Voices » Richard Wray

It's SO Over: Cool Cyberkids Abandon Social Networking Sites

Richard Wray and Sam Jones — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 07:02:39 +0000

By Richard Wray and Sam Jones, Communications Editor and Reporter, The Guardian

From uncles wearing skinny jeans to mothers investing in ra-ra skirts and fathers nodding awkwardly along to the latest grime record, the older generation has long known that the surest way to kill a youth trend is to adopt it as its own. The cyberworld, it seems, is no exception.

The proliferation of parents and teachers trawling the pages of Facebook trying to poke old schoolfriends and lovers, and traversing the outer reaches of MySpace is causing an adolescent exodus from the social networking sites, according to research from the media regulator Ofcom.

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Less Killing, More Kissing: New Breed of Computer Games Bring People Together

Richard Wray and Jonathan Franklin — Tue, 30 Dec 2008 08:03:30 +0000

By Richard Wray and Jonathan Franklin, Communications Editor and Blogger, respectively, The Guardian

A new generation of designers and developers is putting the social element back into videogames, using online networks such as Facebook as platforms to turn people from across the world into poker aces, boffins and the proud and sometimes obsessive owners of virtual pets.

These new games give people the ability to play with their friends rather than strangers, which has sent usage through the roof.

Facebook is already seeing over two billion minutes of game play a month, and the longer people stay online the more chance the game’s developer and the network itself have to make money out of them, most obviously through advertising.

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Our Digital Addiction: 727 Hours Surfing, 27 Phoning and 972 Texts

Richard Wray — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 08:01:41 +0000

By Richard Wray, Communications Editor, The Guardian

In the heyday of rock music, no stadium gig was complete without a slow number that prompted the crowd to hold aloft their cigarette lighters to create hundreds of flickering points of light. Now the same effect is created by hundreds of people holding up their mobile phones as the audience takes photo after photo to prove they were there.

This is most likely to occur in the U.K. as the British use their mobile phone as a camera more than anyone else. They are also among the world’s fastest adopters of social-networking sites such as Facebook and Bebo, posting the subsequent photos or at least updating their status to relate how great the gig was, as a way of keeping in touch with an ever-expanding and ephemeral collection of “friends.”

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