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July 23, 2002
For those that don't know, the guy in armor depicted is none other than "Master Chief," the main character in the best selling Xbox game, Halo. (But my Master Chief is better because he's left-handed.) Don't fret, I'm not going to talk about a game, like I did with the previous chapter.
I recently started a weblog at Xanga. It started out for only one purpose, and I picked this name to protect my identity (it's quite a long story, and only 2 others know it). But on the page, and then you will notice why i picked the Master Chief theme. There will be links from this site to my weblog, but not the otherway around. I doubt people care enough or are smart enough to do link searches.
Following is my first weblog entry. You may read it here or on the actual weblog.
Before writing my first entry in my Xanga weblog (but after opening an account), I decided to visit random sites to get a feel for the Xanga social structure. A nice feature on Xanga's front page is the "Visit a random site!" link. I visited over 50 sites some pages I merely looked over the pictures, others I browsed, and others were read inventively, and a rare few that I actually replied/commented to.
Xanga and its competitors (I'm sure they have competitors somewhere, I just didn't bother researching for any) will be simply known as "Xanga" in this entry.
The first thing that I really noticed about the Xanga community is the demographics. Before even reading my first entry, I expected the age group to be comprised mostly of ages 8 through 25. Instead, it turns out to be a much narrower group of people, roughly ages 14-22. A closer age group also has more similarities. In fact, it is the similarities that I found of most interest, not the outliers (in which I didn't find any).
There is no doubt in my mind that most of the visitors to Xanga are friends of the weblog's author. In fact, I'm also more inclined to believe that these friends aren't web friends, but rather friends that they have met in real life first (school, church, clubs, sports, etc), but also keep up with each other with these weblogs. Those readers are then inclined to get their own weblog (either by peer pressure or on their own, it doesn't matter). This of course, spawns a bunch of weblogs that a clique in real life, also now has a weblog clique. There are many members in Xanga, easily in the thousands, but I have never seen a single banner or pop up advertisement for Xanga in the whole seven years since I've ever accessed the internet. By this fact alone, I'm inclined to think that for the most part, at least 90% of its members joined by word of mouth (or just seeing an easy website to make, or seeing their friends have one). This of course, is brilliant, as any person who knows anything about marketing, word of mouth is the best advertising.
Other than age, there are dozens of other similarities. Another obvious point is the lexicon. Words/phrases such as: ppl, neway, ne1, wut up, u (you), 4 (for) are as ubiquitous as poor spelling and grammar. Other small annoyances are entire entries in lower case, and even of great annoyances, are SeNtEnCeS wRiTtEn LiKe ThIs. I am curious is there a term for all of this? I am aware of 7337 5P34|< (LEET SPEAK, ELITE SPEAK, or sometimes just "hacker talk"). But from my observation (and most likely correct), the number of people that speak in "wut up," and "ne1" greatly outnumber those that speak 7337. If anyone knows, please do inform me. (UPDATE: SeNtEnCeS lIkE tHiS is called STUDLYCAPS.)
Another similarity, going back to the xanga member's lexicon, is that the word "bored" comes up very frequently. I wonder what these people typically do other than complain and be bored. In fact, many entries actually have lists of complaints! Other topics are things that they did during the day, which are usually laced with complaints as well. Surprisingly enough (and rather disappointing) is that not a single person offered a suggestion or solution, not even a radical idea. In addition, curse words come up often, which is fine, it is a diary after all.
Another common use of these weblogs are shout-outs to readers. These diaries are being used as shoutouts almost as much as they are being used as diaries. Why shout out when e-mails are available. Since many of the shoutouts are to the same people over and over again and most likely it�s always the same people that read them, why not just do mass e-mails?
Xanga is first and foremost a gathering of people to form an online community. One of the main tools implemented are Weblogs, which are essentially online diaries that can be shared to the world, but is it successful? Speaking from an idealist's view (apart from my usual Economic self), I have to say it was a failure. For the most part, readers of these Xanga sites were friends of the person before they had xanga weblogs. The online community is there (if all one cares about is population count), but inside this community are hundreds of extremely tight cliques that don't even see the other cliques. At least in real life, cliques will form, but there's generally some communication among cliques, whether its people in more than one group, or rumors, or even competition. In the Xanga communities, this is non-existent.
Final Remarks: I have no idea how people can be bored. I haven't been bored in at least the past 4 months, perhaps even more than that. If one is bored, there are plenty of chores to be done. No complaints, at least it beats boredom. If one is bored due to lack of transportation or money, go get a job. Volunteer work is a great way to make friends and be productive. I suppose whatever that whatever the case might be, writing a xanga entry that states nothing other than "I'm bored!" is much better than just sleeping.
I'm a big believer in that there is always something to do. Even though this entry might be considered a waste of time, I quite enjoyed it, and learned quite a bit. Though this is not a formal study by any means, I was able to put some of my knowledge of anthropology and sociology to some use. Doing a small side research on my own (rather than just reading it) was something nice to do for a change. Besides, I doubt this internet sub-culture has actually been studied to any formal extent "neways."
