Social Networking can be used to further advertise a firm's products to its users. In addition, it can also collect information from its consumers based on the feedback they give. Nowadays, Facebook users can create a page about their product or a firm can create their own Facebook account and use it to advertise their products or provide weekly updates or questionnaires to further survey their audience's thoughts and interests.
In a more personal perspective, social networking has now become a norm in the modern world, as much of everyone you know has at least one of the following apps: Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, or Snapchat. Especially when living in urban areas, everything is fast-paced and typically, people don't have time to casually meet on their 'free time' (due to commuter inconveniences or just the desire to have a small conversation instead of spending your ENTIRE day with this one person), so these apps help people connect each other and see what someone else is up to. You could even argue that people use these applications to contact others, as they find it more convenient with faster replies than they would with texting. (Sometimes, their preference is strictly based on the UI alone!)
The most obvious benefit of social networking technologies is the ability to stay connected and have the opportunity to meet people from all around the world who might share the same interests with you. A quick example from my own experiences, I remember introducing two friends online, one who lives in Tennessee and the other who lives in Greece; when they met and spoke, they felt like they've met their clone because of all the interests they shared with each other! But in the first place, neither ever had the intention of visiting each other's state/country, so without these technologies, these two highly compatible people would've never had a chance to meet, or at least, had a significantly lower chance of meeting.
Delving onto the aspect of "staying connected," these technologies, although criticized for their seeming encouragement of narcissism among users, actually provide what social scientists call "ambient awareness." In his article "Brave New World of Digital Intimacy," Clive Thompson defines it as, "It is... very much like being physically near someone and picking up on his mood through the little things he does - body language, sighs, stray comments - out of the corner of your eye." Thompson also talks about an acquaintance of his, Ben Haley, did not think much of Twitter when he first heard of it. Haley thought it was silly to post about every detail about your life -- "why would you subject your friends to your daily minutiae?" But as time progresses, Haley realized that he was beginning to find a rhythm to these posts, as if they were little puzzle pieces that formed together to showcase a picture of his friend's lives. As Thompson wrote, "This is the paradox of ambient awareness. Each little update - each individual bit of social information - is significant on its own, even supremely mundane. But taken together, over time, the little snippets coalesce into surprisingly sophisticated portrait of your friends' and family members' lives, like thousands of dots making a pointillist painting."
Of course it comes to no surprise there is a dark side to these technologies. Being connected is great and all but at times, these technologies become a platform for harassment and slander. What's even worse is that, since these technologies are designed to connect you and others with its platform when you are far apart, it also gives rise to a great opportunity to deliver anonymous attacks. In Jeffrey R. Young's "They're Back, and They're Bad: Campus-Gossip Web Sites", he states that "students have more ways than ever to post [anon] attacks on classmates, thanks (or rather, no thanks) to new and expanded online forums promising to be bigger and jucier than the infamous JuicyCampus."
These sort of websites encourage derogatory remarks to be said. Another forum called Peoples Dirt are said to create discussion boards aimed at students, organized by their state. The Maryland's attorney general described the site as "home almost exclusively to abusive, harmful, and embarrassing personal attacks on high-school-aged children."
Of course, these kinds of attacks don't only exist in blatantly abusive vessels like JuicyCampus or Peoples Dirt. They occur in even the most popular websites, like Twitter or Facebook -- they can occur pretty much everywhere.
I think these technologies will improve in the future, as businesses are always trying to find ways to improve their "product" for customer satisfaction. Twitter has undergone numerous updates, YouTube has gone numerous updates, and we all know the drastic change of Facebook's UI. I think these technologies' visual aesthetics will constantly morph and change according to the current fad or trend that works in marketing. Nowadays, a simple, modern, smooth-like chic finish seems to be what's selling nowadays in terms of logo appeal. (I mean, just look at Google's change in logo.)
"Brave New World of Digital Intimacy " by Clive Thompson, NY Times, Sept 7, 2008 http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/07/magazine/07awareness-t.html
"They're Back, and They're Bad: Campus-Gossip Web Sites," by Jeffrey R. Young, The Chronicle for Higher Education, Sept 4, 2009, p. A20+. Available at: http://chronicle.com/article/Theyre-BackTheyre-B/48220/
Comments
Post a Comment