Social Networking Sites

Social Networking Sites: Facebook, Twitter, Myspace, and Tumblr, it's hard not to be joined to at least 3 in today's totally connected yet strangely disconnected society!

Personally I didn't have an active account to any of these before this class and when I was younger I was signed up to Facebook and Myspace but grew disillusioned with both to the point I forswore them. So here I am signing up again and my how things have changed!

Looking at Facebook I see that there have been a lot of additions to the format. There's a news feed, timeline, graph search, personalized ads, facial pattern recognition features that instantly tag people in friend's pictures. Every nook and cranny of a person's life and what they are interested, or not so interested, in sharing are served up hot on Facebook. Talk about the cult of total narcissism! Yep, I'm one of those, just not at all into it. I can't wait to delete this newly created profile it's seriously giving me the heebie-jeebies. Everyone I want to talk to I keep in contact with using phone, email, and in-person meet ups. This isn't to say that Facebook is a complete waste, it has its merits.  

                                                    Have you had your fix today?
 
Now time to turn an eye towards Myspace. My how things have changed! Myspace used to be the social network back in the day for everyday average Janes and Joes, not unlike present day Facebook, but it is clear that it has become a site used mainly by bands, musicians, and their fans. Guess they had to change the business model since Facebook devoured their Janes and Joes. Verdict: Not interested - profile deleted post haste!

Onto Twitter...at first I thought this thing was a terrible idea and fad but I was proven wrong. My opinion on it has changed because it can be used as a means for important and not so important people speaking directly to 'the people' and sometimes that can be informative and/or hugely entertaining. I remember from the Occupy movement and Arab Spring that tweets were used by people as informal journalistic tools and helped paint first-hand pictures of those events. Having signed up on Twitter for the first time for this class...I have to say, as soon as we've wrapped I'll be deleting my Twitter account ASAP. I'll leave the bloggers and news outlets to update me on the really important Twitter tweets.

Finally, Tumblr. From what a friend tells me, this site is where it's at. It's the only one I am actually interested in joining, why? Because it is chock full of LOLs and GIFs and images! I'm very visual so this is right up my alley. Once you find a topic or microblog that you like it's really hard to stop clicking on the down scroll to read/view more. It's a combination of Twitter's format with its 'follow' and reblog features, there's also a commenting section like on all social media sites.

I guess a drawback to not being embroiled in these social networking sites is that I miss out on a lot of trendy things going on. Sometimes a friend references some viral phenomenon and I am clueless about what they are talking about. It's a rare occurrence and I'm never missing out on anything too interesting. 

Blog vs. Wiki

Blogs and wikis are similar in that they both allow for the dissemination of information to a broad audience but they are different in that a blog is usually authored by one person while a wiki is editable and composed by more than one author.

Convergence, the joining of old and new media, in today's networked world is essential because we are at the nexus of new media and old media. Vestiges of old media, like physical newspapers and magazines are still with us because they have been standards of the written word for centuries but now with new media like ebooks and Web 2.0 we can have both the physical and online versions of a magazine, for instance -- old and new have converged.

Blogs can be used for collaboration. A blogger writes something in a post and others see it (maybe the blog is on someone else's blogroll or RSS feed) and respond to the post. The conversation on the blog could facilitate the blogger and readers getting together to collaborate further.  

For example, in the NY Times article "Brooklyn Blog Helps Lead to Drug Raid," we see how a neighborhood in Brooklyn has used blogs as an updated new media version of a neighborhood watch. These neighborhood watches have led to arrests and a stronger feeling of community among the more productive inhabitants of Bay Ridge.

This article highlighting mass participatory journalism links to a broader phenomenon of the influence of the blogoshpere. Kathy E. Gill states in her article "How Can We Measure the Influence of Blogospheres?" that since "blogs have exploded on the Web's landscape [...] bloggers are influencing the world outside of the blogosphere, as measured by audience reach, media adoption and political necessity."