Social Networking

These social networking technologies can be used not only for widespread communication among friends, peers, and strangers, but it's also a capitalistic opportunity for both individuals and the corporations that run these networks. 

In the reading, NBC2 Investigators: Multi-million dollar scam being used on Facebook, the article details the facebook marketplace feature. This is actually a very useful way of finding people who may be interested in goods you have to sell. I have actually used this feature myself when selling shoes or streetwear. Unfortunately, as this article discusses this feature also gave rise to a lot of scammers. You have to vigilant when dealing in commerce on Facebook as there are a lot of people who are trying to take advantage of you

For individuals, we have seen in recent years the rise of the “influencer”. People who are able to create large audiences on social media, that’s essentially almost a cult following, are able to profit off of social media by being paid by brands and sponsors to promote them. There are influencers, such as Kylie Jenner, who can be paid well over 6 figures for even a single post on Instagram. In the reading, How to Build a Community on Social Media, Lavenduski goes into detail about how Dave Klonk was able to build an audience on social media. The three main points to follow are 1. Tell (sell) a story about yourself, 2. Offer content that relates to your target audience, and 3. With a facebook business page, make sure you build email lists organically and don’t buy them.

Social media benefits as it makes the world a smaller place and helps us feel more connected. For example, on Twitter you can see what's trending worldwide or what's trending in your local area. People who are interested can see what's actively going on across the world. It helps us be more empathetic and understanding of other cultures.

There is a dark side to social media. By making it easier to communicate, it also makes it easier to harm. Cyber bullying has been a big issue that has been talked about in recent years. Additionally, the concept of privacy is essentially non existent in our modern day and age. Our personal data is out there to be taken advantage of by both corporations trying to market to us, and possibly individuals who wish to do us harm and stalk us.

I think the next evolution of social media is to make it more real. I think two big technologies that we will see combined with social networks are Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality. While we can talk to anyone in the world over text currently, I believe in a few years it will be a whole other space where we can see the people we’re talking to in 3D, possibly even feel them.


Sources:

How to Build A Community On Social media. September 26, 2018 https://www.asicentral.com/news/how-to/september-2018/how-to-build-a-community-on-social-media

NBC2 Investigators: Multi-million dollar scam being used on Facebook. April 27, 2018. http://www.nbc-2.com/story/38062070/nbc2-investigators-multi-million-dollar-scam-being-used-on-facebook

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Next New

A technology I think hasn't been tapped into enough is Augmented Reality. Virtual Reality has been increasing in popularity in recent years but mainly in video gaming. I think the AR technology can be implemented to create a new type of new media. Instead of replacing your reality, Augmented Reality adds to it. A big issue with social media is the disconnect from reality, augmented reality can open up a whole new way of connecting with people anywhere in the world. My idea involves some type of wearable lenses, either glasses or contact lenses (way in the future), that overlays a visual on top of what you normally see. Imagine a world where you can talk to a relative on the other side of the world, but see them two feet in front of you. Imagine a world where no one owns a TV, because you can just watch Netflix, YouTube, or a Podcast on any empty wall with AR lenses. It can also be used to play video games, but also game-ify real life. Imagine there is a health program where you s...
Read more

Modeling Reality with Virtual Worlds

Virtual worlds are a powerful tool as they can be used to imitate reality in a safe way, for corporate purposes such as training employees or carrying out conferences. But also, they can be an outlet for creativity and this is seen mostly in video games such as Second Life and World of Warcraft. A recently popular form of virtual worlds is virtual reality. A potential pro and con of virtual worlds are that it can affect the user's mental health. As seen in the reading,  Virtual world may impact real-world behaviour, in this article, there is a positive example where a user sees their skinny avatar and it motivates them to lose weight in real life. However, there are a lot of cases where people become addicted to their alternate reality and the "second life" they live where they start to neglect real-life responsibilities in favor of their life in the virtual world. Virtual worlds foster creativity as many people treat them as an escape from reality where they can create ...
Read more

Creativity and New Media

Image
Building upon our last two topics, I wanted to do something creative in a virtual world and incorporate one of my old projects. Over 6 years ago when I was a Sophomore in high school I created a 3D CAD Model of Thomas The Tank Engine for my Intro to Engineering class. I created the model in Tinkercad and it can be viewed here: https://www.tinkercad.com/things/eyyGT58A08B-thomas-the-tank-engine Now I wanted to take a step further and downloaded the model as a schematic file, so I could import it into a virtual world in Minecraft, to do this I utilized the MCEdit tool. Here you can see Thomas as a virtual world in Minecraft: Excuse the phone picture as my screenshot tool is broken.
Read more