Category Archives: Assignment 1

According to this article, social media is not the only way to go when marketing a website. Although it is a powerful tool, more “classic” forms of Internet marketing prove to be more effective, such as emailing. With all the noise that’s on the web it gets harder and harder to stand out, but when a person is emailed they are forced to at least read the sender and the title of the email, compared to a social media banner that kinda just fell to the side l! The great thing about marketing is that is constantly changing or be tweak and what not

With pressure from the media, government and consumers, companies like Facebook and Google are forced more and more to address privacy concerns (including recent hearings in the Senate with Google). Google Chairman Eric Schmidt has announced that Google is going to simplify it’s privacy controls. They are attempting to make the way in which Android users agree to share their data with Google more transparent. With internet becoming more and more reliant on handsets, and with the Android platform expanding rapidly, this will affect the data shared by millions of current, as well as potential, users. They will revise Google dashboard, a service that allows users to see what data they have shared with Google.

Alarmingly, the article claims that “more data has been collected in the last seven years than all of human history.” With such enormous amounts of data already collected and continuing to be collected at an ever increasing rate, the task of allowing users to manage this data (or for companies to manage the data themselves) seems arduous if not potentially unfeasible. Data collected on a phone may be shared by Google with any number of companies or advertisers, who can then disperse the data even further. There is no system, as of yet, to control this flow of data. There was a time when people were afraid to use their real names on the internet, where they hid behind a wall of anonymity. Today, more information is collected, analysed and used about individual than ever before.

I recently came about an interesting news video from Deutsche Welle, Germany’s international broadcaster. The news clip was about Sony and its unfortunate data breach. What caught my attention initially though was the idea that various companies allow employees to log into Play Station online in order to compete against each other, chat and watch movies! This is such a common trend that as many as 77 million users have signed up for the service. Now that’s a fun and modern work day interaction technique. Here’s where it gets tricky… in order to use this service, people are very open to providing their names, passwords, birthdays, addresses and even credit card information on Sony servers. Day after day we all give a bit of our information away without wondering what the possible consequences may be. We expose ourselves to hackers on a daily basis, and unfortunately for Sony Play Station online users, they fell right into the trap. Hackers were able to get into the system and use the data that’s now easily accessible to them. This breach is being called the “largest theft of personal data on record.” What makes me more and more hesitant about revealing personal information is the fact that Sony now admits to having known about this breach yet hadn’t advised users until a week later. So as safe as we all may think we are, I would highly reconsider giving away such personal information, even if it is a so called “trusted” corporation such as Sony.

News link.. http://mediacenter.dw-world.de/english/video/#!/126215/Sony_admits_huge_data_breach

In this article written by Jenna Wortham, she is exploring the idea of the fear of missing out and how it affects us now. Are we so dependent these days that all of us who are in the social network world actually undergoes the fear of missing out issue? Do those of us who are addicted to our Facebook and twitter pages feel that if we don’t log on to our homepage for several days that we are going to be missing out on the social world and about what is taking place in our friends or followers life? I think that this much easier said than done because of all of the technology in the world today. Maybe if smartphones did not have applications on our phones for Facebook and Twitter, this would be much easier to do, but now that we are always checking our Facebook on our cell phones, I think that it is much easier to get caught up in the fear of missing out world. We always want to see what new statuses friends posted on their wall, and to see if they added any new interesting pictures for our viewing pleasure.

Maybe we are just too addicted to the social media world and always need to be in touch with that world. Jenna Wortham suggested ideas that we can do to address this situation such as hiding your phone, limiting time on social networks on the weekend, and finally to put your cell phone on silent for long periods of time. I for one actually currently do put my phone on silent and keep it far from me for several hours during my day to avoid seeing my phone blinking because I have a facebook notification or something.

How do you handle the FOMO?