Blog Post 1 - Web Sphere Analysis

Foot contends that it is important to archive and preserve the bits of content and the experimental dimension of site interactions online to understand cyber culture through web sphere analysis. Web sphere analysis is the analysis of the relationships between the producers and users of we materials, mediated between the structures of website’s hyperlinks. Foot explains that this concept is the act of studying the objects and themes related to websites to understand the hyperlink context and archive the metadata of present and past analysis.

It becomes very difficult to use web sphere analysis when it comes to social media sites. While yes, there are a vast number of hyperlinks on social media medians, the problem is that there are so many different producers and consumers of content compared to a one topic website that gathering and analyzing data from them would be a much larger headache. Where a single topic website focuses one thing with possibly different consumer views, social media has many different producer views, objectives, outcomes, etc. along side the consumers.

With the invention of hash-tags you would think it would help organize things in the social media jungle. While this has indeed help consumers find content faster it also gives producers unlimited power of how they categorize and preserve content. With the ability to create any hash-tag the producer wants, it makes analyzing links impractical. A solution to this could be social media websites to only allow specific tags, and thus funneling links into bigger more constructive pools.

The premise and structure of social media websites is connecting with people and while their goal is to connect you with people with similar interests and views, this is not always the case. The 9/11 examples that Foot uses explains this well in that web sphere analysis is changed through social networking sites because of it becomes a system of links and personal interests. Furthermore, information I feel gets lost with SNS making it difficult to use it for WS analysis. With so many producers, it would be just difficult to make sense of the data and understanding which producer made what.

I feel the 2013 Boston Marathon Bombing is an excellent event to compare with the post 9/11 productions and I see individual producers voicing their opinions even more. Social media has not advanced enough in the way they control data to accommodate for its high pool of content producers.  If anything the marathon bombing would have more individuals announcing their personal views than 9/11 since SNS has grown so much since 2001, I mean its why Twitter is as popular as it is, people like voicing their opinions and it’s as easy as ever to accomplish this.  Thinking about it makes sense though, if there is a major travesty, disaster, or event in the world where do you go, to a stand-alone news website or government page? Most likely you find out more about it from Twitter, Facebook, or some other social networking website that has many more producer insights.