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Monthly Archives: February 2011
Companies Taking Advantage of Social Media
Written by Brian Stelter, “TV Industry Taps Social Media to Keep Viewers’ Attention” shows the way companies are starting to use the impact of social media for their own gain. This New York Times article focuses on how the ABC network is taking people’s use of sites like Facebook and Twitter to benefit themselves financially. As people start talking about the Academy Awards, ABC has made a second site dedicated to more footage of Oscars. This way, they not only monetize through the airing of the Oscars, but also through the website visitors wanting to see more from the awards.
Stleter claims, “many people feel they have to watch some shows as they premiere in order to keep up with conversations online”. Witnessing this happen on my Twitter timeline on nights of Real Housewives and Jersey Shore airings, I can see this effect. If I am not watching a particular show, I feel that I need to close Twitter or be confused by the influx of tweets reacting to the latest scandalous statement. Watching the Academy Awards last night was no exception as the “Oscars hashtag” flooded my timeline.
While I can see that this may be a clever marketing strategy, I feel that it is a way to take advantage of social media for financial gain. Companies like ABC have taken the opportunity of the impact of events and what Stelter has refered to as a “two screen experience”, such as the Oscars, to further add to their bank accounts.
“10 Reasons You’ll Never Quit Facebook”
http://bit.ly/bi4FEZ
There are reasons every cause to shut down facebook has a facebook page. Its hard to give up what Facebook offers. The article is pretty messed up, but it has some truth to it. Enjoy.
The things in this slide show says alot about our culture and all the things posted are not set in stone, new things will come things will come that will be able to provide the same services that seem better. Facebook dominance is sometimes over stated. New trends will see light and Facebook will be the company that was phased out by new means of communication.
Restrain
Communication issues are becoming more challenging and they are impacting the quality of our daily life. Numerous issues have come to the surface, and they are not new, however, in my opinion these issues brought to light have the potential of huge benefits or damage to us, just like Lusely said “the new technology can also be dangerous,” and I agree that there are increasingly more things demanding our attention, and the way I see it, there is plenty more to come, and all this keeps our brain engaged in numerous tasks. I have a feeling that we have yet to realize how much we have not thought of in terms of technology helping us to communicate.
Furthermore; our brain has this uncontrollable thirst to keep busy, learning and in some kind of interaction or stimulation. The urge for us to communicate is ingrained in us humans, we are not fans of solitude, and communication between us validate who we are, for example, we always try to convince our friends that we are special, and to some degree better than others, and confiding in our close friends we seek endorsement, this creates a chain reaction that branches out into a million consequences, and technology facilitates the relieve of this compulsion.
Wired for Distraction? By Dalton Conley, is an interesting read, among other things it say that “when we set our mind to concentrate on something — and reactive attention, when our brain reflexively tunes in to novel stimuli. We obviously need both for survival, whether in the wilds of prehistory or while crossing a street today, but our saturated media universe has perhaps privileged the latter form and is wiring our kids’ brains differently.” Time magazine. At the end of the day it all depends on the individual, as some may say that multitasking with daily chores and communication devices is no big deal, I’ll say to that: let’s look at the quality of these tasks performed. As the increasing gadgets are here to stay and we just have to get re- acquainted to the meaning of “restrain.”
lhttp://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,2048363,00.html
The comfort of Social Networking
“You’re basically standing on a soapbox and reading something out loud only with a blog it feels like there’s a big community square and everyone’s got a soapbox and they’re about the same height and everyone’s reading at the same time. So it’s a matter of people going and listening to one and oh, I don’t like what you’re saying and blogging with someone else and listening to what they’re saying until you happen to find someone who is saying something interesting or you happen to know where your friend is on his soapbox saying something”. -Jennifer
Blogging, just like many other social networking sites, gives people the ability to connect with others and talk to others about common interests. The quote from this weeks reading “A Blogger’s Blog: Exploring the Definition of a Medium” pretty much sums up the meaning behind social networking, people want to be heard and by putting their ideas on the internet they are potentially given the feedback or support they are looking for. This was also talked about in class last week, that it kind of feels good or is comforting when someone comments on something you posted on facebook or twitter. Seeing comments on posts give people the comfort that others are listening and that they also agree or relate to what you have to say.
Blogs are sometimes called online diaries which goes to show that blogs are made for people to express their feelings and ideas to an unbiased audience. By blogging about feelings and ideas people are given some kind of relief, and by knowing others are reading their posts people are given comfort. Bloggers are able to read comments and communicate back and forth to their readers and as a result create a network of people who share the same ideas that they do.
I guess it makes sense that people would use the internet to find others with same interests, considering you can connect with anyone in the world, but what ever happened to real human interaction? But I guess that blogs give people the ability to say things that would maybe be socially unacceptable in real life, like talking about how much they love knitting, or talking solely about themselves.
Posted in Assignment 1
Tagged Blogs, Boyd, Social Interaction
Comments Off on The comfort of Social Networking
Blogs v Facebook
“What complicates analyses of blogs is that they are both the product of blogging and the medium through which the blogger produces their expressions. Blogs emerge because bloggers are blogging. And yet, what they are blogging to is the blog itself. Consider this in terms of another medium. Radio is a medium in which people express themselves, but the act of speaking to be broadcast is not radio-ing, nor is the product of speaking radio. Radio only exists when people’s speech is broadcast through radio waves. And yet, blogs are the bi-product of expression and the medium itself.”
I found this excerpt of Boyd’s “A Bloggers Blog” interesting in the way that it reflects language’s ability to adapt. Boyd states that “language is a medium” and that “mediums are also connected to and built on top of other mediums.” She indirectly supports this argument when she clarifies the terms blogging and blog, explaining how they are uniquely related. Blogs are built on the medium of language, and the term “blogging” was developed from the term “blog”. This reminded me of the way the term “facebooking” has come into the medium of language and is now a common verb in most people’s vocabularies.
But while both blogging and facebooking are common words in today’s vocabulary, both blogs and social networking services seem to serve different purposes. Blogs and social networking sites both serve the human need for acceptance and recognition (as we discussed in class), but Facebooking seems to have a more negative connotation than blogging. When most people think of blogging, they think of expressing one’s opinions or daily life. There is no negative or positive aspect to blogging. But when most people think of Facebooking, the connotation is negative. Facebooking suggests that someone is wasting their time checking their newsfeed every five minutes, creeping on someone else’s page, or constantly editing their profile. What’s strange to me is that both types of sites require the publication of private information, and in most cases, blogs are far more personal than Facebook profiles.
What does this suggest about the future of the internet? Will personal blogs continue to grow in number or will Facebook continue its domination over social media?
Also, to some degree, the development of Facebook and other social networking sites are based on the popularity of blogs. Why are social networking sites like Facebook far more common now than personal blogs? Do we prefer shorter, more concise status updates about generally trivial matters to the long, explained posts on different topics?
Homeless and on Twitter
This morning i came across this article on the New York Times website and it kind of blew my mind. To give you a quick idea on what this article is about, it starts off discussing a man named Derrick Wiggins, 44, who is homeless in NYC and who is on twitter. He is one of the four homeless men from the streets of NY who were given prepaid cellphones so that they could create a Twitter, develop a following, and then document or tweet about their lives. This is part of a project by three college grads who intern at the BBH advertising agency in TriBeCa. They were given $1,000 and told “Do something good, famously.” The result was a website called UnderHeard in New York, and the goal is to “help homeless New Yorkers speak for themselves through Twitter.”
The article goes on to tell us about the going ons of Wiggins life documented on his twitter page @awitness2011, for his now around 4,500 followers which are from all over the world including Brazil, Italy, and Australia.
This article i think speaks about how universal twitter, and social networking in general is. It’s kind of amazing actually that through social networking we now have the opportunity to take a glimpse into the life of the homeless: the shelters, the subway rides, the job searches, and thats just Wiggins.
In class yesterday we discussed why people post on facebook (this is twitter, but the same action of posting is involved), and maybe for some it’s attention, but for Wiggins “just the fact that somebody is listening” helped him persevere. He said, “I’ve received what I need to keep going.” Sometimes that’s all that is. The need to share your story and know others care. You feel less alone in the world. Twitter has obviously helped Wiggins keep going just as much as it’s allowed us to view the world from his shoes.
Facebook Drama
http://www.upi.com/Top_News/US/2010/11/21/Anti-Facebook-preacher-admitted-affair/UPI-24431290389780/
http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=facebook+drama
We’ve all heard of the term “Facebook drama”. There is even an entry for “Facebook Drama” on Urban Dictionary in which the drama “encompasses emotional, personal things, including fights, [and] personal opinions”. However, a little over a year ago, a British man, Brian Lewis, took this term to another level by killing his girlfriend, HaleyJones, of 13 years after she changed her Facebook relationship status from “married” to “single”. It started as a small issue between the couple as she was spending more and more time online. Things blew out of proportion after Jones ended the relationship and a week later, she changed her relationship status. Lewis confessed that he became enraged by Haley’s time spent on Facebook and suspicious of an affair. He now faces a lifetime jail sentence.
This article doesn’t apply to everyone’s annoyance with Facebook usage, but it does make a statement of how Facebook can create many problems within relationships. As we discussed in class, people are showcasing their lives to the Facebook community and have the potential of meeting many new people. This can be viewed positively or negatively. I personally know of couples who fight when something surfaces on Facebook. Tagged pictures or a wall post from an ex-girlfriend are usually the causes. There is even a minister in New Jersey who condemns Facebook as “a gateway to adultery” even though he, himself, ironically engaged in group sex in the past.
There is no excuse for Brian Lewis’s behavior, but social media is proving to trigger some insecurity and “Facebook drama” in personal relationships.
South Park’s take on Facebook
[kml_flashembed movie="http://www.youtube.com/v/WTnJTfIGYK4" width="425" height="350" wmode="transparent" /]
This is just a short clip of an entire episode of South Park dedicated to give their take on Facebook. This episode aired on April 7, 2010. You can read the plot summary or watch the full episode.
It addresses the issue of being “forced” to make a profile, the annoyance of parents/grandparents joining Facebook, the addiction of the applications features on Facebook such as Farmville and Cafeworld. They have the angry jealous girlfriend who makes it clear that they need to be “in a relationship” on Facebook to be official. They also show the desire to have more friends than others and the stigma of having zero friends. And finally they depict how troublesome it is to deactivate one’s profile, by having Stan, the character forced to make Facebook profile, sucked into the cyber world of Facebook.
While listening to the class discussion on Facebook earlier in the semester, I thought of this episode. The questions that were asked were answered in this episode in a comical way. However, there are some people out there who do take social networks, cyber relationships, cyber equities seriously. I feel that in this episode, the characters of South Park are showing the viewers how ridiculous we’ve become as our lives are revolving around social networks. (They’ve based one of their earlier episodes on the Internet and how society would fall into chaos if the Internet shuts down. link)
Posted in Assignment 1
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Password Please
During many of our class discussions we talk about employer’s using items that we post on facebook or other social media sites to fire their employee’s or using the internet to find out things about prospective employee’s.
What about saving the time of entering a person’s name into a google search or any website that compile personal information such as http://pipl.com/, imagine your prospective employer asking you for your password and login information. This may sound unfathomable to many of us but according to the two article’s below this is exactly what happened to Robert Collins an employee of the Maryland Division of Corrections.
Mr. Collins was asked to give his login information for his facebook account while going through a re-certification processes. He had to sit as the interviewer logged in and read posts made by Mr.Collins as well as people he was friends with.
The case has now been taken up by the ACLU which states that this is a breach of the Federal Stored Communications Act and Maryland State law.
http://www.aclu.org/blog/technology-and-liberty/want-job-password-please
http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/11/02/should-employers-be-allowed-to-ask-for-your-facebook-login/71480#disqus_thread
