The start of a new beginning

After completing modules 3 & 4, I now understand the significance of developing and sharing effective content. The modules started by explaining the value of content and the importance of a content strategy. The modules states "Not only is well planned content a great way to build trusting relationships with your audience, it can also help you support the needs of your business. The best way to achieve this is by ensuring your content reflects the unique perspective of your brand, while also taking into account the needs of your organization." By building a strategy around these fundamental ideas it will help ensure a path for your company to follow.

A content strategy is essentially a gameplay for how you would like to approach the coordination, creation, and distribution of an organizations content. By not using a content strategy it would be the same as a football coach telling his players to just go run around and see what happens. There always needs to be a plan to properly and effectively make your goals become achievements.

A community collaboration is the process by which clients and/or families receiving services, other community members, agencies, organizations, and businesses work together to share information and resources in order to fulfill a shared vision and goals. This is an extremely important process that can have a very large impact on the building of a social media. By creating relationships through helping other entities it only helps yours more.

After I read Chapters 4 and 5 in the book, I learned many useful principles to help build a fundamental community. I always had an idea of how important this is to the development of a good organization but these chapters extended my current knowledge. In chapter 4, the main idea was developing a vision statement and the impact that a well focused statement has on social media collaboration. The vision statement gives a basic guideline to their goals and the achievements that are ideal to be succeeded. My biggest takeaway from chapter 5 was purpose. when creating community collaborations it is important these are reasonable assumptions or known facts that this is a beneficial move and will not be wasted. Instead of just assuming a collaboration will help or doing it just to be a good organization there needs to be intent. By building a purpose it helps to center goals around a main reasoning in why you will be doing it.

Algorithms:

I have a very strict view on algorithms. The fundamental idea behind them is fairly a good concept to try and promote things to people that they will actually be interested in. However, the main issue is how much information is stopped from flowing through to a persons socials or web browser. A system that allows for anything random might be a bit better for the concept of being more unrestrictive and abusing algorithms. Algorithms have a clear impact on a healthy democracy and need to have some sort of change to help eliminate this issue. These complex codes should all for more information to be shared and instead started canceling out the data they find to be inappropriate. There should be no more suppressing news. I personally see the same channels and websites giving me my information even though I don't click it at all

Advertising:

The biggest idea that stuck out to me in this section was clickabait. As somebody that likes to watch videos that people post I have noticed how much clickbait is used even in the people of everyday life. If s small content creator that has a following of a few thousand uses it all the time then it makes you begin to wonder how often these big companies that get paid from visits on their sites will use it. It is absurd to think about how these companies abuse it without us even realizing it. These videos and posts are plastered in capitalized letters, exclamation points, and words such as "Greatest" and other words that make it feel like this has become your top priority.

Exposure:

In my view the most important traits of a social media consultant is creative and very knowledgable with technology. A social media consultant is somebody that specializes in social media strategy and planning. Companies and clients often contract their services to develop and improve a company's social media presence through marketing techniques and strategic practices. Being a creative individual helps the consultant to land more clients because they want to always be better than their competitors so they will be looking for something that is not like the others.

Watching this documentary has exposed me to quite a few things I did not know about. I was very unaware as to how manipulative social media companies are. Big data and algorithms are the weapons that these companies use against their own consumers. Big data is powerful because it gives the companies the ultimate insight. Big data is large pools of data, for social media companies it gives them unlimited information about the people that use their applications. This can be a very intimidating thing to think about because this gives the companies all the info they need to know to create these algorithms. Algorithms are just as scary and have a large impact on us as users of social media. Social medias use algorithms to give us advertisements of things we've searched before or clicked on. These two tools can be used against us consumers making us addicted because it shows us what they think we want to see. Think about how many times a random pop-up shows up and you click on it because tour immediately interested in it? I know for me personally instagram shows me advertisements of things I've either said or looked at all the time. These two tools are dangerous because it constantly draws the user to stay using their phones and rack up more screen time. This leads to extreme phone addiction. I personally will say that I tell myself "only 10 minutes" and then will find myself on a completely different site or social media 45 minutes later. These two powerful tools lead to serious addiction.

I found these two pieces of information to be extremely fascinating. In the video titled “We’ve been sneaking into your brains” I realized many things about my own social media consumption. Social media can sometimes be a detrimental platform for its members. Personally, when I look back on my social media I begin to realize all of those moments that It was not beneficial. In fact, there are very few moments that I think my phone usage and social media was useful. I can use my phone to make important phone calls and texts. However, I could also use my phone to sit on different apps for hours and waste productive time by scrolling at pictures of things I wish I had, Or thinking that those on the other end of these pictures I see are so much better off. These thoughts tend to have a bad impact on our image of ourselves. Once I had realized the impact on myself, i deleted all my social medias. 

One thing I would love to mention about the video was a remark he made early on. He said “Phones and social media are like slot machines”. This quote alone hit me head on like a train. When you enter a casino and see people on slot machines, they all look the same. In fact you'll see somebody with a slumped back, eyes fixated on the slot, hand on the handle, and no smiles until they get lucky. How does this relate to a phone and social media? We use phones and social medias to post pictures, posts, and updates. When you check your phone is it always something that gives you benefit of some sort? Or did you waste 3 hours scrolling about things you will never retain. Phones are just like slots. It could be a big benefit or little benefit that continues brining people back to pull the handle or to swipe right on your notification. Addiction can happen quickly. And when comparing these two you can now see how without noticing it, social media and phones are an addiction.