Saturday, December 14, 2013

J201 Online Assignment 4/5_Pat Rose

Patrick Rose
Section 310
12/14/13
Online Assignment #4-5


            The first aspect of social media that I looked at was Facebook. Looking back, I laughed hysterically at my message, timeline and photo comment history. I was particularly intrigued by my lack of grammatical structure and “unique” word selection that I chose in my conversations with people. The frequent use of “k” and “cuz” seem very childish now, but less than five years ago that was the common variation of communication between social circles. Additionally, Facebook used to have the option of posting a status and it always started with “is”. For example, one of my statuses said “Pat Rose is tired cuz it was a long day”. Although this was the common method of knowing what people were doing, it seems very confusing as to why “is” was the standard model of Facebook statuses. In terms of ad history, most of the information that is logged of my activity feels outdated. The “Ad Topics” that they claim to have of me are very spread out and random which most likely means I must have accidentally clicked on an ad or two and thus they recorded that information.
            On the other hand, when looking at the history log that Google has recorded of my activity, I found that Google was much more accurate and concise in their display of my media and social record. Instead of a list of about fifty different ad topics that Facebook had recorded of my activity, Google had a much simpler list of about twenty interests that I have. However, the topics that were included in my Google interests were much broader compared to the Facebook list which may also be attributed to more developed search engine and a more concentrated area of the web in comparison to Facebook.

            When reflecting on my digital society experience, I found it particularly interesting in the idea that all of my activity within the digital society has been recorded by something. I’m not exactly sure if this is a good thing or bad thing but it did provide me with a laugh or two. As far as my personal communication development, I have seen a major improvement in the way that I communicate with others. Whether using more mature grammatical structure or eliminating previously immature wording (i.e. k, aight, cuz, etc.), I have learned to avoid as much confusion as possible when trying to communicate with others through Facebook. In addition, I grew to learn not to trust everything on Facebook in regards to people’s individual lives and daily lifestyles as back in the day Facebook was almost seen as a “tracking device” for people’s daily activities. Currently, I tend to minimize my use of facebook and try to limit my conversations with people to minimal exchange of information or sharing of web links. Overall, I find the development of social media to be extremely interesting and can only imagine the future generations of social communication. 

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