Week 5: Web 2.0

According to Levinson, Meyerson, and Scarborough, Web 2.0 “has changed what real people see, and how they interact and use the internet”. They also write one of the new components of Web 2.0 is, “collective intelligence is valued. People want to share their ideas and opinions. Internet users are tired of listening; they want to talk and be heard”. We can see this is true through the use of social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter.

Facebook and Twitter have changed the definition of narrative. According to wikipedia, “A narrative is a story that is created in a constructive format (as a work of speech, writing, song, film, television, video games, in photography or theatre) that describes a sequence of fictional or non-fictional human events”. The majority of Facebook friends status updates are a new form of narrative. Most people post about how their day is going, or what they are doing which is a “sequence of non-fictional events”. Facebook would be similar to narrative in a photograph. The same two people look at the same photograph but they tell different stories based on their interpretation. This is similar to Facebook as sometimes a person does not give all the information so the meaning has to be interpreted. For example friends will comment “what do you mean”, and the original poster will go into details so it could be argued that the comments are part of the original narrative. Tweets have similar qualities as Facebook but the narrative is scattered through many different tweets so it is difficult to follow the story. Tweets are limited to 140 characters so it is difficult to get the narrative into one or two sentences. Tweeting is taking me a bit to get used to as sometimes it is difficult to get what your message/story out in less than 140 characters.

Resources:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narrative

Jay Conrad Levinson, Mitch Meyerson, and Mary Eule Scarborough. Guerrilla Marketing on the Internet. (176)