Marginal Utility - PopMatters; November 13, 2007

"It may be a generational thing, or a my-being-a-Luddite thing, but social networking seems to me to have less to do with being social and more to do with self-marketing. MySpace, when it started, was primarily a place to market your band; it was a means to mounting a commercial website without the HTML knowhow. Once people had personal websites, they could be drawn in with the allure of metrics, the thrill of measuring one’s reach the way a marketer would—how many hits you get, what kind of demographic you are drawing, how successful you are at getting target audiences to interact with your site, what you need to say or how much skin you have to show to attract more attention and things like that. The attention, in this realm, becomes a measurable kind of currency, whereas in the dreary real world, it’s much harder to put a number on it—you can’t really count how often someone looks at you or answers your questions or has a positive thought about the way you have designed yourself..."  FULL STORY