Disconnected

I just returned to the United States from Aruba late last night.  Starting Wednesday, July 12th until last night, I was almost completely disconnected from the Internet... and social media.  Our resort's Wi-Fi was "overloaded" (basically, their Wi-Fi could not support the number of people who wanted to use it) and I didn't have an international cell phone data plan.  Some of the restaurants we visited had limited Wi-Fi, so I could check-in on the happenings of family and friends and check-in with school-related items.  You don't really realize how active you are on social media until you are without it.  

I've heard people say "when you disconnect from social media, you reconnect with life."  From my experience, I'm not really sure that's true.  I wasn't able to communicate with my family and friends in the United States.  At all.  Many of my family and friends are going through life events and I couldn't check-in:

• My dad is recovering from a hip replacement
• My mom just bought a new home
• One of my sisters just announced she is pregnant
• My other sister started a new job
• My best friend's grandmother is in the hospital

Rather than reconnecting with life, I felt shut-out from it.  

What do you think?  Does disconnecting from social media reconnect you with life?

LinkedIn as a PLN

Confession:  I used to think of LinkedIn was just an online resume.  

I created an account in 2008 and I am pretty good about updating my information.  I connect with family, friends, and former colleagues.  That's about it.  I never really understood the breadth of what LinkedIn has to offer.  

This week I spent a lot of time taking a closer look at LinkedIn as a PLN and I'm really glad that I did!  I connected with students in our program, graduates of our program, and professionals in the field.  Now, my network is full of great posts and articles, many that are very relevant to what we are working on in this class.

I'm planning to continue working on my LinkedIn network, as it will likely be very beneficial once I graduate!

Loving and Loathing Twitter: Part Deux

Last week, I wrote a post called "Loving and Loathing Twitter." After immersing myself in Twitter for this class, I am feeling a lot more love and a lot less loathe.  I've really enjoyed connecting with you guys and learning more about Web 2.0-based learning and performance.  And, for those of you who gave me support to go down the water slide on the 4th of July... it still hasn't happened.  Womp.  Hopefully, I'll go before I head back to the U.S. on Friday!

For those of you who are still unsure about Twitter (or may have some the of the gripes listed in my previous post), I offer some advice to you:

• Make Twitter your own.  Work/school-related? Keeping up with friends? Following celebrities/athletes? Staying up-to-date with current events?  Maybe a mixture?  
• Clean-up your "Following" list.  I looked through mine last week and unfollowed people/accounts for various reasons.  Which brings me to my next piece of advice...
• Yes, follower reciprocity is polite.  You follow me, I follow you.  Yay!  But, sometimes I get really random followers.  If I don't know them or of them, I usually won't follow back.  This helps keep my feed more manageable.  A lot of these people/accounts are just fishing for followers, anyway.
• Hashtags are a great way to navitage Twitter.  Use them!

If you have any other Twitter advice, please let me know!

Snap Maps: Fostering a Global Community?

Earlier this week, I read a post by Alexis about Snap Maps.  Snap Maps are a new Snapchat feature that allow you to get a location-based glimpse of your friends and events happening around the world.  Here is a glimpse at my Snap Map:

I like the feature.  I think it's interesting.  Snapchat filters the content so that users aren't exposed to innapropriate or explicit snaps.  Also, Snapchat users can turn off the feature so their location isn't public.

I wanted to see what the Internet was saying about it.  Obviously, there were a lot of negative opinions about it regarding the safety of Snapchat users (especially young children who technically aren't supposed to be using it anyway...).  I want to focus on the positives.  I read an interesting NPR article that is relevant to our course material this week:

"'There's something incredible about this,' says Jill Walker Rettberg, a professor of digital culture at the University of Bergen in Norway. 'You can see the whole world. You can see life in a community you might not see otherwise,' she says...The notion that the map could foster a global community or sense of togetherness was important in Snap Map's development...Snaps are so often the most quotidian scenes that you'd see in the U.S. — only they're happening abroad: silly faces at happy hour, snippets from long car rides, a man salivating over a blurry plate of rice and meat in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, a woman trying to coax a squirrel over with food in Mexico City."

I like this perspective of Snap Maps fostering a global community.  Based on what you know about Snap Maps, do you think it has the potential to work?

What Do You Think?

Disclaimer:  This post includes some "colorful" language.

This week, I started reading The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F***: A Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life by Mark Manson.  In the first chapter of the book, he offered an opinion about social media:

"Our society today, through the wonders of consumer culture, and hey-look-my-life-is-cooler-than-yours social media, has bred a whole generation of people who believe that having these negative experiences- anxiety, fear, guilt, etc.- is totally not okay.  I mean, if you look at your Facebook feed, everybody there a f***ing grand old time.  Look, eight people got married this week! And some sixteen-year-old on TV got a Ferrari for her birthday.  And another kid just made two billion dollars inventing an app that automatically delivers you more toilet paper when you run out.

Meanwhile, you're stuck at home flossing your cat.  And you can't help but think your life sucks even more than you thought."

Social media doesn't make me feel like my life sucks.  My life doesn't suck.  In fact, it's pretty awesome.  Even when I'm feeling down, it doesn't make me feel worse. However, I kind of see his point.  After reading the chapter, I scrolled through my Facebook account. Many of the posts were in the category of hey-look-my-life-is-cooler-than-yours.  But I also noticed that people felt okay to post about their negative experiences.  For example, my sorority sister's three-year-old son just had surgery to remove a brain tumor.  He is currently undergoing more treatment and she posts updates about his progress.  She also posts about her guilt when she has to leave him to go to work and her fear that the treatment won't work.  She receive messages support and encouragement from her family and friends and but people have used Facebook and other social networking tools to start a fundraising campaign and meal deliveries.  

So, what do you think? Do we live in a  hey-look-my-life-is-cooler-than-yours culture where people feel it's not okay to post negative experiences?  Does social media add to the anxiety, fear, guilt, etc. that people already feel?

Some Quick Qualitative Research

I had some time to kill in the Orlando airport before I boarded a flight this morning, so I figured: "Why not collect some data?"  I decided to ask some of my fellow passengers about their social networking tools and habits.  I had a conversation with a gentleman and his granddaughter:

(Note: I received permission from the participants to post this information.  Their names have been changed)

Stanley (age 76)

Stanley was sitting in one of the large armchairs (you know, the ones with the outlets) reading a newspaper.  He was dressed for his Caribbean vacation: floral t-shirt, linen pants, and sandals.  Here's what Stanley had to say about social networking:

"I have a Facebook, but I don't know how to use it. My grandkids set it up for me.  They love the social media.  Their faces are always in their phones.  Heaven forbid they have a conversation with each other.  [My wife and I] don't have WiFi at our house and you'd think their world was over.  I do have the Internet.  I go on the Internet to check email.  Thats about it."

Alison (age 14)

Alison was sitting in the airmchair next to Stanley.  She didn't seem as thrilled to be going on the family vacation.  The entire time I spoke to Stanley, she was on her phone.  When she realized I was talking to her grandfather about social media, she was very interested to join the conversation.  Here is what Alison had to say:

"Snapchat is my favorite.  I'm on Snapchat all the time.  Old people don't use Snapchat, which is cool.  It's just for, like, younger people.  I like it because you can be private when you want.  Not like Instagram where you have to make the choice to be public or private.  I use Instagram sometimes, but Snapchat is way better. "

It was interesting having this social networking conversation with two different generations.  I'm hoping to talk to some locals when I get to Aruba about their tools/habits, so stay tuned!

Introducing: Context Collapse

Since we are discussing Web 2.0/social media and communities/networks, I wanted to post about context collapse.  I hadn't heard of context collapse until I started doing some research with Vanessa last spring and it is very relevant to our discussions this week.  Here's the best offline description of context collapse: When you were a kid, did you ever see one of your teachers outside of school?  Maybe when you were out with your friends?  How did that make you feel?  Your "personal world" collided with your "school world."  Who you were in school was likely very different than who you were outside of school.  

Context collapse happens frequently in online spaces.  Take Facebook... You are probably Facebook friends with family, high school friends, college friends, colleagues, etc.  How do you manage your self-presentation when all of these different contexts merge onto one platform?

It is a really interesting phenomenon.  I linked an article discussing context collapse and Twitter.  If you have time, it's a good read!

Click HERE for the article.  Happy reading!

Loving and Loathing Twitter

"Hi. My name is Lauren and I am a social media junkie."

I connect on my smartphone and on my computer.  I am a producer, a consumer, and I even conduct research about it social media. However, there is one popular social networking platform that hasn't quite clicked with me: Twitter. I have a love/hate relationship with Twitter. I think that's why I can't totally get on board with it, yet I can't quite let it go.  

Why I love Twitter...

• Real-time updates about current events
• Exposure to perspectives other than my own 
• Access to celebrities (yep, I'm that girl...)

Why I loathe Twitter:

• It's confusing (well, at least to me...)
• It requires A LOT of effort to keep up with conversations and hasthags (posts get buried)
• Bots/spam accounts (#amiright)
• Users hiding behind their keyboards to disseminate offensive content (fun fact: kids these days are calling them "keyboard warriors")

While my biggest gripe is the keyboard warriors (and there's nothing I can really do about that), conversations and hashtags getting buried is a close second.  

So, friends in the EME 6414 blogosphere... any tips or tricks to help alleviate this particular frustration?

Welcome!

Hi everyone!  Welcome to my blog for our EME6414: Web 2.0 class.  I've had blogs before (both personal and for other classes), but I've never really been great at keeping up with them.  I look forward to connecting with all of you through out blogs and various forms of social media!