Week 3 blog post: How to interpret the technology?

The article “The Reader-to-Leader Framework ”elaborates on what motivates technology-mediated social participation and talks about the four successive levels of social participation: reading, contributing, collaborating, and leading. I’m more in favor of the side of soft technology-determinism. The social and cultural background play a very important role in leading the technology of social media. People maybe enticed to adopt an artifact or practice if others they know and trust are already involved (Rogers, 2003), so there comes out the function that called “People you may know”; Interesting and relevant content is the main reason for users get motivated in reading user-generated content, so it comes out the interface that enable the users to pick up their favorable areas when first log in; People also have a desire to stand out in a crowd, so there comes out the likes of posts, rewarding contributions with money and awarding points in learning systems. As we can see, the effective and popular social media should respond to the social needs in order to meet the needs of users. A good social app designer should not only be tech-savvy, but he or she also needs to have a better sense of how to motivate social participation from the cultural and social context.


Another article gives us an idea of how does Big data work in our society? Admittedly, big data makes many more social spaces quantifiable. However, do numbers speak for themselves? Big data Itself cannot represent an “objective truth”. At the end of each year, the most popular social media app in China “WeChat” will generate the big data about how many likes do the users give and receive, how many friends have they added, etc. It is very exciting to see those data of yourself, but it also intrigues me to think of the meaning behind these data. Does the number of friends means the intimacy of the relationship or the metrics for the popularity? Will frequency of contact indicate strength of relationship? We are all the interpreters of data and different people will have diverse interpretations. The data will lose the meaning and value if without context.

Comments

  1. ShunzeSeptember 20, 2017 at 2:18 PM

    Hi, Boen, I can't agree more with what you concluded in the end of the article that big data will be meaningless without context, which is commensurate with our reading this week. This point was also fully substantiated by your example of WeChat. Indeed, one may have +1000 friends on Facebook, Snapchat, WeChat and so on and so forth, but is the number of friends one established connections with on SNS tantamount to one's popularity in real life? Will big data be able to recognize the virtual status of one's online presence without the prior knowledge, namely the context or the background of his/her real life? I guess that's one of the important aspects worthy of more in-depth discussions for the researchers in the field and the rest of us.

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    Replies
    1. Christina BSeptember 21, 2017 at 10:28 AM

      Hello Shunze and Boen,

      I agree with you both and definitely connected with the assumption that numbers equate to intimacy and value. Facebook started to send how similar messages to WeChat where it tells us how many friends we made in the past month or gives us system-generated videos on notable friendship anniversaries. I find that a lot of the information has been superficial and we cannot divorce numbers from context. Numbers provide quantitative value but contextual analysis give us the greater picture.

      Best,
      Christina

      Delete

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