The difference between Facebook and VKontakte from the point of view of McLuhan's theory

Lecture



  The difference between Facebook and VKontakte from the point of view of McLuhans theory

Hot and cold media

Marshall McLuhan, in his book Understanding Media, divides the means of communication, which, of course, are social networks, into cold and hot. This division explains the features of the degree of user involvement and the nature of human interaction.

Hot means of communication introduce a person's feelings to a state of high content with data, while cold ones leave him a place for personal participation, they invite him to complete images with feelings and imagination. For example, telephone and dialogue are cold means, they force a person to dive into data, but radio or aggressive advertising are hot means, they convey a large flow of data with which the user cannot interact interactively - there is no place for them in the personal participation of the media consumer. .

Man - car, woman - ice

If you try to analyze a woman and a man by this typology, it turns out that a woman has a cold communication. She draws the interlocutor into communication with her silence, and with mysteriousness and uncertainty makes her complete the image. The man is more hot in communication - he has an abundance of information, his opinion, which he wants to convey to the interlocutor. A man broadcasts, a woman engages. A man is eager to make the world like himself, a woman wants a world not to conquer, but to understand and to know.

Svetoslav Zaderiya, the founder of “Alice”, sang: “Man is a machine, woman is ice”, repeating the meaning of Marshal McLuhan's words about cold and hot communication.

Photos and glitch art

If we consider clothing as a means of communication, we can see that, for example, dark glasses create a mysterious and inaccessible image, inviting interested participation and completion, are a cold tool, while ordinary glasses with an excess fill the female image, in fact being a hot tool.

For the same reason, careless fashion photos from clubs with flashes of light and taken with deliberate carelessness involve a person in the process of consuming and drawing into the atmosphere much better than the image of a glamorous photo that is filled and filled to the limit, in which people are not involved in their participation and feelings.

The same story happens with the glitch art popular in certain circles of designers - people want interactive and participation, roughness at the level of the image's guessing.

Social networks

If you approach this typology to the classification of social networks, it turns out that “VKontakte” is a cold medium of communication. The social network itself is not aimed at communication, it is egocentric (the material was written at that moment when, when going to the VKontakte page, the user entered the profile page. Now the user enters the news feed page - Ed.). The main thing is the profile of the person, his photograph and the completed questionnaire, and not his message flow.

The design of the VKontakte news feed is such that it is not defined as the main page, unlike the news feed on Facebook. Navigating and navigating the social network is tied to a profile, so from the point of view of communication, it is a cold service that provides deep involvement in the process of completing the image, like dark glasses include the interest of the researcher. Personality and persona is a cold means of communication, because you can create a profile in such a way that the observer will see only the external, but notice that there is a lot more deeper - something that is not expressed on the network.

  The difference between Facebook and VKontakte from the point of view of McLuhans theory

In Facebook, the profile is not presented in the manner of school questionnaires - user characteristics are hidden on other pages, you need to go to another screen to find them, but on the main page there is a stream of messages that, as a means of communication, are hotter than personality because they define and limit a person much more clearly than a silent image.

  The difference between Facebook and VKontakte from the point of view of McLuhans theory

In order to understand the difference between a cold and a hot means of communication, let's mentally transfer to an audience at the psychological department, where an experiment is conducted on students. In front of an audience of students, a silent person is brought out and they ask students to tell what they think of him and how they define him. Before a different audience of the same person, they are asked to tell something, not necessarily about themselves, maybe just some facts, and then turn to the student with the same request.

In the first case (the cold case of communication), the image of a person is more blurred, and audience involvement is much more than in the second case, because any message from the source imposes a framework on the person’s perception and determines it, leaving no room for imagination.

In essence, the difference between Facebook and the VKontakte social network is that VKontakte invites the user to complete images with imagination. This feature, as well as the interface for viewing updates (in VKontakte, a set of tabs with various “news”, “answers”, “comments”) pushes the user to walk around the profiles of other users himself and look for updates there. On Facebook, however, all updates are collected in one central information highway, and getting there is the key to life in a social network. Hence the nature of monetization proposed by Mark Zuckerberg - to pay for the selection of news in the tape. The function is called Highlight. “Highlight” posts hang longer in the ribbon, are placed higher and appear in the ribbon of more friends.

Falling out of the central highway for a person on Facebook is tantamount to oblivion. Few people will go to the profile and find an update there. From this there are big demands on Facebook content, unlike VKontakte: users who post boring nonsense risk being on the sidelines of the news feed. Therefore, now an advertising and journalistic audience has gathered in Russian Facebook - they provide information, and on VKontakte people continue to comment on their mood and emotional background.

In Facebook, people go to work and have an interesting conversation, and on VKontakte they build relationships and have a rest, like at a party. Therefore, if a person suddenly enters an informational tape with uninteresting content, it is quite possible that this will be the last thing his friends will read from him - clicking on the “unsubscribe” button occurs anonymously and quickly. People know how to unsubscribe from the update, but hardly anyone will find how to return the updates of hidden users to their feed again.


Read more: http: //www.cossa.ru/articles/234/17269/


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