Interesting juxtoposition, DrKris. I actually don't think danah's argument and the natural-monopoly one are necessarily mutually exclusive. danah wrote: "i keep finding teens who got locked out of Xanga and responded by making another Xanga (or a Blogger or a LiveJournal). They have expressions scattered across numerous services with numerous handles. Some teens chew through IM handles like candy.... [Their screenames are] not seen as something to build an extensive identity around, but something to use to talk to friends in the moment." danah uses the term "ephemerality" to describe this (she says that while it's "not universal amongst teens, it's far more prevalent than you'd ever see in adult culture"). So I'm sure you'd agree there are degrees of it. But even if all teen social-networkers constantly establish new accounts across multiple services it doesn't mean they delete accounts in any of them - danah suggests they just establish new ones everywhere these most ephemeral of users go. The monopoly argument says that the biggest most comprehensive network (the one with the most communications tools and longest friends lists) just becomes a base for it all. People don't leave entirely, they just use other spaces for other purposes (sometimes privacy). I suspect one reason why MySpace just keeps growing is because people don't delete accounts (and of course some of those have just forgotten their passwords). All speculation, of course, but I think danah's sense of "starting over" isn't the heavy, permanent, adult notion of starting over, like pulling up stakes and moving everything somewhere else, but rather just a "hey, forget that password-remembering hassle, let's just go somewhere else and talk." Does that make any sense?
Anne
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Anne Collier
BlogSafety co-director