Blog 2

Honestly, I found the documentary in class a little disturbing. The message that I got from Clifford Nass in the documentary was that technology was and is made up to be this great "tool" to use in everyday life, but it's becoming a problem in modern society. Maybe it's because I come from a small town, where half the student population is "plugged in", and the other half is so far removed from it because they would rather be out "enjoying nature" (aka, being typical rednecks), but I find myself taking away from both sides of the issue. On one hand, technology is great, it makes it easier to network for school and jobs like using it to help with homework, and it makes it easier to communicate to family and loved ones long distantly. On the other hand, I stop and look around long enough when I'm in line at Starbucks, or that lag right before class starts, and it's a sea of people surrounded by each other staring at their phones, laptops, and tablets. I realize that it can be boring sitting alone in class, or standing in line, but I personally feel like half the time I'm trying to "kill time" in those situations I'm actually just staring at a blank screen, pretending to be busy. Since when is that being sociable? 

I do admit, I'm addicted to Facebook, and Snapchat, and texting, and email, but I try to keep it to a minimum. I know that when I'm driving, I'm the world's most terrible driver when I'm on my phone, so I'm never on it. Same with homework: I get distracted from it with an incoming phone call, text message, Snapchat, Skype call, Hangout, new comments on Facebook.... The list of distractions goes on. I agree with Nass, how can people get anything done with so many distractions? I feel like I have too many, and I'm not even on Twitter or Tumblr or any of the other (what I like to call) "hardcore" social networking sites. 

I know I get distracted easily, and therefore, I try to limit my distractions while I'm doing homework, like going to the library. It could be that I'm terrible at multitasking, or it could just be me procrastinating, but I find that going to the library or cafe to do homework helps me focus on one thing at a time. I know I'm there for one specific reason and I use my time more wisely. 

I'm not exactly sure how this relates to race/gender/class/sexuality, I suppose one could say that "women multitask the best", but I don't think that's true because I know a lot of people that could easily prove that statement false. 

Blog 1: Why Study 'the Internet'?

Prompt:

In creating a methodology for web sphere analysis, Foot contends the need to archive on the basis of preserving both the “bits of the content” and “also the experiential dimension” of online, specifically site oriented, interactions.  Could we extend this methodology to incorporate analysis of social media sites? What changes would we have to make; is the dynamic nature changed within SNS’s? How does the ‘link’ (“the essence of the Web”) get complicated within SNS’s.

How might a comparative study look between Foot’s web sphere analysis of post-911 production and that of the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing? Look at Table 1.1 and hypothesize upon the sites of enabling expression.  How would SNS’s come into play?

I think it would be difficult to analyze social media sites today, but I also think with the "invention" of people using hashtags, it could also be a bit easier. Using hashtags makes it easier to see who else in the online world is talking about the same things you are, and the more people use in posts, the more likely it is that one can find more people talking about the same thing. I think that if people did an analysis on social media sites, they could easily start with using hashtags, although not everybody uses them in every single post, so therefore it could also be difficult to find and group posts of the same topics. That being said, I do think that since there are so many different users and pages on any given social media site (Facebook, Twitter, etc) that it makes it hard to look through all the posts, pictures, likes, etc. If everybody used hashtags, and used them to the fullest extent, I think it would make it easier to analyze information on social networking sites. 

On the other hand, I think that social networking sites can become very complicated very quickly. For example, take the 2013 Boston Marathon Bombing. Almost instantaneously my friends in my news feed on Facebook were posting about it. Looking back, I am shocked about the type of people that were posting about it. Almost all of them had lived on the West coast most of their lives, and very few had any kind of tie to Boston, or the marathon. They were posting because they had probably seen it somewhere on somebody else's page, and they had just shared the link, video, or story. When people share links like that that, it's sometimes very hard to figure out where the link originated from. 

Using the article and table 1, it could be said that personal online sites get and provide the most expression on topics (in this case the September 11 attacks). One could extrapolate these findings to incorporate the expressions that were expressed towards the 2013 Boston Marathon Bombing. Like I said before, my news feed on Facebook was packed for days with posts about the Bombing, and many people were "liking" and commenting in support of the people that were there, witnessed it, were injured, or knew people that fell into one of those categories. People were constantly updating the news on the subject with everything that they could find.

I think it's an important tool to be able to utilize the social networking sites, but I think there are a lot of rumors that get started that way, especially when everybody is pulling information from different sources.