Alexia Blogs

I find Boyd’s sociology thesis on Facebook and myspace irrelevant given the Irish social community habitat. The Irish experience is very different. Surplant myspace with Bebo and Facebook, well, with probably, Bebo too and you have social networking Irish style. The homogenisation of Irish online social community scene is, indeed, a sad proposition.

Boyd divides the US social communities into two distinct camps: blue collar workers that use myspace and college students that use Facebook. In America, the Facebook following has grown organically across college campuses by word of mouth. It hasn?t had the same foothold in the Irish market as Bebo has users firmly attached by the time they get to college.

Such is the Bebo appetite in Ireland, that many colleges have blocked Bebo from their campus networks in an effort to promote fair usage policies across their labs.

I believe the key issue here is the retention strength of these networks to firmly hang onto users as they move through life. Facebook has a large proportion of white-collar workers in it’s ranks, only because they started using it in college. Their entire circle of friends use it. Why change or migrate to another network, learn a new set of tools and convince your pals to switch? Too much hard work. If Facebook didn’t have that natural work of mouth standing in colleges in the US, then myspace would possibly have a bigger piece of the social community pie.

As for Bebo, it’s got such a hold on the Irish social community it’s difficult to see where a natural rival is going to come from. Bebo has a large user-base from kids in primary school to young professionals and even their mothers. While many of these users are tech literate (more of the browser persuasion), they are not of the nerd brigade. They like to point and click. They don’t care whether or not Facebook adds RSS to it’?s arsenal. As long as Bebo is free and they can drag and drop videos of kittens and Megadeath, life is peachy. It really doesn’t matter if other social community sites are fuller featured.

This is the doozy that’s facing Twitter users in the midst of migrating to Jaiku. A sizable amount of their contacts continue to reside on Twitter real estate, even though service uptime is spotty at best. Migrating a circle of contacts to a new social setting is like trying to catch a meteor. Bloody impossible. This leads many Jaiku-grounded users to occasionally dual-post to both services in order to sate their passion to communicate and stay in touch with their contacts.

On another note, I disagree with Boyd on the taxonomy of her subjects. Boyd uses the word “class” to describe the camps. I don’t think “class” is the most appropriate word here.

The traditional meaning of “class” boils down to the educational status of your parents. If both of your parents attending college, then you are tagged “middle class” and if they didn’t, you are working class.

Trying to superimpose these tags onto their equivalent American categories (working class is blue-collar and middle class is white collar) is a misnomer. Just because you attend college does not mean that you are working or middle class. It simply means that you have had the change to study at a post high-school (or secondary school) institution. Class may have nothing to do with it.

So, class really has nothing to do with why people prefer to use Facebook over myspace of vice-versa. This all about online communities retaining members as people resist changing their social habits.

Seriously, the eyes being made between FF and the Greens is even making me uncomfortable. Why don’t they just get a room and finish it? As I write, former TD Dan Boyle is speeding on the train from Cork up for final face-to-face with FF. Even Gormley is getting in on FF love. It’ll be interesting to see if FF offer more to the Greens based on their recently dispatched position document. My opinion is that if the Greens are really serious about moving onto the Government benches in Kildare Street, they will have to compromise on some of their top issues. You can’t have six or seven top-level issues that you are not willing to give ground on. I hate wedding lists with proscribed gifts. FF won’t tick off as many goodies as the Greens think they will.

The coverage on Newstalk and RTE couldn’t be different. Newstalk got a live phone from Boyle - on the spot commentary. RTE recycled some sound loops from last night’s Week In Politics with Séan O Rourke. Hardly, an up-to-date snippet. Just shows how flexible independent radio simple out-foxes the old, rumbling Morning Ireland machine.

I don’t understand the logic and the long-term thinking of closing power stations. News is breaking this morning that the ESB is set to close a number of power stations before handing their running over to a new state agency. Tarbert looks set to be a dead cert to be closed down.The Irish Economy is already facing an uncertain power generation future. Nuclear energy is still a taboo subject even though we are effectively using it through the Interconnect. Slowly, we are realising that present methods of generating power are inefficient and that new technology will have to be used. With nuclear being a poison chalice and biomass a tough ROI sell, closing power stations will hasten tough decisions on Ireland’s electricity supply.

Stable power supply is an essential element for generating inward investment from major international firms. With a cloud over the power sector, confidence will undoubtedly be hit and investment strangled. This is a rosy assessment of implications of closing power stations. More immediately, threats of striking power workers and supply outages are a distinct possibility. Why are we cutting our bridging power supply advantage to the future?

I took these photos last night at an impromptu SD4 mini-reunion in Flannery’s (old Reuben’s premises) down by the Cornmarket. Scuse the quality, I’m still messing with the settings, especially dark interiors.