Personal Media Reflection # 1
My top Five closest friends are
people that I have known for about 3 years minimum and due to the fact that I
am selective when it comes to choosing people I really get close to and I think
it stems from past relationships and network considering I lost all my original
close friends when my family decided to move to Canada in Grade eight. Out of my top five friends, only one of them
goes to Brock University and I attended high school with all of them so they
all know each other at least somewhat close. Majority of my closest friends
have played on a sports team with me at some point where we built a bond or
connection that allowed us to be close friends. I only have one girl in my top
five closest friends but she is the first person I would go to with a
confidential or personal issue because I feel comfortable enough around her to
reveal my deepest thoughts. The ICT I
use the most frequent to communicate with my very close friends is my cell
phone usually via black berry messenger or a direct phone call. Only one of my
very close friends have twitter and neither did I until this course so Facebook
is our primary social media site used to communicate between each other.
Majority of my close friends are in different school or back in Mississauga
except for the one that attends Brock so I don’t get to see them on a regular
basis but we definitely try and make up for lost time during our summer
vacations and common leisure times. The one characteristic I noticed about my
five other friends that I am somewhat close to is that most of them attend
Brock and that I have only known them for around a year or less, I use black
berry messenger and texting on my cell phone a lot for this group and Facebook
is also a key tool in building these social networks. The top five people I listed in my
acquaintances are old classmates, work peer and a professor. Email and Facebook
are the most often used ICT and social media site with the people in this
network. I feel like I can confide in my very close friends for advice on
almost any general or personal topic; financial or physical help or just an ear
to listen and help you blow some steam off.
One trend I noticed is the more time I spend with the people that are
not are close in my social network the higher they climb in my rankings of
friends and the friends that I am already close to yet start to build
connection with other people in my social network which tends to strengthen my
connectivity of my social network. I am hoping that now that I have been
introduced to the twitter world that it will open up another door for my social
networking.
Personal Media Reflection # 2
Social media is very common all over the world
especially in North America, considering the fact that North America is the
continents with the most percentage of internets users with over 78 % of the
population of North America using the internet. With the mass use of the
internet comes the use of twitter which one of the most popular media sites
behind Facebook, personally I was very reluctant to get a twitter account until
I took a social media class. I thought it was a new trend that would get old
and Facebook would be enough for me but there is always a reason behind a large
population trend like that. After getting a twitter account, I can honestly say
I have no regrets and I can see the potential that twitter offers to the mass
public. When I first created my account on twitter, I decided to follow some of
my close friends who I know like to tweet regularly and then I decided to check
or I like to define it ‘creep” their followers and then follow a couple people
who I found interesting. The first thing that astonished me about twitter Is
the copious amount of celebrities that have a twitter account, I thought it was
cool that I could follow one of my child hood idols and get a slice of his
personality and level of humor. One thing I came to conclude was that there
will be a couple imitators or fake accounts out there because people love to
impersonate famous people. I decided to
search some of the global trending topic and the topic were pretty random but
not surprisingly Justin Bieber was one of them, other than the Bieber fever
most of the topic were relevant using about current events like sports. I then
took on the task of searching up some topic of personal interest like pro line,
summer activities and new music; I found the variety of the result very
interesting. Unlike regular online research of a topic; twitter shows a wide
range of results from tips to definitions and stories of personal experiences
which I found interesting and was able to relate to. My first official tweet
was just on a trending topic of doing crazy things and I expressed that a lot
of kids do crazy thing in hope of getting acceptance and gaining a popular
status. I found a lot of stuff twitter
useful and interesting from sports updates to random facts or jokes and I can definitely
see the potential of twitter is expanding people social network and business
opportunities. With its many benefits does comes its constraints, like
imitators accounts or people twitting useless or harmful information although I
did find twitter to be more professional that Facebook in that sense. I think
that as time goes on I will be fully diverged in the twitter world and I will
try and take advantage of some of the opportunities that it present by
promoting myself.
Personal Media Reflection # 3
I chose the topic of fantasy sports for a random
search on Wikipedia because that is something I enjoy participating in against
friends and even stranger online. The first things that caught my attention in
the article was the size of the hobby summarize how fantasy sports generates
around $ 3- $ 4 billion yearly and how there are over 32 million people in
Canada and the United States alone that participate in fantasy baseball league.
I also found the history of fantasy sports to be quite interesting from the
internet boom in the mid 1990’s when two companies introduced their web sites
and changed the world of fantasy sports forever. The article explains that the
dot com era really fueled the boom of the fantasy baseball economy and brought
the realization to the potential capital from running a fantasy sports league.
The use of YouTube for fantasy tip and creation of reality TV shows based on a
fantasy league was something that definitely stood out just to show the growing
population becoming involved in the fantasy league life. The legal facts were
hard to pass by considering that George Bush passed the Unlawful internet
gambling act of 200 that declared fantasy league gambling legal as long as
"prizes and awards offered to winning participants are established and
made known to the participants in advance of the game or contest and their
value is not determined by the number of participants or the amount of any fees
paid by those participants”. I considered that part the ‘voice of the
authority’. The article first started as
a random alleged topic first posted in 2001 and all that was posted was a
random definition of fantasy sports saying: a fantasy sport is a game where
players get points based on the statistics generated by individual players or
teams of a professional sport. The article kept receiving little edits and kept
getting more relevant information like more in depth definitions and examples
of the popular fantasy league sports and sites used. An old edit of the article
in 2007 tried to show a one line description of the history of fantasy league
sports explaining how it was original called the rotisserie league. It wasn’t
until 2007 that the article really started to shape up with important
information about fantasy leagues. There were a lot of changes to the article
surprisingly and most of the edits were grammar or spelling corrections and
people taking out information that felt was unsubstantiated. The article has
taken in a lot contributors to the content and there are no major sources of
the same group of people but rather a large collaborative effort by many
interested in the growing hobby on fantasy sports leagues. My thoughts about
Wikipedia definitely changed after this article because I never really took in
the amount of contributors that edit an article that we are lucky enough to
reference today. Wikipedia is a great site for collective thinking in order to
clarify information that will be accessible to the mass public.
Personal Media Reflection # 4
The two ‘social’ games that I
decided to play via a social networking site are the Sims social and City
Ville. City Ville is a Facebook game similar to Farm Ville where the purpose of
the game is to develop a city by farming, constructing buildings, and
collecting rent. The game lets the player become the mayor of a virtual city
and oversee the development of it ,
players can also visit their neighbor's city and perform up to 5 different jobs
every 12 hours in order to gain good rep points. The Sims social is a Facebook
extension to the Sims video games but in this version you create and
personalize your character to interact and build relationships with the other
Sims character of your friends. The involves your character building various
skills like art, cooking, music, writing, athletic, driving and your character
has to choose where to pursue the career path of a rocker, chef or artist which
some can say are ideal jobs for young teens trying to earn a little extra
income. Your Sims character develop
personality traits that shape his activities and what he is capable of doing
like for example an insane traits allows you to talk to yourself for
entertainment without losing social energy. Your character also develops needs like hunger
and social needs. The game even involves real life remakes of celebrities like
Lady Gaga. In a way it does promote being social as social points are obtained
by performing social interactions with other Sims. Sims encourages interaction
with friends online by the socializing features of Facebook to allow
players to send and receive gifts in order to finish certain quests or
objects. Player can receive special
items that allow them to level up by interacting with or inviting friends to
join the Sims ‘social’ world, this could be a problem for kids who don’t have a
lot of friends; in result Sims has its way of generating cash from its users
and you can buy the special Sims cash with real currency and its allows you to
buy special items within the game. The
game present three levels of relationships you can choose to have with some,
either a friend, rival or in a romance, giving kids a limited view on type of
relationship that can be formed. The game does ask for mutual permission to get
into certain relationship status with other characters. These ‘social’ games allow
single players to have multi players interactions with strangers and friends so
there are the benefits of socializing. Both games have some social constraints
like the addition traits like good kisser in the Sims game order to romanticize
with other characters of the opposite sex might create a false sense of reality
for the player when it comes to real relationships. All the interactions in these ‘social’ games are
good in a sense that it allows kids to build social networks but it still does
not include important none verbal gesture that are key in face to face
communication.
Personal Media Reflection #5
The power of social media in
fueling collection action is remarkable and its only seem to be gaining more
world-wide reach and efficiency and #KONY2012 is a good recent example of the
ability of social media to spark collective action. I personally wouldn’t have
thought that just one video could make such an action but I was shocked by the
viral spread of the video, I even found myself placing friendly bets to see how
fast it could attain a hundred million views. I first heard of KONY 2012
through a Facebook group invitation with a link to the video on YouTube about
raising awareness. I got the notification on my phone and I decided to just
treat it as spam and ignore it. I didn’t have any initial concerns or care
about watching the Joseph Kony video a couple hours later when I saw about ten
other invitations to the same group that I decided why not check it out and see
what all the fuss was about. The video itself was moving and it hard not to
help but feel sympathy for the kids and what they seem to be going through and
it was great incentive of raising awareness of the evil actions of Joseph Kony
and I am in full support of the cause. Although there are various benefits of the
social media incentive like global awareness spreading like wild fire and then
being able to put pressure on the world government to take action. The social
media incentive really emphasize the phrase “what can only one man do” or at
least start to do with the global connectivity social media creates. The social
media incentive can have its constraints though, for example I saw videos of
people from Uganda speaking out on the bad image the mass population now has of
their country and the Ugandan government was definitely not please with that
bad media they were getting. There were even a few people saying that the
joseph Kony accusations are incorrect and that all the child kidnapping terrors
do not occur anymore. Zuckerman’s offers
a really critical view of the Invisible Children campaign and questions their
dedication to the cause almost accusing them of having side intentions.
Zuckerman recognized that Joseph Kony was a horrible human being and needed to
be stopped for the national of Uganda to move forward and prosper. He also did
say he was impressed with the way they conducted the campaign with all the
intangibles they needed to win the hearts of all the people that came across
the video. The comments that were posted at the end were more sympathetic with
the Invisible Children organization, giving them credit for bringing awareness
to a serious issue. Another comment which I found interesting because I heard
this before is that it is just a way for the white liberal American to do
something with their bleeding heart or come in with a perception with they are
superior and coming to save the day.
