Week 4 Blog
1. What are your thoughts about virtual environment and “life
on line”?
According to these week’s readings, it has triggered my
thought on the landscape of the virtual environment and what are the differences
compared to the real world. I agree with the idea that people will showcase
varied identities to the context of different social media. For example, in the
LinkedIn, people appear to be more professional; in the dating app, people will
be more attractive and use more edited pictures to present themselves; while in
the private social media app, people will be more authentic to their family members,
close friends, lovers, etc. “Life on line” offers people more opportunities to represent
themselves and it has also made the conversation spaceless and increased the proximity.
From this point of view, it indicates that technology determines culture to some degree. The article Interpersonal life
online mentions that people online are more likely to be brought together
by shared interests and more easily to become friends online. On the contrary,
in the real life, physical appearances are more important in the first stage.
Thanks to the “life on line”, people will have more chances to make the
acquaintances of strangers.
2.Do you feel there is a correlation between life online and
academic achievement, for better or worse?
I have no backup to say whether there is positive or
negative relationship between the life online and academic achievement, but it
is important to educate more homo zappiens, who are digital thinkers and
creative problem solvers. In the article Facebook
and academic performance, the writer points out that googling is not equal
to the ability of searching the information and making a relevance of what
people have found. Furthermore, we need to ponder on what is effective multitasking
during study. From my personal experience, emails or the text messages sometimes
quit me from reading the paper on computer because of the click-to-click information.
When I’m back, I’m already being dragged away and have to reread again. I
really want to discuss with the teacher and classmates on how to build up the
ability of multitasking. From the article, it’s interesting to know that original
purpose for the FB is to help residential college and university students to
identify students from other residence hall. The FB does make the study more flexible
and collaborative and help people have access to the resources, lessening the
space limitation. However, as what the article has mentioned, it is the ability
of filtering and making relevance of the information that matters. In a
nutshell, life online gives opportunities for better academic performance, but
at the same time it brings the bigger challenge for the new generation to make
good use of it.
Dear Boen,
ReplyDeleteYour illustration is organized and closely related to our discussions. I have a few questions about the first point. Firstly, you said that "life on line" provides people with platforms to get themselves represented. However, do you think that the our images on social media is equal to ourselves? Also, with the presence of spaceless conversation, there is also a new phenomenon called "smartphone addicts". Maybe in real life, we get even more isolated. As you mentioned in the second point, maybe the "life on line" has one essential characteristic: it distracts. Thank you for your post! I really enjoy reading it!
Sincerely,
Mengshi (Veronica)
This comment has been removed by the author.
DeleteHi Mengshi, thanks for the response. For your first question, I think sometimes people will not represent real themselves because of the self-comparisons (downward comparison and upward comparison). For instance, if people are reading about lives that are much better theirs, they maybe feel worse about themselves. Some people use the self-editing tools to beautify themselves after seeing the slim models on the social media, resulting in inauthenticity and even low self-esteem. For the second question, I totally agree with you that sometimes social media even get us isolated. According to the sociologist, people can manage their friends with no more that 150 and no more 15 people with intimacy relationships. However, most of the people have more than 150 friends on their WeChat and many of them have more than 1000 friends. It is very interesting that under the bottom of the "friends" list in WeChat, it says "You have xxx contacts." WeChat does not say that "You have xxx friends." There are differences between an acquaintance and friends. However, with the increasing friends in the Moments, it makes harder to for people to develop friendship from weak tie to close relationship.
DeleteHi Boen,
ReplyDeleteYour view of "Life on line" is very impressive. Actually the various identities are the reasons why people are so addictive to online platforms. Online life opens up possibilities for people to show delineating images and features in their daily life without risk of being doubted. For instance, people who are lack of strong willpower may present their hard-working images on social platforms to create a "determined and strong-minded person" online. It is like an updated version of their real life.
Thanks for your reply! It's true that people will sometimes adjust their behaviors and images on the social media according to the environment. “Our omnipresent new technologies lure us toward increasingly superficial connections at exactly the same moment that they make avoiding the mess of human interaction easy.” (Marche, 2012) In the Moments of WeChat, people give a like or leave some complimentary comments just in order to maintain the friendship. According to the WeChat 2016 users report, browsing and posting in Moments ranks top among the Top 10 things people do on WeChat. And the Like function and comments in Moments make people less likely to message their friends through the Chats function on WeChat.
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