View Connections of Mine Made and/or Maintained Via Social Media in a larger map

Link to Social Media Essay

Social Media Essay

Link to my Google Map

My Google Map

Thoughts on Learning To Love You More

Learning To Love You More was a project that is separated into "projects" which are assignments for participants to "report" on. The projects that participants are asked to report on range from things like "teach us an exercise" to "make the saddest song."

What is most interesting to me about the Learning To Love You More project is that the projects that are given to participants are very different. Some of the projects ask them to explain a process like recreating a snapshot, but some of them ask them to perform simple, loving actions like spending time with a dying person.

This project speaks to me because the tasks given to participants force them to do things and think about things about their lives and others lives that they might not have otherwise done or thought about. Aside from making the participants do and think outside of the box things, it also connects them with other participants who are doing the same things with their lives. If I had been a participant in this project, having that connection with others doing the same things with their lives would have given me a sense that we weren't only changing ourselves and growing as individuals, but that we were helping to change and teach the world.

Thoughts on 253

"In cyberspace, people become places."

 This line on the homepage of 253's website is one that I feel is extremely accurate. It is simple enough, but I feel like it's overall message is very profound. 

When we form relationships with people in person, we don't consider their location as much as we do when we begin to form a connection with people who may not be as accessible to us. When you begin to converse with and form relationships with people in different places around the country or around the globe, you begin to associate the place they are from with the identity of that person much more than you do with people you've met and formed a relationship with in person. When you've formed a connection with someone in cyberspace, from that point on you will associate that place with that person. The person you've met has become that place to you.

Thoughts on Wikipedia

I believe that Wikipedia can be useful for people to get information that they don't intend to use in a paper or for anything else where the information needs to be factual without a doubt. For example, Wikipedia can be a great resource for someone to look up a topic that they had heard about but knew nothing about just to get a general overview of it.

I generally use Wikipedia to look up people such as actors and other artists that I like to find out a little bit of background on them just because it's interesting to me. I also like to use it to look up places that I would like to visit some day to read a bit about their history.

Wikipedia has been gathering quite a bit of resources for a lot of entries and I think that helps the entries with the most resources listed to be more credible because it shows that the information was gathered from other places and wasn't just written based on what someone thought.

Final bib and abstract

Final bib
Final abstract

Response to videos

I think the main idea that I took away from these videos and the background knowledge I have about things like the numa numa trend and other things mentioned is the way that YouTube allows every day people to do simple things that can quickly become extraordinary for a variety of reasons. They could do something simple and rather stupid and it could become extraordinarily popular be being ridiculed, or someone could record a simple video of themselves singing a song at their computer and if it's shared enough, it will likely be viewed by someone that can do something with their talents and they'll become extraordinarily famous. Social media and YouTube in particular have made it incredibly possible for people to share typical moments in their lives and have those moments turned into something fascinating.

Abstract and bib drafts

Abstract draft

Bib draft

Thoughts on Lovink

Lovink refers to blogs as being a more modern version of the homepages that people used to create for themselves/their interests. I had never thought of blogs as being similar to personal homepages, but after it was brought up in Lovink's post, I can definitely see the similarities.

He speaks about blogs combining personal thoughts such as what has been going on in that person's life with things that they find interesting going on in the world. People are then able to easily write about these things even if they have no actual knowledge about them. The problem with this, Lovink says, is that blogs are inherently easy to find by others looking for information based on tags that a blog writer can associate with their post. If a blog writer writes a post with enough conviction, what they write could easily be interpreted as being factual by people who happen upon it after entering certain search terms.

Project thoughts

1) What are the key questions for your project so far? What evidence do you have relating to these questions?
-Is social media just a fad? Will it be able to last? I believe that my project and evidence presented in it will prove that social media may be a fad, but that it is likely to last because it has thrived through many different changes such as a variety of social media platforms which I talk about in my project.
Do people actually rely on social media as much as some people claim? My project and the stats I'll use in it will prove that the majority of people do use and rely on access to social media.
2) What do you like most about your project so far? If you were explaining your project to someone, and you were conveying what you like about it and why you're interested, what really good examples would you use? (Try for at least three...) Why do you like these examples?
-I like that by going through the history of social media I'm able to show how it evolves which I feel proves that it will only continue to evolve. I think that my project provides evidence of this because I talk about how many social media platforms were based almost identically to previous platforms.
-I think that the statistics that I used in my trailer and plan on using throughout my project help to add credibility to the point I'm trying to make. The numbers that I use are evidence that my project isn't simply based on opinion.
-I think that by talking about how much social media has evolved over time helps to prove my point that it can survive change and still thrive, grow, and be just as much if not more important to most people over time.
3) What citeable evidence is associated with these examples? The examples may be citeable in themselves, i.e. they may be a video or a text, but they may also be a trend or practice. So, how would the examples appear in your bibliography? Start by drafting "a statement of use" for each example, based on the definition above.
I will cite sources that I've used for my statistics that I've gathered as well as for the images I've used in my trailer. As my writing for the project continues, I will likely gather more information from other sources on the internet such as blogs that focus on social media's use.

My main question and concern about this project is whether or not my topic is something that I'll be able to work well with throughout the rest of the semester. I'm not sure if it's something that will be interesting or important enough to work with and add something to the overall group project.

Thoughts on abstract

The way that social media has infiltrated our lives and changed the majority of the aspects of the way we live. How social media has become more prevalent over time and how it has evolved. What social media was developed from, what the consequences of our immersion into social media are. How social media has become so involved that it now includes things like ways to shop without leaving your house and being able to play a game with someone you've never met thousands of miles away.

Thoughts on Lessig Chapters 6-8

The most interesting part of these chapters of Lessig for me was his focus on things such as Netflix and Amazon and how they've changed the way that many people interact within the economy and how the economy operates in general.

Things like Netflix and Amazon allow people looking for certain items such as a movie to rent or something they're able to purchase over Amazon are no longer made to interact face-to-face with the person representing the business loaning them the movie to rent or handing them the item they've purchased. Netflix and Amazon have so drastically changed the way people rent movies and shop that similar businesses such as Blockbuster and Wal-Mart have had to adapt their services in order to compete and not fall behind in the technology department.

It is extremely interesting to think about a business like Wal-Mart that has been around for many, many years and how much it has had to evolve in order to remain in competition with these new e-based businesses that have changed the way the vast majority of people shop and do other things that once were unable to do without visiting a business in person.

Social Media History Trailer

Thoughts on Lessig Chapters 3-5

The part about these chapters of Lessig that I found the most interesting was the paragraph or so about being free to read what we want, when we want, but not necessarily being able to do the same thing with regards to television and movies.

I think this statement is interesting because, somewhat recently, reading books has become even easier to do. With the release of e-readers, people who enjoy reading can now sit down in their favorite, comfy chair, skim through a seemingly endless list of book choices, purchase their chosen book without moving from their chair, and begin reading it almost instantly. In my opinion, reading is one of the most easily accessible hobbies that one can have. Though e-readers aren't necessarily cheap, once you have purchased one, you no longer have to travel to a bookstore where you will pay more for the book you're wanting to read.

These chapters also mention iTunes and how it was very important in helping to save the music industry by making digital copies of recordings available for a price and also making them in a format that would not allow for them to be reproduced and shared. I think that iTunes is for music, television, and movies what e-readers are for books and magazines. Instant access for a smaller fee without having to leave your home is the reality for people in the 21st century.

I think that my blog post is loosely related to Lessing's idea of community.

Community is the idea that there are countless numbers of groups in the world that can be based on any number of combinations of grouping tactics.

People who own and use e-readers are a community, people who create free content for e-readers are a community, readers in general are a community. These communities have been formed based on a common appreciation for something and in this case it happens that they were formed over an appreciation for a type of media and/or a format to access that media. The people who create free content for e-readers as well as the people who leave a comment on the page of a book about their opinion on it are all creating a certain type of media.

Thoughts on upcoming trailer

I've been thinking about the best way to go about my trailer and I'm still not entirely sure. I know that I want to focus on social media because a lot of my interests are in the usage of social media in public relations, but I feel like that would be too specific for a short trailer.

I'm thinking I'll probably use images and videos collected from all of the most popular social media websites and just collage them together to a song that I feel fits well with the images. I think that I want the images to portray all of the social media avenues that are available to people today and how they can be used (blogging, picture sharing, video sharing, social interaction).

Thoughts on Lethem's "The Ecstasy of Influence"

I found Lethem's article extremely interesting and it definitely sparked a lot of thoughts on the subject of plagiarism of my own.

Of course I believe that knowingly plagiarizing someones work word for word is wrong and illegal, but other than that what can we really define as being plagiarism? For a long time in literature there have been certain kinds of stories that have been retold with different characters and in slightly different ways. The story of the reluctant hero or the ugly duckling turning into the swan are stories that have been retold countless times by different people with only slight differences in the plots. Would this be considered plagiarism to anyone? There are some story lines that simply work and it would be silly of a writer to not acknowledge that.

ENGL 303 Survey Response

The thing that always strikes me when people talk about their Internet usage in the past up until now is how much it differs.

I always assume that people rely on the Internet either as much or more than me and it's rare for me to think that someone could spend a minimal amount of time on the Internet for any reason. When you look at the responses of those people who don't rely on the Internet as much, they are also the people who weren't as immersed in it at a young age like I was. I think when you're introduced to something like the Internet so young, it's much easier to get used to and addicted to it.

ENGL 303

This is a new blog for ENGL 303 Multimedia Writing.