+/- 1000 of what I feel about this project.

Social media has been both a blessing and a curse to our society. In many ways, it has helped publicize certain aspects of personalities and opinions that were really hard to get people to understand. If an eccentric person wanted to express themselves before social media on the internet, they could only do it on the streets or in person, and people look at that person as a weirdo because that was the only way to express themselves before. Now, the internet and social media have made it easier to express oneself in another way that people can understand a little bit easier. Now, people can use words, tag themselves in pictures that they feel express their personality, and even post videos of themselves doing what they feel is part of their regular life and personality on the web and on social media websites so the whole can get to “know” them.
Now, one might wonder how on earth this ties into the final project. One way I saw social media affect the way reality shows get their characters was through social media sites. For instance, Snooki was a celebrity on Youtube before she became the recent fixation of pop culture fame. She would have probably continued being just a mere Youtube sensation, but since most reality shows use social media sites to recruit cast members, this helps the reality show find people easier. Before the age of social media, casting calls set up all around the country helped recruit characters for those kind of shows. Now, social media has allowed creators not only to choose characters, but also, many sites allow users to vote for the character they’d like to see. In many ways, social media has created access to viewers or potential viewers to pick who they want to see on tv, which is like a feedback loop. This interaction with social media allows the creators of shows to put what they feel viewers want to see, and with this, a specific niche of people will watch these shows and ultimately decide who and what goes on each show.
Due to this look, reality television can become more dangerous than what one feels. Some shows, like “Flavor of Love,” “Rock of Love,” and “The Real World” rely on these methods to pick their potential characters for the show, and consequently, the viewer can easily forget that the shows are not being designed solely by the creators but also, but the viewers who vote on social media sites. As a result, certain shows will reflect the values and interests of the viewer, even such things like misogyny, promiscuity, alcohol abuse, and insensitivity towards infidelity. This can make the viewers just as guilty as the creators of the shows when it comes to keeping the cycles of inequality for people active.
For this project, I really saw that reality shows take up many of the aspects of social media and the effects it can have in today’s society that is part of a very strong “instant gratification” era where everything is just a google search away. When we needed an answer or an inspiration for something, we could just youtube it or facebook it to see if it was popular. It was kind of scary how fast an answer could be found simply by having a ton of people like it and design a website where followers post information. I saw that one doesn’t necessarily need to have anything more than an interest in something that someone else in the world likes, and you can have a tv show. We all liked shows like 16 & pregnant, Jersey Shore, and The Real World. But we found this out in the classroom. Whenever I was on facebook typing something about these shows on the search bar, it kept suggesting the fan page for the shows for me, with each group filled with at least 300,000+ members. It was ridiculous.

The dangers that I feel come out from social media and reality show interacting with our daily lives is that there is no doubt these two factors affect us in ways we wouldn’t imagine. Reality shows like Jersey shore glamorize superficiality and hard partying with lots of sex, and just speaking with some underclassmen about the show and what “profound” lessons they learned from the cast on the shows really scared me. A lot of them started liking the show after they were asked to join a fanpage on facebook that linked them to clips of the show. Some of the kids never saw the show before clicking the link, so it was scary how they just devoured the show after a simple click on the “like” button.
If this project has taught me something, it has taught me that reality shows and social media have blurred the lines for people when it comes to what they want to show the world. Reality shows show how people do a lot of things (even mistakes) and the entire world just needs to tune in and watch, while social media and networking sites allow anything about a person to be posted whenever and wherever. It’s scary, but without it, we wouldn’t really be able to share certain aspects of ourselves to the world as fast as we’d like to.

Final Project Reflection

Now that this project is over, I’m going to come clean: honestly, I have never really been a fan of social media. Facebook is fun to check but having conversations that anyone can read is weird. It takes too much energy to censor everything you say on a friend’s wall but I’m not willing to risk the consequences of having the wrong person see thing wrong thing. Admittedly, I’ve never tried Twitter but it sounds ridiculous. I don’t know anyone who would care to read 160 character updates of my life; if someone wants to know what I’m doing, they can ask. It just goes downhill after that. Out of curiosity, I tried Chatroulette. Luckily, I didn’t run into any creepy old men…all I got was a black screen. (Sidenote: It started working a minute after I typed this…I got a couple of middle schoolers, a man with tattoos who worked in corporate finance and asked me to “show your tits”, and two flashers before I gave up. I liked the black screen better. Much better.) Maybe my aversion to social media is because of my complete inability to use technology or maybe it is because of the massive abuse of social media that occurs today. Regardless, I was less than excited when I heard that a major component of our final project would be the use of social media. Throughout the project, I found that social media would prove to be extraordinarily useful but also extremely frustrating.

Without social media, mainly Facebook, it would have been impossible for us to finish our project. It was a place for us to discuss the reality show with each other, remind people to bring costumes, keep track of daily activities, share what we were working on, and post pictures and videos of our successes. We managed to utilize the messages, groups, discussions, and picture and video uploading features of Facebook. Looking at the MOMA page really helped. It was a bit of an unobtainable goal, since I’m sure the MOMA hires publicity people to run their Facebook page, but it showed us how to use the technology we had to our advantage. In theory, the whole thing sounds perfect. However, Facebook didn’t organize us quite as well as I had hoped. Since we were relying on Facebook as our main source of communication, this made the project much more difficult. I couldn’t help but wonder if the problem was with the technology itself or with us. Some aspects of Facebook really bothered me…it was hard to format the posts so that they were easy to read (I got so tired of clicking “see more” at the bottom of each post) and uploading the video itself was tricky.

There were definitely mistakes on our part too though. Not everyone checked Facebook; it was common for someone to come to school and have no idea what we were working on. When they asked, the information was often on Facebook. Personally, that was a big surprise for me. I assumed that people would check the Media and Society page when ever they went on Facebook but in retrospect, it seems clear that our class did not really want to mix business with pleasure. When people checked Facebook, they went on to look at their friend’s pictures and maybe send a funny YouTube link, not to do school work. We weren’t perfect at putting information on Facebook either; not everyone updated what they were working on. Understandably so, some groups would get so caught up in whatever they were working on that they would completely forget to record it. However, this was one thing that I feel we improved on as time went by. At the beginning, it was very strange to keep a record of what we did in class and of what we were planning on doing the next day. The more we did it, the better we got. It definitely took us a while to find our roles in the group but once a group of people started regularly updating the Facebook page, it became much more comprehensive and representative of our project.

Using social media for a school project was a new experience for me and in general, I wouldn’t call it a positive one. Don’t get me wrong, social media definitely has its place. It can be fun and can be used to spread information if used right. However, when used wrong (i.e. Chatroulette), it can be a disaster. For this reason, I do not feel it is appropriate for use in a work or school context. It is also hard to use something that is usually meant for entertainment for educational or business purposes; it is always tempting to stop working and to use it for fun. Technology that is used mainly for communication works much more effectively. Using social media in this respect is also difficult because you never really get a break. All of a sudden, something that had always been relaxing and fun is being used to do work. Recently, I was at a Challenge Success meeting and one of the middle school teachers brought up the need to have time away from work or school. She said that she does not check her email from Friday afternoon to Sunday morning and she encourages her coworkers to do the same. I really liked this idea of having a separation between personal time and work time. Advancements in technology make this separation even harder. Thanks to the iPhone, I have gotten emails from some teachers at two in the morning. I feel that our challenge now is to maintain a separation between business and pleasure, between our personal lives and our public lives. Some day, employees may be expected to check their Facebook daily and update their boss on their work. We have to make an effort now to make sure that the technology we use for entertainment stays separate from the technology we use to do work.

Reflection on Final Project II

Me as a boarder there is really nothing to do or I can do in the dorm. The only thing I can do is stay in my room the whole day and have fun with my laptop. Television, social network, Youtube, or anything that spreads media is really important for me. Every day I will go to a specific website and check out the newest episode or go on to facebook and check around what is going on. Everyone has one facebook page even my friends in Taiwan has it. From the massage they posted on each other’s wall I can see what is going on the other side of world. Or sometimes go to out for movies or rent a DVD. For me, media is something that entertains me or something gives me knowledge. Now, whenever or wherever there will always be some kind of media around us. For example, when you walking on the street picture will be display, music will be play, and television will be turn on. Also, this is not just in American but it is a universal trend. In Taiwan, ads are all over on the streets and pop song is playing in every store. Moreover, there are always some common things in the media of our society now. In Taiwan, most of the ads will have really skinny girls on it and a muscular guy on it. For song, it is always something really sexual, hatred or sarcastic. For me personally, media is something I cannot live without. When I am bored I watch some video clips and when I do my homework I turn on my music. Sometimes, I feel I am living in my own little world by the media. Any story, song, or information from the media u can always think that it is your own experience your own story. No one can hurt you because you can be selecting thing you wanted to hear or see. However, the bad thing is you will be block from the reality. you choose something that you wanted to know because there are so many choice to pick but when you walk back into reality there is nothing you can pick or choose. Media can avoid the things you don’t like but you cant do this in the real world. Media helps me every day by providing me entertainment but it also hurts me by pulling me away from the real world.

Reflection on Final Project

At the beginning I wasn’t really sure what were we going to do for this group project. We had a lot of different scene and a lot of different groups focus on different stuff. Everyone has their own opinion about what we should do. At the end, it came up two different themes, one of it is food and the other one is “the reality show”, which is the group I was in. We decided to make a video about “the reality show”, the story is basically about David who is a high school student and have a lot of things going on with all the different girls. While filming the video, I noticed that videotaping could be a really good way of keeping something documented and real. After filming we take it to the process of editing. The purpose of editing is making the video look nicer also get to the point of what we trying to say from the video. However, I think editing is making the whole video so unreal. We cut out the part we don’t like and we add something in, when we think is necessary in order to make it more interesting. From the whole process of producing the video, I realize nothing is real or unreal about the media. Today’s media is about what we want to see and what we want to say. We make the video base one the reality show and what we think is interesting. Or using Photoshop to make the picture how we wanted. All the technology is making everything really easy compare to years ago that we need so many equipment to make a film. Because of the technology is so easy and so convince, therefore, it require less people to work on the same thing. We have too many people in the same group and focus on the same thing, it become so unnecessary. But even though, it end up everyone has something to do and make everything really easy and be done really quickly. I love the part that everyone has their own opinion about the film but at the end everything fits perfectly. I think the reason why it ended up perfectly it is because what media show us and make us feel. For example, on the TV show, a cheating scene makes audience feels intense even though it happens in every drama show. Media make some common thought between people and make us think toward the same way from the massage which is spreading from the media. During these two weeks we use “face book” to become our communication place. People post some interesting video on it and some important information. Facebook is a really good place to spread some media information but it has no privacy. This kind of social network helps the media to spread fast to everyone. There are definite some good thing about the social network. For example, if you are trying do some community service and you need some volunteer, you would probably choose to post some ad on facebook instead of set up a table at a same spot everyday and wait for someone to come to you. Social network is so much faster than any other kind of communication between people. However, that it is so fast that you cannot stop it. When you post something on it, right at that moment there will be someone talking about it already. Especially on facebook, no one really understands the privacy rules on it but we only know it is connivance and fun. Technology helps people to make everything easy but also making other problems that makes people concern, just like everything we used to make a video which made everything easy for us but facebook makes us concern about our privacy and what will spread to other people.however, everything was done pretty fast due to the new technology and the facebook. we couldnt finish this project without any of these.

Reflection on the Project

I’m not going to lie: when we found out about this project I was less than thrilled. Basically because I assumed that our class would not be able to work together in any sort of cohesive way. And I didn’t much like the theme either… pop culture is more of a topic than a theme anyway. So I’m glad we were able to make that something more specific and focused. I’m actually pretty amazed that we were even able to get organized and finish a project. I think it probably could have been more varied—it seems like a lot of us ended up working on the reality show and quite a few of the original ideas fell by the wayside. But I think overall having the class focus on two major projects worked better than having a few people on many projects—it would have been much more difficult to finish them. So that’s my overall opinion on this project: I think it probably could have been better and gone farther, but was good all things considered (i.e. we are all second semester seniors and disinclined to get organized and work.)

So, my experience with using social media in this project. My experience here was largely just organizing the group on Facebook, so I suppose I learned a little about that. I thought more people would check Facebook than their school email, so it would be an effective means of communication, but I think people who don’t check their school email aren’t going to check a class page about a school project. But having it there was good—it did do its job in providing a central “location” for the group to meet/keep one another updated outside the classroom. But Facebook disappointed me a little in terms of its effectiveness as a community organizing tool—especially in regards to the reality show day. I think it’s because committing to something on Facebook seems less real than to committing to something in the “real world.” I think we still have this idea (as a society perhaps) that unless something is physically in front of you, it doesn’t entirely exist. Because of the somewhat ephemeral nature of Facebook (by which I mean that everything is always changing and moving and that there are no constants), do people feel they have less of a responsibility to commitments made via Facebook? The spirit day had 31 confirmed attendees and 25 maybes… but I think all of about 6 or 7 people dressed up total. I guess that goes for the real world too though… I’ve always heard that you should expect a quarter of the people who volunteered for something to show up. So the internet and life seem pretty similar in this sense. So Facebook worked well for the purpose of organizing our class, who knew to look for it, but not so much for the spirit day.
This project (or rather my side project that sort of sprang out of the larger group project) also allowed me to use Blogger, as site which, up until now, I had not been very familiar with. I’m reserving judgement here: I’ve always kind of felt like blogging is similar to confessional poetry: rather self-centered and telling more about people than I want to know. So for me, blogging was something new, and I didn’t particularly like it—I felt very pretentious, and am pretty sure that it will never be read, so I have to question the point of putting my ideas out there in the first place. If a blog is posted and nobody reads it, is it even still a blog? Because isn’t the purpose of blogs to be read? I need to stop getting philosophical about social media; I’ll just get frustrated.

School via Facebook?

Is social media leading the world toward a wikitopia or a chatroulette hell? It’s entirely possible I think. Although I’m not entirely sure what those words mean. I’ll look that up and get back to this. I do know that I’ve become very dependent on Facebook to stay in contact with people. It’s been weird creating a new persona for myself on Facebook as part of this project, and using it so much for this class. Because I found out that I do worry about what people think of me based on what I put out onto Facebook. But at the same time, that’s something over which I have control; this way I can decide exactly how much information about me I want people to have, which in actual face-to-face life, I can’t necessarily do. But online it’s like I can control peoples’ impression of me, and I guess that was more what my side project was about: can I get people to accept a completely opposite persona of myself by changing the way I interact and present myself on Facebook? (For results, see the blog I wrote about the project: http://makepeacerantings.blogspot.com/ ) But it’s been difficult with this project, because I do use Facebook in daily life, so I was constantly worrying “oh, if I put this on my account, what will people think of me?” etc. etc. But then I just decided that I needed to have fun with it and make a very ridiculous persona. The problem was that since I was trying not to use my other account at all, I kept wanting to use my fake one for all the stuff I would normally do, so I broke character a bit. As for the class work we did involving Facebook, that didn’t seem too odd: classes keep branching out into different ways of connecting with students via the internet, I suppose Facebook was an inevitability. It definitely is more efficient for organizing than the school email would have been. But I worry a little that if Facebook gets too used by classes it’ll just turn into Edline, and stop being somewhere where you can talk to your friends about things unrelated to school, or complain about school. It’s kind of like going home in the afternoon: you physically separate yourself from school, and can compartmentalize in that way. I feel like if Facebook became more school-centered, it would lose its appeal, because it would no longer be an escape. Should schools and classes utilize social networking sites to enhance their curriculum, or does this defeat the purpose of these sites that seem to be primarily designed for social rather than academic use? I’m interested to hear peoples’ thoughts…

Final Blog: Facebook and its' minions.

1. I have never done a project like this and I thought it was very interesting to combine schoolwork and social media. It was cool to integrate Facebook into a school project because that never happens! It made it easier for the whole class to know what was going on because we all had a centralized place to put our ideas that was accessible to everyone. I think this project would have been a lot harder if we did not have the Facebook page for it, this made it possible for people to work on it away from school and for everyone to still know what was going on. Although it was difficult for the whole class to be involved in everything, I think it turned out well and everyone had a part in all the aspects of the project. I really liked this project because it was a class effort but everyone still got to put in their own input and I think it will all come together really well. This project was an interesting experience, it really showed the immense incorporation of social media in the real world and how it is possible to use it for anything.

2. Social media (Facebook, twitter, MySpace, chatroulette, etc.) is taking over the world! Middle school and High school students’ lives are almost entirely based around social networking sites. Most of my friends and myself included get home from school and go on Facebook for the rest of the time we spend at home. From the time I get home around 3:30 pm to when I go to sleep generally around 11 pm I always have Facebook open. Facebook is slowly taking over my own life and it is hard to stop it. It is a great way to keep in touch with people and talk with friends but I really only talk to about ten people on it and the rest are people I never talk to. Social networking sites have become all forms of communication between teenagers. Many people will have their serious conversations over these sites instead of in person or at least on the phone. I think that these sites are kind of an escape from reality. It is easy to get away with a lot of things that you wouldn’t normally say or do in person.

Chatroulette could be a cool idea if the creepy people did not abuse it. It is an interesting way to get to know people around the world and it is completely anonymous. But, people who use it for inappropriate reasons ruin the idea. I do not think that we are heading towards a chatroulette hell because most people do not even know what chatroulette is and a lot of people refuse to use it. I have experienced chatroulette because I did not know what it was so my friend and I went on it and we just thought it was hilarious. I would never use it seriously because it has become such a joke, due to the fact that no one really uses it for it’s true purpose.

Separation of professional/ school life and social life (one’s life on Facebook) is difficult, I think, for teenagers these days. Too much stuff happens on Facebook daily that when people come to school, it is talked about often. Most conversations among teenagers happen through Facebook and it then becomes an integral part of social life for high school students. I personally use Facebook constantly and it has almost become a habit to always want to check my Facebook. Every opportunity I get to check my Facebook, I take it. So much of my social life is focused around Facebook and it is actually sort of gross. Although there are definitely still a lot of social happenings that occur in “reality”, everything has become so technology based. I personally think people need to begin interacting without Facebook but it has already become a primary source of communication that there is no way people will stop using it. So, our reality is quickly drifting towards its technology caused death.

I do not think there is very much privacy in our world these days, so much information is put on Facebook for everyone to see and that is then continued into our so-called “reality”. Although we may think we have privacy from people, anything and everything you put on Facebook is forever kept in the abyss of the Internet. Even people without Facebook are still mixed up in this alternate world through other people’s photos, videos, etc. Just because you don’t have a Facebook does not mean you aren’t on Facebook. We cannot get away from this leading power of social media and it will simply continue to capture our real lives into its evil grip.