Image from Flickr
Taking 6 million TV budget and spend it online – it’s very hard to reach attention of young audiences (14-19 year olds). So how to design for them?
What was life before internet? Most people thinking that revolution in media is about choice, the fact that you can have everything online, no need to go library etc. This is the paradigm shift, and young people can extrapolate back to limited choice.
But what young people have hard to understand is that before you didn’t have permission to speak in public. You had to have permission from public media (newspaper, TV station, etc.) to have voice.
The similar process happened in regarding to Phone boxes vs. Mobile phones. From stepping out of public space into the private space of phone box, towards new set of gestures and cultures to explain to by goers that you in a private space of phone conversation.
There are roughly six kinds of spaces:
- Secret spaces – (Mobile, SMS, IM) – intimate spaces, we share them with people we know. We expect privacy, even though technology might not provide them.
- Group spaces – (Bebo, Facebook, Tagged, etc.) – the conversation in this group is about sharing and re-enforcing the group idea. Even though the technology doesn’t provide privacy (MySpace page is public), they are talking to a limited group of people in their heads.
- Publishing spaces – (LiveJournal, Blogger, Flickr, Photobucket, etc.) – using these tools to get students to peer review their work. Students put their stuff out on the blogs to other students to comment and engage in further converstations.
- Performing spaces – (Second Life, World of Warcraft, Home, etc.) – people who perform in these spaces they reherse their identity and play by the certain roles
- Participation spaces – (Marches, Meetings, Markets, Events) – the goal is to have/get something to happen. The architecture of these spaces allow for such actions.
- Watching spaces – (Television, Gigs, Theatre, etc.) – They are trying to design services where they can ask each other who they think they are sharing space with.
In general social software will become commodity that will make the whole process ubiquitous.
For teens, social embarrassment, is something that’s most problematic for these groups. When you design spaces for them, you have to watch out how you are designing around these so they are not expose to these problems.
There are also some things that teens are not prepared to tell to their peers who they know in everyday life, but would still like to discuss anonymously online.
How do you reinvent the world that is not about public – private but it’s about personal – social. You can’t really just join there as an organization, and you can’t just break into social spaces.
Organizations are used to having monopolies on attention, so there is also a big challenge to tame their ego’s before they can enter the space. How can organizations learn to dynamically change and shift their role depending on the needs of the social playing space.