October 27: Social Networks

When I want to post a video so that my friends, my very small social network, can see it and appreciate it, I post it to Facebook. It’s private and it guarantees that people I don’t know won’t see it as long as I’ve managed the privacy settings appropriately. It would never have occurred to me to post it on YouTube. It’s just too public.

The most intriguing concept to me in this week’s readings came from Lange’s article on YouTube, specifically this notion of carving out a private space in a very public domain. I should note that I don’t spend a lot of time on YouTube directly. Often, the YouTube videos that I see are through other sources like Facebook or news outlets. I’ve kind of always assumed that people post to YouTube to get some kind of recognition, perhaps even celebrity. Justin Bieber and Soulja Boy come to mind as good examples. And of course, at the beginning of the semester we watched Mike Wesch’s digital ethnography video that identified “narcissism” as one of the reasons that people post their videos to YouTube. That message has stuck with me. 

So this whole idea that people want to post videos on YouTube but also want to maintain a level of privacy strikes me as counter-intuitive. given that the article was published in 2007, I wonder what other options users had for posting videos privately online. As I said earlier, I generally post videos to FB but I wonder if the site didn't allow this type of posting at the time the research was conducted. And if this true, have the number of "publicly private" postings gone down?

The Digital Life

The Global Digital Life research project claims to be the largest ever online research project. The interactive infographic shows the results of information collected from 46 different countries and something like 50,000 people (a screenshot is shown below although the actual site is flash-based). The graphic is pretty interesting even though it's technically the information is for companies that are trying to improve their business.  Discover Digital Life

October 21: Moving Forward

I really enjoyed last week's presentations and was surprised by the diversity of topics. It made me realize that I had so many more possibilities for my final project.

I was initially interested in writing about how to make teaching and learning in an online course effective. This idea was spurned by own and current experience in an online course. I have found it incredibly difficult, I think,  because the social aspect of learning is missing and there really hasn't been an opportunity to build community in that course. I log in, download readings, and post my thoughts as required. But I don't interactive with the other learners.

So as I move forward with this paper, I think what would be helpful to me would be to focus on learning and how learning happens through ICTs. Through this course, I feel like I've been exposed to various social media tools, theories of online identity, communication styles and more. Now I need to figure out how all of this information applies (or doesn't apply) in order to make online learning a better experience for the learner. With all of the talks last week, I was specifically thinking about how much of the newer ICTs (like Twitter) are actually being used in online learning.


So if anyone knows of any research or has had experience with this, please let me know!

Maslow's Hierarchy Reinvented

I thought that this was pretyy interesting as well:

October 6: Reflections

It seems that most of posts have continued to focus on control in one respect or another. Actually, I think my view of control has expanded through the readings and class discussions. My first question five weeks ago was "Do we ever really have control?" At that point, I was really thinking about it from a very basic level -- the individual. But now I realize that it's sort of loaded question because there are so many facets to consider when we talk about control. For example, although I feel like lose a little bit of control every time I post to Facebook, I didn't think of Facebook itself is as a very controlling entity. My information, as long as my privacy settings are set, is not open to everyone on the web. As Stross states the internet is actually "more social" than Facebook because people can easily access information without "friending" someone first.

My other question focused on the future impact of the life online. If you public posted potentially embarrassing or harmful information about yourself or others online, would there be any repercussions (e.g. would you get fired or not hired at all if this information was discovered?) While this is an intriguing question, a new question have emerged. I was struck by the reporter's quote in the Digtal Nation video we saw last week. It was something along the lines of the web allows us to be "together alone or alone together". Social media allow us to be social online in so many ways – joining groups or communities of interest, tweeting and re-tweeting, posting comments on blogs, walls, etc. My new question is what motivates some people to be social and others to not be social within the same groups or communities? What about the lurkers?

image via: http://www.useit.com/alertbox/participation_inequality.html

Individuals & Their Online Identities

Found this infographic which is quite interesting and relevant to our last class:

Individuals & Their Online Identities