Translated material
Badly forgotten old
“Sotsialka” in Runet became a hit of the 2007 season
The so-called social networks gave rise to the special term “Web 2.0”. They are advertised on radio and television, they are discussed in trolleybuses and restaurants. Some people explain the phenomenal success of “social” Runet projects by the mythical participation of the FSB in them. In reality, everything is simpler. The Internet in Russia has become available to so many citizens that it has become possible to transfer many offline activities to the Internet: meeting a long-lost classmate, viewing vacation photos, flirting with a pretty stranger, finding and maintaining professional contacts. Even the genre of the diary (“album”, in the terminology of the young ladies of that time, forgotten in the century before last) was successfully reincarnated thanks to the Internet. In this regard, let us note some natural phenomena accompanying Web 2.0.The Internet during working hours is the favorite haven of the “office plankton”, lazy people of the post-industrial era. There have been many of these at all times. An engineer at a Soviet research institute, toiling from idleness, is essentially not much different from many employees of large and small corporations, most concerned about salary and vacation. They are the backbone of active participants in social networks. Just a year ago, chat rooms, forums and blogging were the best means of killing working time. But now the undisputed primacy belongs to social networks. This fall they became the best “time killers” in Russia.
Not giving a damn about the strict bosses, the office occupant writes a letter to Masha from the fifth “A” whom she met on Odnoklassniki.ru, uploads another photo of herself there and looks for a companion on mamba.ru for a trip to Egypt. System administrators, at the direction of their superiors, block social network traffic as unwanted, report to management the names of idle employees and... taking advantage of their official position, they themselves hang on to Odnoklassniki for at least eight hours a day.
Most often, spending time on participating in social networks leads to insignificant results. After spending a couple of hours, you can find the mentioned Masha from the school before last, who, I remember, was a plump excellent student with pigtails, but grew up into a thin brunette without a higher education. Or Lenka, the first beauty of the course, who now fits perfectly into the formula “work, two children, a husband with a beer belly, and she’s no better.” Meeting on a social network with a person you once knew well is like a bad Hollywood trick: here the hero of the film is still a boy, and in the next frame - wow! - He is already quite an adult. Limiting yourself to a virtual renewal of previous acquaintances (which, alas, most often happens) is more or less pointless.
Yes, social networks often really help restore old contacts. “We graduated from school 17 years ago. Haven't seen each other since then. It turned out that someone was in the USA, someone in Israel, someone in Germany. Everyone has their own life. Very strange sensations,” says Muscovite Alexander, who has built a successful business and, in general, does not need old connections. “I wouldn’t look for them myself, but here is such a convenient mechanism - consider yourself to have found them.”
By the way, about the mechanism. The quality of development of a “social” site is not at all the basic factor in its success. Successful social projects depend little on the level of the programmers who created them. Moreover, many projects that were well executed from the point of view of an IT engineer never found their audience, and are now more dead than alive. People are ready to use a poorly made website that happens to be in the right place at the right time. A classic example is the same “Odnoklassniki.ru”. This site with an unsightly interface, long loading times, a structure devoid of logic and constant errors does not deserve more than a “three”. But users find pieces of their “social network” on it, get caught up in them and stay, neglecting perfectly programmed sites where there is not a single kindergarten friend.
The main thing for creating a social network is not its mechanism, but a fruitful idea that offers the audience new ways of communication. A ready-made community or a model tested in the West may come in handy. After all, in America the Internet is exactly the same as in Russia, only it is developing faster. Hurry up to copy a successful American project on the RuNet, and the American dream of success will come true in our latitudes. Which is exactly what is happening.
This fall, an epidemic of nostalgia for one’s own past—school and student, mainly—is raging on the RuNet. The creators of social networks accidentally tapped into a person’s eternal interest in his youth, at a time when every year brought more impressions than ten years bring to a mature father of a family. Web 2.0 simply fueled this interest. A little more time will pass and the epidemic will pass. Everyone who was supposed to get infected will get over the disease safely and either return to their previous ways of killing working time, or turn to something new. For example, they will begin to build separate communities. This promising trend, which has long been evident in the West, is barely visible on the RuNet.