Like the food pyramid, but for imaginary crap

Bradley Horowitz at Yahoo runs a blog called Elatable, and I think his sketch for how social media communities scale is clear, possibly oversimplfied, but accurate. Basically in Flickr, SecondLife etc, you have power users who are nerd enough to really create and develop influential new stuff. The second tier remixes and popularizes it, and the rest of us lap it up. It certainly speaks to the “one percenters” argument against Time’s Person Of The Year issue (yes, “you” are the person of the year and by “you” they mean lonelyGirl15).

It also ties in to the FIC argument in SecondLife. That’s “Feted Inner Core” - meaning there’s an inner circle of developers an cultural influencers in SL who are granted special status and priveleges by the folks who run the company, and people are pissed off because it’s elitist, non-democratic and takes power away from other folks who are contributing. It’s kind of classist and Chomskian - a good breakdown can be found here at New World Notes (warning: long, weird and nerdy).

Comments \ 1

  1. Elevens
    January 29th, 2007 at 10:19 pm

    Holy crap that guy is nuts:

    People do not want to be relegated to becoming the passive and docile consumers of the technocrats; they want democratically-accessible tools for both content creation of a variety of levels of competence and non-technical content

    –

    I believe Linden Lab needs to enforce the Terms of Service equally on the forums and stop its reliance on the much-abused abuse-reporting system, currently owned and operated by the FIC, and permit as much free debate about the game as possible. LL should convene in-world focus groups, both randomly and across sectors, to expand beyond its “FIC sounding board” approach.

    Seriously? It is a video game (and a bad one at that.) If you want to make a difference and create real change, join a political party, don’t whine over how come some social media game designer is foisting un-democratic practices on an artificial game world.

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