Created in 2005 during the riot in the suburb of Paris, Bondy Blog has become the voice of suburbs. The blog publishes articles written by young citizens from Seine-Saint-Denis. It represents an opportunity for young people who come from an unprivileged background to express themselves and to lead journalistic investigations. Bondy Blog was often presented by its creators as a new school opened to everybody. It has become a reality. The website and the famous french journalism school, l'ESJ de Lille, have recently created in Bondy a preparatory class for the entrance exam to great journalism schools. The most promising students will be partly selected on the blog.
One of the blogers has produced a short report about the official inauguration.
The famous social networking website Facebook (http://www.facebook.com/) has created fear by revealing that when a website user shares some pictures, videos or other contents he looses the control of this information. Even if he supress this data by himself, other copies subsist and could reappear one day. Recently an applicant have found himself refused a job because the potential employer had come across compromising pictures on his facebook page. Be careful with “Fesses-Book” !
For a long time we have considered Internet as a world where everything is changeable, where an event or a feeling is always impermanent. There is nothing more specious than this affirmation. On the contrary the web is like a faceplate where everything stays engraved for decades or centuries, maybe for eternity...No one can say. Internet is an immovable memory which accumulates data, and anyone is able to get to this data in only one click. Since their birth, the technologies of information gradually reveals their uses and specifications, often very surprising. We thought they allowed reliable communications, and now we realize that they reveal our intimity to everybody. We thought that they would protect people against oppression and dictatorship. But they are often in politicians’ and brands’ service. Yesterday Internet was liberal and liberating, tomorrow it would further authoritarianism and become a powerful mean to supervise and control people.
Sciences and technologies are neither good nor bad, it depends on how we use them. This example shows us that we are responsible for what we created.
MySpace is a social networking website created in 2003 by Tom Anderson and Chris DeWolfe. In July 2005 it was bought for US$580 million by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation. Today MySpace has become one of the most popular websites in the world with more than 230 182 000 members in April 2008 and this number does not stop increasing. Many artists have perceived the power of this new digital interface and have seen in it a means to meet a public. MySpace is more than a simple website, it is also a powerful communication tool for most of self-produced musicians, a weapon of mass communication. MySpace creators understood the fantastic potential of their website and, confronted with the other networks such as Facebook, they decided to create a special version fully devote to musicians and music lovers, MyspaceMusic.
The impact of the Internet and the numeric revolution on music industry is considerable. They both give birth to new kinds of musical creations and they help artists who could not afford it to get to a professional level. Nowadays you are able to write, tape and produce a CD at home and distribute it by yourself from your computer. However this new way to success would not exist without free means of communication and promotion as MySpace. A musician needs to seduce a lot of people if he wants to be successful.
It allows everybody an equal chance to be heard. From superstars to unheard garage bands, everybody can have a page and anybody can become a friend of those artists and support them, thereby becoming part of their online network. And MySpace offers the same tools to everybody, big or small. That is why more and more musicians are heavily invested in MySpace. They can make new fans and communicate with them. They are able to post new music, photos, new tour dates and blog posts about whatever topics strikes them. Most of them don't even have proper websites, a MySpace page is enough. It is easy to create and maintain, no need for a webmaster. And anybody can make it for free. MySpace has become an irreplaceable institution for anybody wants to make a name for oneself.
MySpace takes an active part in the emergence of new means of music listening. It gives to the public a feeling of participation in music creation by reducing the gap between the artist and the music lover. As if the fan would have a real key role to play in the evolution of the band or the singer he loves. In a way MySpace set the public free by giving back to him the right to choose what he really wants to listen. Public becomes the only judge. Here is the revolution ! The site has raised the bottom and allowed bands to reach out to people in ways that didn't exist just a few years ago. It gives birth to very successful artists outside of promotion’s and production’s traditional ways. For example the famous rock band, The Artic Monkeys, has been discovered by a music label because of the website and they sold more than 360 000 copies of their first CD in only one week. In this way MySpace represents an opportunity for labels to find a gem, like an inexhaustible goldmine. Because of the CD crisis labels cannot risk betting on unknown bands anymore, so MySpace must become a solution for them since it is a good mean to test the success of a talented newcomer. This social network establishes a close relationship between the different participants involved in the music industry. MySpace proposes a new business model.
The example of MySpace shows the amazing power of the Internet. It emphasizes the importance of medias and their impact on society. Medias can change the world !
According to Amit Kapur, managing director of MySpace, “ today the interface has got about thirty versions and it counts more than 230 million members”. If MySpace was a country, it would be the fifth most populated state in the world.
