gain social capital and spread YOUR intellectual property

On the web, specifically on blogs, people tend to assert personal ideas and thoughts, their intellectual property, creating a voyeuristic medium. The term ‘mediated voyeurism’ draws on one’s desire to excitement, the need for involvement, and to further the pursuit of truth. These ideas have helped to form weblogs or as we know them today, blogs. In order to be considered a blog, one must have the basis of reverse chronology, frequent updating and a combination of links and personal commentary. Content is important, and presents a fresh perspective and helps diversity flourish.  Format’s vary, self expression is extremely important. The blog is an important aspect of social action, but being that it is a relatively new form of media, it can come under scrutiny with little moderation.

Networks are set of relationships that work in complimentary or non-directional. They are based on similar interests, geographical location, and similar attitudes.  A network is like a roadmap of ideas and thoughts. Multiplexity refers to the idea of multiple connections throughout the network. Relationships, along with social capital are broken down by primary groups and cliques and are segmented as such. Furthermore these relationships are structured on similarity and clustered in this way.  These relationships are based on connections from one node to the next, some may be close, and others may not know each other at all.  These relationships, as most are, have the basis of core values, which everyone in the network possess. In our culture, there are also social circles, which have overlapping social networks, allowing for people to be connected to more than one network. Hence, the more social circles you have, the more social capital you maintain. Out of these social networks and social capital, patterns emerge and can be plotted and graphed.

Technology is growing at an alarming rate, for example as mentioned in the last article with the growth of American’s owning and using cell phones. In a short few years, the technological sector formed, and began to grow and only a few succeeded – but with extensive market share and capital. The boom came from the aspect that the Internet did not require tangible goods that could be harmed by timing, cost, and other problems. The lack of constraints allowed for the internet to boom quickly – creating Moore’s law, speaking to the growth of technologies at rapid rate of invention.  The reading then targets pricing structures, competition, acquiring customers, the use of demand side/ supply side economics.  IT makes diversity easier to provide and interconnects many firms that would otherwise, not be connected.