From telephones to television to facebook – new mediums, old fears

August 10th, 2010 • LIBR559M

“Does the concentration of power or wealth in social media, ie Facebook or Google,  worry you? Why?”

My main worry with the use of social media has always been that people won’t ever talk to each other face to face anymore; we’ll just facebook or text each other. But as I work my way through this class, I’ve started to think that these fears of mine are just that, fears, and I’m sure that people had the exact same worries about the telephone. But with new technologies come new social norms. So for example, it’s possible to have a meaningful conversation on the phone. New technologies give us more and new ways to communicate with each other – I don’t know that I really need to be comparing them to a face to face interaction like I’ve been doing; they’re just different ways of communicating. And really, when I think back to all the time I wasted as a kid and teen sitting watching tv, I think that social media is much better because the user is involved. At least with social media you’re thinking and engaging versus tv where I just lay on the couch and turned off my brain.

I found the Michael Wesch video super interesting. I hated! Elementary and high school and I didn’t do well at all. I think that if I had had social media as a learning tool, I would’ve done much better and probably enjoyed the learning process a lot more. Social media provides different ways of learning, students can pick a social media that they enjoy and use that as a facilitator to the learning process. Because I had such a hard time with my school work and graduated high school by the skin of my teeth and feeling stupid, I’m all for any new ways of teaching so that as many learning styles and possibilities get incorporated as possible. I want learning to be fun and I want everyone to believe that they are capable of learning (and teaching) because we are all on some level.

Now onto facebook…I do find it creepy that they customize their ads to me based on my profile. A friend of mine told me a couple of years ago that he had just sent a facebook message that had the words “New York” in it, and seconds later, ads for New York started coming up. He loved it and said it was convenient. I’d rather facebook mind its own business, but I guess since I’m using its services for free, that’s the deal. Part of the problem I can see with customizing ads like this is that maybe, just maybe, some of us want to see and try new things and we don’t want to be kept inside a little bubble or be put in a box and left there.

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