How Will Corporate Ownership Affect Social Networking?
As appropriate, bubbling up from the grassroots media sites are the beginnings of warning of what will happen to the promise of social networking when major corporations like Fox — MySpace– and Google — maybe YouTube — take over the major social networking sites. This from COA News, a non-profit online news network:
The reason participatory citizen media has been so popular and successful is partly due to the fact that their platforms have been relatively independent of corporate control, therefore they have allowed people to espouse independent points of view. Either a major corporation did not own these websites, or the corporate owner did not yet dare to interfere with their newly acquired online communities. That was then and this is now.
It’s not hard to find cheerleaders for the latest rise in online participatory media communities. But there seems to be nobody questioning the parallel rise in corporate buyouts, and commercialization of these spaces.
