Myspace Ethnography

I am currently pursuing an ethnomethodological study of Myspace, the fastest growing online social network. Myspace has been growing exponentially for the past 3 years, and has just exceeded 55 million users.

Method:
I have created a virtual identity as a researcher and embedded myself within the Myspace community. My virtual identity can be viewed here: www.myspace.com/ethnography

My preliminary questions include:

1. What is the relationship between music and identity on Myspace?
2. Why is Myspace the fastest growing social network?
3. Why is Myspace ‘fun’?

I am interested in the personal public messaging that occurs within ‘comments.’ This is a communicatory medium analogous to talking loudly at a party, so as to be over-heard. The quanity and quality of a user’s comments is an important source of social capital to be acrued on myspace.

More soon…

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 14th, 2006 at 7:53 pm and is filed under Social Movement Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.