You guys probably know that I am writing my paper on Web 2.0 for seniors. While I was doing my research, I came across this 80 year old man who has made 96 YouTube videos in the last year! Probably I am the last to hear about this because he is the most subscribed to person on YouTube.
I just think it is amazing, though, that someone that old has grabbed onto a trend that is geared mostly toward young people. Oakley’s videos started out telling about his life story and he has expanded to create videos where he interviews young people about the relationship with an older generation, issues he reads about in the paper, and even a video about how to introduce other seniors who may fear technology to use computers.
Oakley thanks his readers all the comments (he gets thousands per video) and calls his “fellow YouTubers his friends. He said it has changed his life:“This YouTube experience has been one of the major changes and breakthroughs in my life and given me a whole new world to experience”.
This Englishman also got so much press that he stopped making videos for awhile because he had never meant to bring publicity to himself, only to connect with others through his videos. So great! I think if this man can learn on his own to make videos at 80 and is lovin’ it, imagine what we can do at the library for other seniors who want to tell their story.
Check him out at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qJ6B2qOFp7Y
For this assignment, I forayed into the world of Facebook and Ning.
Facebook first. I had started an account like three years ago and not done anything to it or looked at it since so I was pleased to see that a great number of people had requested my permission to be their “friend” over the years. Something about Facebook seemed too… cluttered for me. There are all of these “gifts” I can send my friends and waaay to many updates about who put new pics up and who added themselves to different groups. Also, people keep choosing me to win in a fight in some “Compare People” feature and I can’t figure out how to look at it so I will never know the one person people think I can take in a fight. What I did like was the obscenely large number of pictures that you are allowed to post (a girl I used to babysit had almost 450 up there) and I liked the feature that lets you choose how you know the person. I did not like that you couldn’t look at someone’s page unless I was their friend or in their network. Over at myspace, we do a little thing called myspace-stalking. Now how is my friend supposed to show me the picture of her ex-boyfriend’s new wife or explain to me the girl she ran into that I know but can’t picture in my head? In conclusion, I think Facebook should step it up.
I also got a Ning account. Now this site I found very user-friendly. It took me through all the steps of the appearance and features of my site quickly and painlessly and when I was ready to load, just told me anything I had missed would be included. I also noticed that I could add my own cascading CSS sheet if I so choose. I have no friends, songs, discussion questions or group members yet but I am having some fun with just messing with the appearance of it thus far. I am thinking that I may start a page for the book I wrote or maybe for people that are trying to get published. It’s so great that it’s free. Very pleasNING. Ha.
I was a teenager when I had my first experience with social networking so I was more interested in how to cause trouble than how to “connect with my community”. Like Nicole mentioned in her blog, I found an AOL screenname. My mom helped me create my first one, just part of my name; and then I got a different ‘cooler’ one with my friends so I could do the sneaky stuff. Then we set to work lurking in inappropriate chatrooms or searching for our crushes on-line.
The interesting thing about chat-rooms, email, and, more recently, the explosion of social networking sites is what different people we all become. When I was fifteen, I wasn’t shy, but I wasn’t going out of my way to cause reactions from people and I wasn’t a spiteful or rebellious child, I don’t think. Neither were my friends. Yet online, in these chatrooms, we would lie, say rude things or provacative things (this is before internet predator was a phrase) just to see what the person on the other end would say. I remember trying to convince some boy in a sports chatroom that claimed he was fifteen and claimed he lived in Texas that my friend and I were Troy Aikman’s secret illegitimate twin daughters for like four hours. We created a different identity to contact a popular boy and try to get dirt about who he liked. This was the kind of mischief we would have never dreamed about carrying out in person.
As I got older, I had friends who were dumped by email or who had huge blowout fights with other friends over IM. What is it about typing that made us say things we wouldn’t utter in the flesh? Perhaps it was not having to be face to face with the person or maybe the time delay urged us to overthink our friend’s comments. Maybe we just weren’t used to seeing what we said to each other in print and we didn’t know how to take it. It could have been the newness of being able to create an image of yourself that less people could see through. Maybe, still, it was the friends sitting around us egging us on and telling us what to say next to the boy in our Yearbook Class or the girl we thought may have glared at us at lunch. I wish there was a Wonder Years episode that discussed virtual community so that Kevin Arnold’s older voice could tell me what it all meant. And yet, maybe the mystery of our virtual vs. actual identities is one that even a Daniel Stern voiceover couldn’t wrap up in 23 minutes.
