Tag Archives: Social Media

Your facebook acount settings maybe private is it really?

Posted on March 20, 2011 by nichola.smith

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zBZrynmd7cU

Social Websites such as face book, twitter, my space allows you to create a user name and password to help keep profiles private where you the account holder is the only person that has access to the account. But in realty it is also known that once you post information on your profile it is considered no longer private because it has become part of the cyber world known as the internet.

Have you ever recalled logging into your face book account and you see links such as http://lilbituly/0sssz2 and dont know who sent it. These sites are known as fishing sites. These sites should not be clicked on because they are used by hackers to fish your password by redirecting you to a ‘look alike’ face book log in homepage that requires you to enter your user name and password.

Once the information is entered on the ‘look alike’ homepage it is sent directly to the hackers account where they can review your information with the use of your password. Shocking right? it is also known that you should never have the same password for your email and face book accounts because this only makes it easier for your information to be retrieved.

To sign up for face book and any other social site is free but the information you provide is owned by the social site. this reminds me of Josh Harris project where he said everything is free except for the videos he captures, he owns.

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holy matrimony

Posted on March 20, 2011 by gee.elle

Social media has definitely changed the world of communication and how individuals approach their real life relationships in the public sphere. Take, for example, marriage proposals.  Proposals are meant to be a show of love and affection, to prove to your significant other how important you are to them.  This no longer means popping the question in front of all your friends and family; it means alerting the entire electronic world. Can you imagine being proposed to through twitter? Living in the public sphere has obviously affected the intricacies of private relationships and the role that outsiders play in these relationships.

As Tanya explained in “We Live in Public”, when a couple is arguing, it’s more beneficial to step back, try to understand each side, and to compromise.  But when the argument occurs in public, it becomes about egos and who “wins” the fight.

A 2010 survey shows that four out of five matrimonial lawyers claim that an increasing number of cases involve the use of social networking sites to provide evidence. One case I found shocking was the story of a woman who had her husband arrested for bigamy after seeing photos of his second wedding on facebook.  The couple had been separated for a number of years, but had never officially gotten a divorce. When he deleted said wife from his friends list, he did not alter his privacy settings and she was still able to see the photos from his second wedding.  She then had him arrested for bigamy.

Clearly social media has the ability to build relationships and tear them down.  Ultimately it’s up to the user to determine how they use the interface to affect and influence their real world relationships.  But will this have permanent effects on socialization and communication in the future? Does providing an alternate source of communication allow for freer expression or does it mimic the purpose of greeting cards (allowing us to defer the responsibility of communication by saying the words we physically can’t)?

Posted in Assignment 2 | Tagged , , , | 2 Comments

Stereotypes and Social Media, pt. 2

Posted on March 14, 2011 by Andrew McKinney

In a previous post, I talked about the possibility of stereotypes fading away with the help of social media.  Ultimately, I argued that this was unlikely.  Well, here’s an article that bolsters my point.  The Chronicle of Higher Education reports on a talk given by Lisa Nakamura at the South by Southwest Interactive conference that outlined several recent studies that have found new kinds of racism flourishing in global video game communities.

For instance, in China large numbers of users began earning a living playing Diablo 2, winning virtual weapons in the fantasy role-playing game and selling their online loot to people in the United States who did not have time to play as many hours to arm their characters. Many of the players chose to play as a female dwarf, a class in the game that can more easily win treasure on solo missions. And so other players began killing all dwarfs in the game, often adding anti-Chinese slurs in the chat section of the game as they did, says Ms. Nakamura.

The article goes on to point to the role of anonymity in the proliferation of racism on the Internet, a topic we’ve talked about in the course (especially in relation to cyberbullying).  However, can we really blame anonymity?  In the example that Nakamura gives, anonymity is important, but can we really guarantee that being able to see a profile picture of someone will make people less likely to be racist?  If there’s one thing that became apparent for me while reading your papers on your social media presence its that the vast majority of you have some doubts about whether or not the people you are interacting with online are really who they say they are.  Therefore, we only friend people we know in real life.  So, how does adding a profile picture and some personal information to a social interaction based solely on the Internet equal a lack of anonymity?

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Companies Taking Advantage of Social Media

Posted on February 28, 2011 by yuliya.krol

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.

Posted in Assignment 1 | Tagged , , , | 13 Comments

Blogs v Facebook

Posted on February 27, 2011 by gee.elle

“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?

Posted in Assignment 1 | Tagged , , , | 12 Comments