Social Networking

Social networking involves Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and other social networking sites where people come together to share news, information, status updates, or merely a passing thought they believed the internet might find amusing.

It can be used in wholesome ways and for incredible good – an elderly couple who no longer drive can keep up with their grandchildren three states away, your cat can become Insta-famous without your dog getting jealous of all the attention it’s getting, your mother can share recipes with her book club, and on and on the list goes.

However, social networking is often used for nefarious purposes. Campus gossip websites can become vessels for harassment and cyberbullying. (Young) Other people can stalk you in cyberspace, and future employers might be vacillating between you and an equally-qualified other candidate, but that other candidate gets the job just because you made the mistake of posting a questionable selfie back in your first year of college. Employers, your friends, and you family will all be able to track you on social media and make judgement calls about who you are, and what type of person you are becoming.

Some people feel forced to quit social media entirely, either because it has become an addiction in their lives, because of privacy concerns, or because they felt it distanced them from their friends despite marketing itself as a means of bringing people together. (Heffernan)

In short, society at large benefits from the profits and jobs created by social networking powerhouses, but individuals, by and large, suffer the consequences.

In the future, it is possible that social networking sites will become even more invasive. With more people spending more time on their screens, Facebook and other social networking sites have more time to monitor them and collect valuable data. We mustn’t forget that Facebook isn’t just a site – it’s also a corporation, with monetary interests at heart. The data it collects from its users is worth money, and in the end, we are just another set of data points to them. I don’t see a reversal of this trend anytime in the future, and indeed expect that the situation will only be exacerbated.

Heffernan, Virginia. “Facebook Exodus.” The New York Times, The New York Times, 26 Aug. 2009, www.nytimes.com/2009/08/30/magazine/30FOB-medium-t.html?_r=2&ref=technology.

Young, Jeffrey R. “They're Back, and They're Bad: Campus-Gossip Web Sites.” Chronicle.com, Aug. 2009, www.chronicle.com/article/theyre-backtheyre-bad-/48220.

Blog v Wiki

In our society, our technology is a vital part of the invisible infrastructure of daily life. We wake up via an alarm on our cellphones, go straight to the computer to check our e-mail, Facebook, Twitter, or some similar such social networking site or means of communication. Then, after a brief interval in the real-world, perhaps eating with a family member while playing an iPad game, we rush off to the train, where we spend the entire commute scrolling Tumblr or reading our favorite blog.

It’s not just us. Companies have detailed disaster-recovery plans in the event of an Internet outage, or a data breach, or some other unforeseen catastrophic failure of their digital assets. Banks have plans for cyber-attacks, and on and on to the highest levels of government with encrypted messages meant for high-ranking officials sent across the digital airwaves.

This is a picture of our networked world, where we are always in touch with one another, and our cell phones rarely stray further than our pockets. In some ways, convergence of technology is very useful in such a digital environment. Instagram now proudly proclaims that it is ‘brought to you by Facebook,’ Yahoo bought Tumblr (Schroeder) in the Spring of 2020, and many other more recent mergers and acquisitions can be cited. However, it is noteworthy that convergence brings with it risks – if all of the Internet is one ten platforms, and two of them are breached in a cyber-attack, nearly one quarter of the Internet is at risk of privacy loss, hackers, or even more unsavory digital elements.

Let us now examine two of the Internet’s most lauded tools – blogs, and Wikis. Blogs can serve as a log of daily life, as in the case of the blogs of deployed servicemen (Dao), or as community bulletins and a means of creating meaningful change, as in the instance of a Brooklyn blog that helped lead to a drug raid, creating a safer, more wholesome community (Wilson). In this way, blogs have been used for collaboration amongst community members. They could likely be used for collaboration in other ways as well, perhaps in workplaces where all employees are invited to work on a private or public company blog where they relay information to senior management and their coworkers.

Wikis, too, are commonly used for collaboration. Unlike blogs, workplace wikis are generally company-specific, and private. Blogs provide a more public sphere, while wikis provide an ease of communication and real-time editing features that blogs often lack or fall short of.

A discussion of wikis would hardly be complete without mentioning Wikipedia, the online free encyclopedia that any literate individual with an Internet connection and a keyboard can edit. Wikipedia has taken the idea of an encyclopedia and revolutionized it. In a similar vein, I would love to see a novel-writing wiki – a wiki where people come together to write and edit one or more novels. I believe that would not only be an interesting idea, but also an – ahem – ‘novel’ one.

Works Cited

Dao, James. “Pentagon Keeps Wary Watch as Troops Blog.” The New York Times, The New York Times, 9 Sept. 2009, www.nytimes.com/2009/09/09/us/09milblogs.html.

Schroeder, Stan. “ Yahoo Buys Tumblr, Promises to Not 'Screw It up'.” Mashable, 20 May 2013, mashable.com/2013/05/20/yahoo-officially-acquires-tumblr-promises-not-to-screw-it-up/.

Wilson, Michael. “Brooklyn Blog Helps Lead to Drug Raid.” The New York Times, The New York Times, 26 June 2008, www.nytimes.com/2008/06/26/nyregion/26bayridge.html.

The Intersection of Poetry, Literature, and New Media: An Analysis

The online world has changed the way we read and consume literature, as well as the platforms through which authors share their work with a wider audience. I have chosen to research and analyze the intersection of literature and new media, particularly the impacts of new media on the literary form of poetry. I would be interested as to whether the rise and proliferation of new media has led to an corresponding increase or decrease in poetry readership. I am also interested to learn whether or not an increasing number of people are encouraged to become poets due to the popularity of 'Instapoets' such as Rupi Kaur, and others like her who have been able to use Instagram to create a platform and gather an audience for their work. In going about this research, I will explore Instagram itself as a primary source and as a starting point; then I will conduct the appropriate academic research utilizing what I have learned from the posts and profiles of various Instapoets, as well as their interaction with their community of readers. I will also research alternative platforms other than Instagram through which poets and writers share their work with their audience in order to gain a comprehensive understanding on how new media has changed the way we read, write, consume, and share poetry.

Hello, World!

Hello, world! This is my new blog for my New Media online course. I hope you enjoy reading and browsing through it!