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Here are some quick thoughts on how the digital infrastructures are enabling people to share and spread content in different ways.

If you are on facebook, you have to be part of a network you have to be connected. If you don’t have a profile you don’t have access, and if you have a profile by no friends you only have access to those who have public profiles, and you are deprived from receiving updates. That is the infrastructure supports RSS for friends, is also supports RSS on statuses globally or limited by language, but there are too many updates for one person to read them before 1000 of new ones have emerged. Another option is to search for status updates of groups by keywords (if you doubt this try searching for Haiti in Facebook and choose “status of every one” to see how many people worldwide are writing about this event at the moment). But the infrastructure does not support a showing all containing one specific keyword either, only the first 100s or so, thus tracing back the history of what people wrote on Haiti is not possible not to say keeping up with what was written within the last 24 hours, when a theme is on everyone’s lips.

-The network is everything if you want to be updated in the way the infrastructure is build to support.

On Youtube most users are not connected or linked to each other. There is an infrastructure supporting that those with profiles can befriend each other thereby being updated on the friends’ newest uploads. But most people do not see the profile owners as important. The search for a video, and should they find several versions of it they are likely to pick the first, which due to Googles’ search algorithm is at top due to rankings and references. This the infrastructure provide different types of services depending on whether you have a profile or not, but both types of users can access the content.

-the network is not everything, instead we can talk about different tools: Youtube’s profile system, and Google’s search engine. Both are made up by different infrastructures affecting the way data is being represented.

This means that the infrastructure on Facebook supports faster, almost unavoidable, spreading of content between users, whereas if people wants to spread awareness of Youtube content the infrastructure provided on the side is not nessesarily enough. Thus blogs, twitter, mailing lists, Facebook etc are more likely to be integrated with spreading content from Youtube.

The infrastructure supporting spreading is therefore not only the place in which something is spread but also the supporting infrastructures needed.