Week Two

This week, our topic was the history of social media. We all use these apps on a regular basis but do we really know much about them? I, for one learned quite a bit that I did not know. One of the videos that was included in our required materials mentioned that in twenty-four hours, the virtual Facebook game Farmville will sell more than one million in digital farm equipment and that digital farm equipment now outsells real farm equipment. (A Day in the Life of Social Media) That seems crazy to me. Humans are living more and more of their life digitally. I wonder what that is doing to our communication skills and how we inter-act with each other. It is also curious how much of ourselves we are willing to put out there for everyone to see. Humans used to value privacy, but it seems that everyone is willing to put all of their information on these sites now. On another video that was required, one of the panelists seemed to think that we are so willing to give up our privacy because we have this perceived notion that it is just our friends and relatives we are sharing with but if the privacy settings are not very strict, that is not necessarily true. It also makes me start to wonder more about the Internet Of Things. I am very wary of devices like Alexa because I do not know who Amazon is sharing my data with but most people have no problem with these kinds of devices. Why have we gone from being skeptical to being "all in"?

First Week thoughts

The Internet and Social Media is such and interesting phenomena. The Internet grew and changed so quickly. At first, no one really knew what to do with it or how it would really be useful to the home user. As technology made it easier for everyone to use it, it grew and changed. Social media has changed quite a bit over the years as well. One of my classmates mentioned MySpace. I was a MySpace user and loved getting into the code and changing my page. Now, hardly anyone uses it. The problem of people believing everything on the Internet has grown as well. Now, anyone can post something and unfortunately, some believe the post without checking further into it. I've gotten so many messages over the years telling me that if I post and share something, Bill Gates is going to give me a million dollars. I'm not a millionaire yet and neither are they. There are so many examples of viral message like that, it can get frustrating to have to explain to my family members that these viral messages are fake. People need to learn more about doing further research before they blindly believe what they see.