CS 371 Fall 2018 Social Media and Social Life

As this week’s topic was open to what we wanted to talk about in regards to the readings and course material we have covered  already. I decided to write about my employment and how social media has intersected with them in very intriguing ways. After reading the assigned readings thus far, it has made me look into my life, peer's lives, and observe students around me in regards to how much they use their technology and social media. The past summer I worked at a non-profit independent living centre, which opened up as a place for homeless people to use computers, have water and a cool place to rest. Almost all of the individuals that came into the center were homeless. I would make an educatedaed guess that approximately 90% of the homeless individuals that came into the shelter, came in to use Facebook. I didn’t think much about this at the time, other than noticing it. Now, after reading all of the articles, as well as all of the discussions in class, I have had further tho...

I recently updated my Iphone software. This software update introduced a new feature: "Screen Time". Screen Time lets Iphone users see how much time they are spending on their devices, as well as what that time is spent doing. For example, yesterday I had 3 hours and 20 minutes of "social networking" screen time. This includes apps such as Instagram (which was my most used application), Messages, Snapchat, and Twitter. In addition to showing one's activity and usage, Screen Time also has a downtime scheduler which can be used to "schedule time away from the screen", as well as an app limit feature to set a limitation of how much time you can spend on certain applications. A final feature worth mentioning is the ability to set up Screen Time permission for family members. This option is useful for parents who are now able to enforce certain limits for their children. I think Screen Time is a great Iphone addition, and one that really made me re-ev...

After reading Graham Meikle's article "What is Social Media?" in which he analyzes the convergence of public media and personal communication, I thought again about large of a role that social media, particularly Facebook, plays in our everyday lives but also how we have seemingly no influence over what aspects of our lives are exploited by Facebook. As Meikle highlights, Facebook more so than any other social media has "...been the firm that has best been able to capitalize on the affordances of social media..." (Meikle 20) by doing many thing effectively but mainly by continuing to draw in new markets. Even though most would argue that Facebook should no longer be considered the top social media platform as it trails in popularity to Twitter and Instagram, is it still controlling our behaviour more than we realize? When he mentioned how Flickr's claim to fame of being the world's largest photo sharing site was quickly crushed by Facebook when photos we...

Hello Everybody, When I think back to some of the first 'lessons' I was taught as a child the ones that come to mind are, 'don't cross the street without looking both ways', 'don't take candy from a stranger', and 'sharing is caring'. Sharing has been imbedded into our brains as being a positive thing since the very beginning, so naturally we are attracted to the idea of social media. Social media consists of many platforms allowing its many users to interact and 'share' personal content amongst on another. These platforms have been designed very specifically so that certain aspects release endorphins which result in making the user happy. However, there are times when these same aspects can cause unhappiness. Just as mentioned in the reading by Jessica Contrera, '13, right now', there are many parts of such platforms which bring on stress to its users. Applications like Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook, now include online socia...

For this week’s blog post, I decided to discuss the idea of sharing data with one another through internet based platforms. I am specifically going to be focussing on Facebook and it’s lack of privacy. Facebook allows you to share articles, and post with your friends, family, and even publicly depending on the settings. This information is than used to create advertisements that are targeted to our specific preferences. This information is than used to create custom advertisements for their intended audience, for example if you search for couches you may later see an assortment of advertisements for other couches. This is because Facebook stores all of our information in a database. Facebook implies that their relationship between advertisers is considered sharing (John 66). The word “sharing” I feel like is used to make it seem like they are not doing anything wrong and that they are not stealing our information. By sharing our information on Facebook we are being taken advantage ...

Recently I was scrolling through Twitter and I came across a link to an article in the Huffington Post titled “Does Your Social media Personality Reflect the Real You?” (article found here ). This article reminded me of a lot about thing that we’ve talked about in this course. The article pretty much just goes on to explain why individuals enjoy fabricating themselves to be a more exciting version of themselves on social media. One of reasons stated in this article is that individuals post photos for “instant rewards from external validation”. This reminded me a lot of Katherine from the article we read not to long ago. In this article she briefly explains her relationship with the photos she posts on Instagram. The article states that she only has 25 photos on her page and “the ones that don’t get enough likes, don’t have good enough lighting or don’t show the coolest moments in her life must be deleted” (Contrera, 2016). In this comment we can see that Katherine feels she can only p...

The reading I chose to focus on for this blog post was Couldry and Hepp’s How We Live With Media. In this reading, they discuss the concepts of network and assemblage. Both of these concepts assume how the social world holds together in a regular way (Couldry & Hepp, 60). Network analysis is important because we are able to grasp how the social world is formulated and how it is linked to social structure (Couldry & Hepp, 61). Viewing technology as articulation we can see how it focuses on practices, experiences and representations that ultimately form technology (Andrew Herman). I think the concepts of network and assemblage can be related to how we use social media as a way society create social structure, how we connect the world, communicate and express beliefs. If we did not use social media such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, etc., that are designed for communicating with one another and creating online experiences technology would be much different. T...