There's an app for that

This is a really good point Emily! It’s so scary to think that every future employer you may have, could have access to those embarrassing selfies you took when you created your Facebook aged 13… Or those drunk club photos in freshers week!

I know, I went to a recruitment firm for some work experience a couple of years ago, and I had to shadow the CEO there. I was shocked at how much he search into each candidate! Everything from Google, to Facebook to twitter! You never think that these sort of things will ever come back to bite you…

It sounds unlikely but I’ve heard stories from someone I used to know of how before any person is given an interview in their company the HR department would search Google, and Facebook, for their name and Email address to check out their online persona. Apparently they would often reject candidates because of their Facebook profiles or what sort of content came up including their email address. Be careful people! I’m sure its really hard to change the search results once your data is out there because a lot of platforms are linked. 

Sounds spot on in regards to being useful for advertisers - it helps the collection and analysis of data for sure. On the other hand though, people use hashtags in ways that don’t just associate their post with a certain context, like health or food, but instead serve to shorten sentences that don’t seem particularly useful for advertisers nor users searching for a certain topic online. For instance: #mynewovenhasarrived #notgoingtogobacktoworkmonday It’s hard to see how some hashtags could serve to identify oneself with something that has gone viral, or a particular product/brand.

FIFA has always been one of those games that has baffled me anyway- why not just go outside and play real football?  But no I wouldn’t say that smashing holes through things due to getting frustrated on a game is normal behaviour at all.  But maybe it is in the terms of the game?  People let go of anger in varying ways, and maybe they’re all just caught up in the heat of the moment and it’s just an impulse reaction that simply comes across as having all this anger towards a certain game. 

Games like FIFA allow people to play football when they can’t play outside! They allow you to be immersed in the sport 24/7

Adding to what Sam has said, games such as FIFA allow people to play a sport they might actually be really bad at, and Call of Duty - play soldier from your student house in Reading. Perhaps they lose sense of reality feeling immersed in a fictional world where they get to be someone else... or maybe it is more related to the anger of player as to how they react to not winning! 

Sometimes I RT stuff that I find amusing, but not necessarily because I do them ‘in real life’, but it would be hard for someone, who didn’t know you in real life, looking through your profile to know this. The ability to RT, RP memes, and like pages etc is really important because it allows us to be able to create our identity online, giving the whole ‘social media’ a purpose - to represent yourself, whether it is a truthful image or not. I wonder if it is more the younger generation who do this though, the ones who have grown up with social media and feel more comfortable manipulating it? I know it wouldn’t occur to my mum to like things that didn’t directly relate to her. 

Character limits are quite clever as they make us more defined language users and help us to get a better understanding for language and ways that it can be manipulated to say the same thing but in fewer words. There are certain situations where I think Facebook statuses need to have the flexibility to be over 140 characters, such as when someone is sharing a story or a memory, but it all depends on the type of person and the ways that they choose to use Facebook - maybe it’s as a social platform or a place to express your opinions and political views. Or perhaps both?  

The character limit definitely does make you think more about what you want to say and how you can say it in the best way which will fit in the characters.  I’m not a huge fan of the limits because I feel that sometimes you need more than 140 characters to express what you want to say in the limited amount that you have.  So you end up writing it in more than one post or completely changing the way in which you word it to make it fit; which is kind of a hassle.  I think you have to write in a certain way on sites which have a character limit- it is a talent to write your story in so few characters

“We are made to think in certain ways by the Internet” - just taking something you mentioned in the original post. I think this is a great way of summing it up, it actually creates stereotypes: when I think of Facebook, in particular the use of Facebook status’ I think of moany people who have nothing better to do than sit around posting about stuff that upset them or went wrong in their day.. however when I actually explored this I found that my twitter was full of exactly this! Irrelevant, mostly negative, thoughts that people post online for others to read about give sympathy over. Why did this not dawn on me sooner? Because of the word-count! I just assumed oh Facebook has no word count therefore its full of negative miserable updates when actually, although they maybe are not as long character-wise, twitter had more. 

The point you make about double personalities is interesting: Zuckerberg: "Having two identities for yourself is an example of a lack of integrity". Facebook aimed to move toward detailing the real person behind the screen, it asks factual data - location, age, sexual orientation, education etc. Noticeably Facebook’s main competitors - twitter and Instagram - do not ask for this kind of data. This could perhaps be a hint towards the future of social media as promoting us to lead double lives. Twitter saying the things you don’t want to say out loud, and Instagram posting the most artistic, photogenic pictures possible to give the best representation of yourself.

And here you are sharing it on yet another platform!I think it’s a good concept - I would never have seen this if it had not been shared across social media channels, as I never read The Independent. Therefore I guess it’s a great way for getting stories and advertisements out across to a broader range of viewers and thus increasing audiences. 

Yeah, I think it’s quite funny that on Twitter and Facebook you have pages that are things like “Best of Tumblr” or something.  And on Facebook you have a link to share things to Instagram etc.  Not everyone has these different types of social media, so people share info across each one to reach more people.  I also like that there are all these different sites and they’re all used for slightly different types of communication, yet they are all linked to each other.  Because the majority of people will have more than one of these accounts, does that mean that they are different types of people when they use each one?  If things get shared across all media sites anyway, why not have just one? I guess it’s about what you want to say and how you want to say it as well as what info you get from each one. 

The idea of cross-platforming between Facebook, Insta and Twitter is interesting. When I first noticed the ability to share my Instagram post to Facebook I thought ‘what a weird idea why would a company want another major competitor advertising within it?’ but then I began thinking about mutual advertising and how it could perhaps be the companies coming together for the benefit of the user. The acknowledgment of the Instagram by Facebook adds intertextuality and another level of social media depth rather than making one seem isolated from the other. 

Since Facebook’s launch in 2004 there have been 1.13 trillion likes, and there are 4.5 billion Facebook likes every day and each minute there are 3,125,000 new likes... Insane. Liking is a form of human acknowledgement which is important in the online world because it gives what we post online a purpose and a value - so if your photo doesn’t get any likes its as though it has no value! The like button also helps us to affirm who we are by showing what we are interested in, so it helps us to give ourselves an identity in a ‘fake’ world which is also important to achieve! 

Yeah I think that people are naïve to think that they have any privacy online.  You should know that as soon as you put anything online it is no longer private.  I think that people have a right to keep some things private if they can, like phone numbers or something, because Facebook keeps asking me for that but that’s not something I want out there.  So I choose not to put it anywhere online.  But if I found anything online that I wanted to keep private then I would not be happy.  I think that Privacy is key to keep you safe from hackers and fraud and things, but I also see your point.  For things like advertising then it’s fine!  Sometimes really useful!   Basically, if you want to put anything about yourself online then don’t expect it to be private and don’t complain when you find out that it isn’t. 

In my opinion, people have the ability to share and post what they like online, and in the process have the ability to make the conscious decision as to whether what they are doing is a good idea or not. If you are not happy with having a lack of privacy online, then maybe you need to re-evaluate what you’re posting, and whether it is appropriate or not for worldwide viewing/ access.

In 2013 (I think) Google apologised for going too far with data collecting - they violated privacy rights. You know google’s street view? Whilst taking the photos of the roads etc they took loads of personal information from unencrypted wireless networks, not just a few either, millions!  I do believe that we are the saboteurs of our own privacy though, how many times do we press ‘I accept’ to cookies, fill out forms asking irrelevant information, upload photos (on Facebook alone 300 million are uploaded every day), post or tweet aspects of our personal lives? I rarely see petitions from real people about privacy issues, probably because they seem so minor in comparison to other world issues, but  if the internet user DID stand up and said no to extensive data collection, surely it would be us who held the power? after all we are consumers - they need us. 

I kind of agree with this yeah, because I do think that people find themselves looking at their phones when they have nothing to do.  But they are also used as a barrier to sort of maintain someone’s positive face, I guess.  By looking at your phone when someone sits next to you on the train is just a way of letting them know that they don’t have to talk to you.  They might not have had any intention of looking at it then.  It’s just sort of the modern day book or newspaper which is easier to carry around.  And because the world is always moving and new things are always happening, people’s phones are where they get a lot of their info in order to keep up with everything.  It’s increasing communication- making it asynchronous, as well as also being a way of avoiding people. 

The intertextuality of this photo is great, a photo of a post-it note! Growing up my parents didn’t use mobile phones it was only me and my brothers who did.. so they had no understanding of what it was like to own one and therefore didn’t like us using them much around the house. However, since they both got mobiles its been a different story! It’s now us ‘children’ who can’t seem to hold their attention for long before their phones steal their eyes, dinging away with emails and texts. I think this is very reflective of how older generations will often criticise what they don’t understand, and also how technologically capable the younger generations are!