Jack MacIntire

Tamir, Diana and Jason Mitchell. “Disclosing Information About the Self is Intrinsically   Rewarding.” PNAS 109.21 (2012): 8038-8043. PNAS. Web. 3/2/14.

            This source is a study from the psychology department at the University of Harvard. What this study finds is that we actually reward ourselves (through the release of chemicals) for expressing our thoughts and feelings to others. We often choose to disclose about ourselves more than we choose to disclose about other information, and doing so might actually yield a higher reward response. It is believed that roughly 30-40% of our communication efforts are put solely into informing others of our own subjective experiences.

  Trottier, Daniel. Social Media as Surveillance. Burlington: Ashgate Publishing Company, 2012. Print.

            This book by Daniel Trottier takes a look more closely at social media specifically, and the surveillance methods that are associated with them. Daniel delves into the world of social media as dwelling places where people spend way too much time and devote way to much energy. In a world where privacy is essentially eliminated online, worlds can unknowingly collide, bringing everyone in your life together, whether you like it or not.  Daniel explores the consequences of living in our newfound social media “dwellings” and the difficulties we all face when worlds collide, i.e. pictures from last nights party end up on a social media site, making them visible to everyone in your workplace, including your boss. Oops!

  Remington, Alex. "Social Selection and Peer Influence in an Online social network." Journalists Resource RSS. Harvard Kennedy School, 12 Jan. 2012. Web. 04 Mar. 2014.

  My second article that I found is called Social selection and peer influence in an online social network and this article talks about how we pick our friends and stay connected with them online. Basically the article said that we pick our friends based on our social standing and our interests. The example that I used was that if I was into video games than I would generally have a group of friends that love video games as well. Online it is easier for us to have friends outside our interest group, because we don’t have to have any face-to-face social interaction, so it is easier to hide our true selves.

            I could use this article because it provides interesting insight into where our Facebook friends are actually coming from. This information is useful because it helps to point out the differences between our online selves and friends we have, and our actual selves and friends that we have.

Weigel, Margaret. "Why Most Facebook Users Get More than They give." Journalists Resource RSS. Harvard Kennedy School, 29 Feb. 2012. Web. 04 Mar. 2014.

              The first article that I chose called Why most Facebook users get more than they give was all about how Facebook is still used, and the popularity of Facebook. It talks about users called power users who ‘like’ and post things on Facebook daily and how they are growing in number. The article goes on to list bullets on studies that have been done on the use of Facebook and how it is changing and evolving.

            If I wanted to use this article in my paper I would take it as the stand of good things that Facebook is doing for our society. It is also helpful because it has a lot of concrete information like for example the fact that it talks about all of those studies shows me that I can use that information in my paper. It also provides insight into the actual Facebook user, which is very helpful.

  Jones, Haley. “Social Media’s Affect on Human Interaction.” HASTAC (Humanities, Arts, Science and Technology Alliance and Collaboratory). 7 June 2013. Article. 3 March 2014.

The beginning of an online identity

The article The Social Network by Alissa Wilkinson starts out with her telling her own story of how she found what was thefacebook.com now we know it as simply Facebook. She talks about a summer job that she had the previous summer and how she wished that she was able to keep up communication with her friends from that job, but at that time there was no way to do that. She opened her email and saw that she had received an email that she originally thought was spam from thefacebook.com. Right before she was about to delete the email, a few people walked by and she heard them mention something about Facebook. So she thought, Why not open it up.

            She goes into discussing how the new site was quickly disrupting the productivity on her campus and how people began to use the term “just facebook me.” Wilkinson talks about what the new website was doing to the availability of information about random people in your college classes for example. She is now able to keep in touch more easily through this website and this was very exciting for her. She can hardly remember a world where you were unable to get someone’s phone number or see a picture of a friend online.

            The article then goes on to discuss the movie The Social Network and talk about the sophomore at Harvard Mark Zuckerberg that ended up changing the world with his website. His story starts out with him creating a website after having a couple of beers, which ends up bringing down the Harvard network system. She talks about how the movie is really about his friends and people that he knows and how the ideas and the whole website began. She says it’s a story that embodies a generation of people that will change the game.

            Wilkinson talks about that writer of the movie and how he puts in truths, but lets the audience ask questions about the actual story of how Facebook came to be. She then goes more into the story that The Social Network closely follows. She talks about how Zuckerberg hacked Harvard’s network to create a site when he was drunk called Facemash.com. She discusses how he had to deal with a website that was thought up by Cameron and Tyler Winkelvoss and their business partner Divya Narendra in which he promised to do the programing for but never started that.

            She talks about how the writer of the movie does a good job avoiding clashing stories of what happened next and how the writer really leaves some of the story up to interpretation by the viewer or reader. As she continues the story, she discusses the movie and the plot line more, and talks about how Mark Zuckerberg and Sean Parker are in essence, beating the system right now in that they are not earing money in the conventional ways and acting like the have a lot of money. The money isn’t exactly what they care about, its more about being out there and being popular to them or rather, being noticed. She talks about how all Zuckerberg wants to do is crave to belong throughout the whole movie, but what Zuckerberg ends up doing is actually pushing people away because of his lack of knowledge on how to socially interact.

            Finally she says though Zuckerberg is not the most desirable character in the story, we must thank him because he was ground breaking in his field and did in fact change the world.

  (Facebook)

    A World of Online Communication

If you asked someone in the early 1990’s whether a social media website for casual use on the Internet was possible, they would have thought that you were crazy. Yet less than ten years later, that’s exactly what we have. It is truly unbelievable, how much our world has been changing and how quickly it has all happened. I remember the first time I heard about Facebook. I was in seventh grade, and I was taking the bus home from school when I over heard some kids talking about this new ‘Facebook’ that they just got. At the time I knew what MySpace was and I knew that some people had them, but it wasn’t something that I felt like I needed to get. The kids on the bus made this new thing called Facebook sound so cool, and so when I got home I went on the home computer and looked up Facebook. After signing up, I was completely addicted. I remember going on Facebook almost every single day when I got home from school. I still use Facebook today, not nearly as much as I did back when I first discovered it, but it is still a big part of my life. Facebook changed the world, and I think that Wilkinson really captures that in her article. It definitely changed my world that is for sure.

(Online Communications) 

Who actually cares?

This article is definitely geared towards people that are aware of Facebook and people that are in a certain age range. It would most likely not mean very much to the older community simply because a lot of them don’t have a Facebook and wouldn’t be able to navigate one. It also wouldn’t be very important for someone that is young enough to always remember when Facebook was around. The article provides the prospective of being first introduced to Facebook and so for someone that is young enough that Facebook was always in his or her lives; they would be unable to relate to that perspective. This article also does a good job explaining enough about the movie The Social Network that if the reader has not seen the movie it is still worth their while to read this article. On the other hand, you have seen the movie (like I have) then you are engaged enough by the subtle critique that Wilkinson provides.

(Facebook Movie)

                                                   Y?

Wilkinson is writing on a subject that has many angles that you can attack it from. So it is fitting for her to talk from her perspective of how she found Facebook herself. Facebook was one of those things that happened really fast and changed the world very fast as well. To me it seems obvious that Wilkinson thinks that this change in the world is something that needs to be discussed. She lived the change like many of us, and felt like she needed to talk about it. For the most part, this article is written to discuss and pose questions, but there is also some critique aspects too when she talks about the movie. Wilkinson uses personal anecdotes to begin the article, then brings it more into the telling of the story of Mark Zuckerberg. As she tells the story, she discusses the movie and how it portrays certain things in the story, and how the movie makes us think about the story being told.

(Why?)

                                Where is she coming from?

 As she writes the article, Wilkinson is seems to be a deep thinker. She has the underlying topic of how Facebook has changed the world and how the world is different with Facebook in it. She shows signs of sympathy when she talks about how Mark Zuckerberg will always be just slightly separated from the social world, yet he is the one that brought it online. She questions how Zuckerbergs generation will be different because of the technology created by him. Wilkinson throughout the article doesn’t show a very strong stance because of the way that the article is laid out. It is mostly a story telling article with not as much commentary, so the only way that we are able to hear her voice is through what little critique and anecdotes that she provides.

(Alissa Wilkinson)

What is style is in right now?

I think that the style that the author chose, the style of a basic article movie critique was the right one to choose. It might have been ironic to choose a blog post or even a Facebook post to share the article, but I think that the way that she did it was based on the fact that she discusses the movie and it is almost a movie critique. Bottom line is, Wilkinson did it the best way that it seems, and I don’t know what other way would have been better.

     Blog… Blog… Blog…

I loved creating my first blog. Right now I am mostly just using it for beautiful pictures, and I think that I will continue to use it for photography, but it is a very interesting idea for me to think about following written bloggers. I feel like that community is something very up and coming and I would like to be a part of it. As for myself, posting on Tumblr, I don’t believe that I will post too many written things especially after this class, but you never know, maybe I will become one of those angry rant bloggers that just writes angry words for the world to see or maybe an intellectual blogger who cares about the true purpose and wants to discuss life. Tumblr is a new cool medium for writing and it has lots of potential, I am glad I have a Tumblr and I will continue to use it.

Works Cited

Asad, Taimer. Facebook Movie. Digital image. Redmond Pie. Microsoft, 28 Feb. 2011. Web. 24 Feb. 2014.

Digitalkatie. Online Communications. Digital image. Digital Media Computing. N.p., 1 Oct. 2012. Web. 24 Feb. 2014.

Johnston, Casey. Facebook. Digital image. Ars Technica. N.p., 12 Nov. 2012. Web. 24 Feb. 2014.

Miller, John G. Why? Digital image. QBQ. N.p., 2010. Web. 24 Feb. 2014.

Summery: The article The Social Network by Alissa Wilkinson starts out with her telling her own story of how she found what was thefacebook.com now we know it as simply Facebook. She talks about a summer job that she had the previous summer and how she wished that she was able to keep up communication with her friends from that job, but at that time there was no way to do that. She opened her email and saw that she had received an email that she originally thought was spam from thefacebook.com. Right before she was about to delete the email, a few people walked by and she heard them mention something about Facebook. So she thought, Why not open it up.

            She goes into discussing how the new site was quickly disrupting the productivity on her campus and how people began to use the term “just facebook me.” Wilkinson talks about what the new website was doing to the availability of information about random people in your college classes for example. She is now able to keep in touch more easily through this website and this was very exciting for her. She can hardly remember a world where you were unable to get someone’s phone number or see a picture of a friend online.

            The article then goes on to discuss the movie The Social Network and talk about the sophomore at Harvard Mark Zuckerberg that ended up changing the world with his website. His story starts out with him creating a website after having a couple of beers, which ends up bringing down the Harvard network system. She talks about how the movie is really about his friends and people that he knows and how the ideas and the whole website began. She says it’s a story that embodies a generation of people that will change the game.

            Wilkinson talks about that writer of the movie and how he puts in truths, but lets the audience ask questions about the actual story of how Facebook came to be. She then goes more into the story that The Social Network closely follows. She talks about how Zuckerberg hacked Harvard’s network to create a site when he was drunk called Facemash.com. She discusses how he had to deal with a website that was thought up by Cameron and Tyler Winkelvoss and their business partner Divya Narendra in which he promised to do the programing for but never started that.

            She talks about how the writer of the movie does a good job avoiding clashing stories of what happened next and how the writer really leaves some of the story up to interpretation by the viewer or reader. As she continues the story, she discusses the movie and the plot line more, and talks about how Mark Zuckerberg and Sean Parker are in essence, beating the system right now in that they are not earing money in the conventional ways and acting like the have a lot of money. The money isn’t exactly what they care about, its more about being out there and being popular to them or rather, being noticed. She talks about how all Zuckerberg wants to do is crave to belong throughout the whole movie, but what Zuckerberg ends up doing is actually pushing people away because of his lack of knowledge on how to socially interact.

Pathos: This video is about olympic athletes and how the only way that they got to where they are now is because their moms helped them and believed in them when they were younger. It appeals to emotions, because the athletes thank their moms at the end, and they are very emotional. 

http://youtu.be/57e4t-fhXDs

Logos: In this video an author named John Green talks about the daunting question that is "Is College Worth It?" He talks about the economics of it through a very logical perspective, and he talks about the life experience gained through college. All of this is very logical and makes a lot of sense.

http://youtu.be/t_N7MAr98CI

Ethos: This last video is about one of my favorite players on my favorite football team, Derrik Coleman on the Seattle Seahawks. I am from Seattle, so this video means that much more to me. Coleman is a running back that was born deaf, but now able to be one of the only players in NFL history to play in the NFL. Ethically it is so cool of these coaches and teammates of Coleman to play with him even though he has some hearing impairment. Very cool, and ethically just.