Cisco: Social networks will define media consumption
Sometimes these stories just write themselves:
During his keynote address Wednesday at the Digital Living Connections Conference here, Scheinman talked about how digital media is disrupting the tech and entertainment industries. Usually that means talking about networking standards and media servers, but Scheinman’s recommendations, instead, were a bit more pop culture than geek culture.
“A lot of you should go spend time on Facebook and MySpace. Spend time to understand why social media really does matter,” he said. Social communities are the solution to some of the biggest problems facing Hollywood and other content providers in today’s Digital Era, Scheinman said.
[snip…]
(For the record, following a cursory search, Scheinman does not appear to have a Facebook account.)
Despite the clear hypocrisy that is typical of senior Silicon Valley executives (everyone remember the Friendster board members who never had a Friendster profile?) Scheinman does make an interesting point.
Where young people congregate is an excellent opportunity for them to share culture word-of-mouth and research done by danah boyd indicates that teens are quite frequently relegated to hanging out online since paranoid parents don’t let them out of the house.
Scheinman then went on to call Rupert Murdoch a “genius” for purchasing MySpace but of course he forgot to mention that Murdoch hasn’t yet managed to generate any massive profit.
