Ian Bogost has written an interesting piece on how use of “Web 2.0″ services such as Flickr have shaped our attitudes with regard to possesions and membership.
In one section of his piece he describes how we have moved away from the the post industrial economy attitude of “we are what we buy” to a new concept of “we are what we do”. So many online concepts are based around the user telling the world what they are doing; Twitter, Facebook, Brightkite, Plurk etc are all based around the simple concept of displaying what the user is currently doing to as many people as possible. In order to have more validity and social standing in the online environment people join more and more online groups to enable them to tell more and more people what they are doing.
This creates what Bogost call the Membership Economy, explaining how previously our social standing may have come from what we owned now comes from where we are and what we are doing. How is this measured? The number of followers on Twitter? The numer of friends on Facebook? Or is it the number of Tweets and status updates instead? It’s hard to say, but it is probably going to be one of the most important metrics on the internet in coming years. Defining the Membership Economy may well be the solution that so many social networks have been trying to solve; when keeping up with the Jones’ is it those who have the most listeners or those who say the most that we should be keeping an eye on?
“membership economy” just how empty has the world gotta become before we all get so bored that the thing collapses under its own weight,