individualism in the digital age

In any experiment you can be faced with several problems. Raacke’s main flaw in his study for gratification and desire is a completely to small control group, resulting in an inaccurate account of group interests. By making sure your experiments are done correctly is what gives you the main and most important purpose of any study, the results. It is fundamental that any attempt at a project that tries to cover ground breaking research is going to be met with an inexhaustible amount of variables. Is the subject answering honestly to the material they’ve been given? Is the subject pre-disposed to not care for the Internet and MySpace in general? Would this experiments result differ or stay the same with a larger, more diverse, group? The last question is what I believe is most important. Sure, any one small test group can help you make a slightly informed opinion, but in reality does it show the community as a whole? All of these problems can be solved with an expansion of the group area and maybe into other test sites. because, no matter how you tweak it, one hundred sixteen students is just a fly on the wall for the entire computer literate world. .
Limiting yourself merely to a questionnaire leaves so much room for error that it nearly voids the project. You can never truly tell if a person is being one hundred percent honest when it comes to a yes/no basis question followed by a, “which one do you like more?” Perhaps, the questions that you have provided for only two sites doesn’t accurately reflect what the subject’s idea for personal gratification is. Also, you can never be sure how a group is going to respond to a set stimulus, especially if it has to be given orally or even written down. Now, on the other hand, if you were to only use this method on a larger test group it could alter the percentages of those that don’t even care for MySpace. A difference of ten and twelve percent would completely change the experiments findings. History, mood, diet, and numerous other details can affect a person’s responses when answering questions. If you go to any farming community and ask them where are their local WiFi hot spots do you think they would have the slightest idea?
Now I am sure that there are many who believe that one hundred sixteen people is a wonderful start, but as said by Raacke in his own article, “MySpace has over 20 million registered users , with a sign -up rate of over 230,000 users per day and Facebook was estimated to have approximately 9.5 million users as of September 2006." Thinking of these numbers alone would in many ways make this an impossible experiment to ever truly find an answer for. You could test all 29,730,000 people in the world, plus an equal amount of nonusers in all different communities and still face an additional over 30 million users with different opinions, feelings and ideas the next day.
The other flaw with conducting an internet experiment with such a small control group is that individual interests vary so much that you may have accidentally hand picked the wrong kind of people. Raacke chose his subjects from a four year public, East Coast University. Could he have narrowed down his subject area any more? Think of it this way, on the one hand, you could have a thirteen year old girl from the Bronx whose only interest with the internet is to keep in touch with her friends that live down the street. Instead of using MySpace, or Facebook, she simply sends a text on her phone saying to meet her in five. Does this mean she doesn’t like the communication sites, or that she simply has a better means of contact? Now take a college student who may have grown up thousands of miles away and ask them how they keep in touch with those same friends from home. Chances are, the internet not only fits their schedules better, but allows for communication any time of the day no matter how busy they are.
As I have said, the size of your control group is very important, but the age, race and ethnicity of these test subjects is just as critical. A test group of only adults over the age of fifty would show that MySpace and Facebook were nothing more than a waste of time and trouble source for teens. Now, looking at the same sites and questioning a group of thirteen to seventeen year olds would suggest that not only is MySpace and Facebook important, but that they spend hours a day just making it look like their own. “The media often compares Facebook to MySpace, but one significant difference between the two websites is the level of customization” says Brad Stone. Mark Sullivan says “MySpace allows users to decorate their profiles using HTML and Cascading Style Sheets while Facebook only allows plain text”.Even though I do not believe that the color of your skin or your religious beliefs make you better or worse than another, they do affect how you view the world and what you see as important. Catholics generally wouldn’t view something like sexual communication with strangers as freely as someone who may not believe in consequences, that there isn’t anything wrong with a little foreplay before work.
In conclusion, Raacke tried his best to show the desire for internet communication, but as we all know, sometimes your best just isn’t good enough. All in all his findings were just to minute to convince me that, for example, Native Americans were the least likely to view theses sites when he only had 15.5% of these individuals to start out with. You can’t just take a group of people that you feel are split into the perfect size categories and call it a valid experiment. It’s a wonderful try, and I'm sure it took a lot of valuable time, but maybe his time would have been better spent on MySpace making his own account.






Stone, Brad. "Facebook Expands Into MySpace’s Territory." The New York Times. 25 May 2007
Sullivan, Mark. "Is Facebook the New MySpace?". PC World. 24 Jul. 2007

Raacke, John Ph. D. and Jennifer Bonds-Raacke, Ph. D. “MySpace and Facebook: Applying the Uses
and Gratifications Theory to Exploring Friend-Networking Sites.” Liebert, 2008.