application (keeping track of friends) and geography (your college or high school) and it draws on the real world networks of these to pull you in – if your friends weren’t already on Facebook then you would be less predisposed to join (and you couldn’t join if you weren’t at college).
MySpace works because of the massive-scale subcultural promotion of the resource combined with the even more massive mainstream media hysteria over it (see Thornton’s classic work on moral panics and subcultures in Club Cultures, Routledge, 1996 – actually I see a lot of parallels between acid house and rave moral panics and the current moral panics around MySpace). MySpace has very broad application and geography, but it is more than likely that your friends are already there so peer pressure draws you in.
It needs to be noted that even with MySpace there are significant differences between UK MySpace users and US MySpace users. US MySpace is inhabited by teens and is, at the moment, dominated by their internal communications where as in the UK it seems that MySpace is more used by music labels and bands to communicate with their fanbase. Taking a long shot, could it be that this is in part a result of differences in the availability, especially in the late 1990s, of cheap and plentiful webhosting in the UK. UK bands and labels have taken up MySpace primarily for its hosting and promotional facilities, whereas in the USA for pure hosting there were (and are) a vastly different and cheaper range of alternatives for simple band hosting.