Sunday 30 March 2008

Evolution of the social network

Recent reports of social networking's demise may be slightly premature. Sure, some users are completely fed up with receiving friends invites, being "bitten", "poked" and indeed having sheep thrown at them.

And there has been a 5% slowdown in new UK users to the larger social networks, Facebook and MySpace, between December 2007 and January this year. But Alex Burmaster, an analyst at Nielsen Online which compiled the figures showing the decline, says: "The slow down in social networks is being somewhat exaggerated. It's a natural form of any growth that we see in the online eco-system. More from the BBC here.

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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.