Friday 15 June 2007

Rupert Murdoch: HisSpace

Rupert Murdoch has been vindicated in his purchase of MySpace. Although Facebook has been the talk of the town this year, Advertising Age (Digital) has the figures for users and visitors of all major social networking sites here that reveal MySpace has nearly as many visitors as the UK has citizens!

Taking a very different approach to the social networking phenomenon, Adbusters (link to Adbusters homepage, article only in paper form) inquires into the meaning of 'friends' online. Personally I find the incessant emails to be someone's 'friend' both annoying and aggressive. Adbusters takes this further and comments that we are now prizing quantity over quality where friends are collected and as such are exchanging intimacy for clever irreverance, conceit and e-jargon. They also note that diction is becoming shorter but sharper. Are we all now advertising copywriters?

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I am director of the Media and Persuasive Communication (MPC) network at Bangor University where I also lecture on political-economy of the media. I am currently working on a book provisionally titled Deconstructing Privacy for Peter Lang and leading two empirical projects in connection with privacy perception and the use of new media for smoking cessation. I am author of Creativity and Advertising: Affect, Events and Process (Routledge, 2013); The Mood of Information: A Critique of Behavioural Advertising (Continuum, 2011); and Digital Advertising (Palgrave-MacMillan, 2009). Please contact me at mcstay@bangor.ac.uk if you are interested in Ph.D supervision or consultancy services.