Hello Folks!
This was a fairly easy read, so I will cover only some minimal things, and highlight some ideas I thought were interesting.
First off, when you write your Social Media Paper (based on your data-gathering project) you will need to incorporate some outside sources (see assignment sheet for more detail). The Uses and Grats article is a great place to find other sources to support your ideas. Use the "Literature Review" section and the Reference page from this article to help you find other sources.
Here are some quotes from the article that I thought were pretty interesting:
Pg. 217 "Dye (2007) points out that this new medium has created a new generation of individuals whose identities are defined by their connections and the content they produce online". Think about this for a second...... Think about how YOU used to define yourself before social networking. What were your definitions? What did you connect with? Who? This is a very interesting concept! What about folks how are not as connected online? How do those folks define themselves?
On page 217 the idea of 'instant gratification' is brought up. How does this idea, or how has this idea (or process) shape our society? Connect this idea to pagers back in the early 1990's before cell phones were wide spread. Go further and connect this idea to drive through restaurants. Even cell phones, DVR's, internet - - - do you get the point? Instant gratification! There is no waiting.
Side Note: My SIL just had her first child, and I have been thinking a lot about babies, kids, families, etc... Babies are on demand, right? Kids are taught patience through growing up. We sit in classes for hours and hours at a time through primary education, then in college our time is divided up even more with hour long classes, then work, then friends, then family, etc... Now throw into the equation this idea of instant gratification and what do we have? I will stop here and let you make the obvious link, but what are your thoughts on this? What are the implications of social networking when taking into account where we have come in just 10-15 years?
Moving on.....
It is interesting to read on pages 217 and 218, the start and spread of Facebook. Pay attention to that section, because it is fairly easy to breeze by it. Also pay attention to process gratifications and content gratifications.
Page 218 states, "According to the uses and gratification perspective, media use is determined by a group of key elements including "people's needs and motives to communicate, the psychological and social environment, the mass media, functional alternatives to media use, communication behavior, and the consequences of such behavior" (Rubin, 1994, p. 419)."
Page 218 - "Gurevitch (1974) defined that the uses and gratification perspective as focusing on the "social and psychological origins of needs, which generate expectation of the mass media or other sources, which lead to different patterns of media exposure resulting in need gratifications and other consequences" (as cited in Rubin, 1994, p. 419)."
One last thing - page 223 talks a bit about the idea of 'convenient communication' and how some folks sent their profiles to 'private'. This idea is one that I hope to cover soon, but setting your Facebook profile to 'private' is key for a lot of folks. The privacy issue on FB is an important one because of accessibility on the internet. FB changes their privacy issues so frequently that it's hard to keep up. However, if you are careful about keeping up your privacy settings (news articles are published frequently about 'how' to keep up your privacy settings), social networking can be a useful tool for satisfying interpersonal needs (keeping up with friends, networking with folks, etc..). It can also be a decently safe place for folks to 'hang out' if they watch their content, who they allow to be their friends, and certainly keep up with privacy settings.
It is my hope, that through the way I have planned the class (reading 'new media', 'old media' and the Social Selves text), that folks will come out of the class with an arsenal of new media experiences along with learning some incredible things from the past/present and even future projections about new media and what this means to you as a media consumer.
How's that for a tangent? ;)
Until later.....
The Blogging Prof.
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