Essay 3 – Free service and production

As the development of the internet, all the information gradually became available on the net. It tended to be that we can find all the information we want there, music is also the same. Actually, the music industry has been changing, for example, the carrier of music. Between 1980 and 1990, the major format of music album is magnetic tape; the next decade it changed to CD; although it seems that CD is still the main format of music nowadays, but what about digital music, can you see how much it eat into the music industry? And how it gonna change the way it used to be.

According to research, CD takes the proportion of 90 percent of the revenue of the music selling while digital format shares the rest 10 percent, roughly. However, the thing is, people changed the feeling of physical CDs and the invisible digits. Some people buy the CD they want, but they mainly listen to the digital music on the computer and mp3 player. CD is more and more tend to be function as souvenir or collection. People do listen to digital music more and more.

I think, in the future, the music will be served more through the internet, and will be FREE. Internet users love the things with a tag named ‘free’. Where is a will, there is a way. As people have a need for free music on the net, there will be people fulfill it legally or illegally, and make money there. In the future, this will be legal and based on standard rules. What I said ‘free’ means that, people do not have to pay money for the music, instead, they offer something else, just like all the other free productions, for example, the newspaper Metro. Through the free music, music companies can sell the advertisements, bundle marketing information, branding, get a higher reputation of the singer, producer, composer, and the company themselves, also, word of mouth and so on. Through the free music the companies serve, they get the money back rely on the ‘side affect’ of their free productions and service.

Physical CDs will still exist, I think, because people like the thing they can touch and feel. In the future, CD will be more and more clear to be defined as souvenir and collections, instead of the carrier of the music we gonna listen to. Digital music will dominate our daily need of music; in addition, mostly they will be served free.

Mu Xiwei

Essay 3 – Social Media and the Future of Music

There are many big record companies in the world, and they are proud of their professional music producers and megastars. But they focus on their business ideas and profits, and it means that their music products are based on the popularity and for the most consumers, not everyone. So consumers can only choose the special products which attract them from the popular music. The social media, especially the Internet, can help everyone to produce and choose different kinds of music; and after they produce it, they can share it with their friends through the social media.

Consumers who live in different places have different tastes and habits about the music. Some of them may like the old-fashion music, but the traditional music industry only considers the common taste and habit of most consumers in order to maximize their profits according to the perspective of music business, then the record companies do not want to publish the old-fashion records without business hit. And some of them may want to enjoy their own special music. The minority of consumers with special tastes does not have any other choice. Recently, with the development and acknowledgement of social media, this kind of consumers can create their own music products, and publish them on the websites free, such as YouTube. Because of the relevant property of YouTube, the audience with the same taste about music can find these works and make comments on them easily. Also the social media creates the opportunity to find the old-fashion records without the republication by the record companies. Consumers who have the old-fashion records can share them with others who want to listen to them. The social media is the bridge between the owners and searchers, and it is also the bridge between the creators or producers and consumers.

The development of social media also provides technology and device companies with the channel to enter into the music industry. For example, Nokia published its new cell phones with its new website for sharing and downloading music in China. Of course, the success of iTunes music store is famous, and Apple is not only the technology company to produce computers and hard devices, but also an active entrant of music industry. More and more technology companies become new entrants, and they are new retailers in the music industry in order to promote their products and improve their services. So the actors of modern music industry include not only the traditional publishers, retailers and consumers, but also the new device and technology companies, and lots of individual creators.

In China, there are many websites to provide the service of listening to the music online, such like http://music.sina.com.cn/yueku/, and users can listen to the music online for free, build their music spaces, and create their own favorite records, then they can share them with others and find the music quickly and conveniently next time. But if users want to download the music to own them, they must pay for them. So many record companies promote their new music through these websites before they publish the records to the market. The social media is the channel to test new music by collecting the feedback of audience before it is published.

Lusha Wang

Essay 3 – The Music Industry 10 years from now

Some years ago the performers and artists had to go through the record companies to be able to make a living on their singing. The artists were on one side of the producing chain and the audience or the market was on the other side. The record companies handled everything in between. They had the expensive equipment needed to record music. Furthermore, the record companies were the key to a network with people organizing concerts and other events. Lastly, the record companies worked as marketers, they had the resources to make their artists famous.

Today, the costs of producing music are much lower. This implies that musicians can produce their own music. They are not any longer dependent on the record companies in this part of the chain. With the Internet the possibility to build a fan base without the record companies has also increased. If you already have a fan base, it becomes easier to plan a tour. Looking at it from this perspective it seems as if the record companies has played out their roles. There is no need for these in-between hands.

On the other hand, even if the single musician has got new tools for marketing his/her music it does not necessary mean that he/she can do it. It is possible to take care of the whole chain from the artist to the market, but then you have to know a lot more than how to take a CMaj7#5. Since many artists rather would like to be artists than administrators I believe that there is room for a middleman. Therefore I think that the record companies will have a future, but in another form. The word “record company” might not be used as often as “music company” in the future. The music companies will take care of the marketing and the business side of the chain.

 

So far everything seems to be fine. The industry might change but not that much since the artists would like someone to do the job in-between them and the market. But the new technologies has also resulted in illegal downloading, no one wants to pay anything for the music. Even if you as a customer want to pay and use legal services the illegal services are sometimes easier and have better quality. How should anyone in the music industry earn money now? Sites like iTunes are getting better and the legal alternatives are on their way, but the question is still relevant. How can composers and artists earn money without getting any revenues from the music itself?

I think that the answer is live music and earning money through the artist as a brand. The record companies will have to buy parts of the artists brand and earn money from merchandise etc. The record companies that we have today will have to be a lot smaller and focus on the marketing and administrative parts. I think that a record company (or music company as it might be called more often) will be very similar to an event company today; there must be a closer link to the live performance where the money is.

If the illegal downloading will succeed, and there will be no way that customers will buy music, some actors still has to pay for it. Radio, TV and other companies that use music will still pay the musicians and the composers. Another way to earn money that has been discussed lately, and to some extent practiced is “streaming”. If you pay a monthly fee you will be able to listen as an example all music from one specific artist.

With all the music available on the Internet today, it is difficult to find what music you want to listen to when searching for new music. I believe that it will be possible to earn money by helping customers to choose the right songs based on other songs they like. Not long ago, iTunes came up with “Genius”, an application that will help you to choose similar songs to one playlist in your iTunes library. At the same time you will also get links to iTunes shop with similar songs that you don’t have. This might also make it easier for customers to choose the legal alternative, since the music is well packaged and you will get other services than just the mp3-song.

Comments on Essay 2

Johan Östberg talked about how one difference between social media and old media is that the old media has to think about reputation. If a newspaper should publish something that later turned out to be untrue they are in big trouble. Of course something that turns out to be false is very serious because it can affect the entire company or newspaper. But, does not a person writing something have a reputation to think about? I believe that the reputation-part holds true for social media as well. If you are acting weird on Facebook all of you friends will wonder what you are thinking about. Your reputation will probably change so that you are worse off. In a context where the things you write are connected to you as a person and a network of people can see what you do, I definitely believe that you will think about what you write. The systems that Slashdot, Wikipidea and others have created work in a similar way. Others can verify what you wrote and comment on your statements. In the same way Google uses links. If there are many links to your website the probability that it is good quality increases. I think that these instruments are a very good to increase the quality of the content produced by social media.

I would also like to comment on the anonymous essay with the title “The quality issue”. I agree that social media content actually can be a very good compliment to old media. Social media technologies allow us to create new content that old media could not cover in a broad sense. If we are going to plan our holiday trip to a place we never been to we want to know what hotel we should stay at. A newspaper ad might give us a clue and perhaps ads with testimonials will help us even more. However, a “real” customer, someone who actually writes good things about a hotel because he/she liked the hotel, can give us more objective information than a sponsored magazine. Customer-to-customer interactions can come alive on the Internet. Concerning the agenda that Johan Östberg was talking about, the reason for a single person to write in a forum about a hotel might not be the same as when a magazine writes about this hotel. However, as I wrote in my essay, the most important thing for the reader is to look at the content produced in the light of the context it is presented in. If a blogger has many readers companies might be interested in sponsoring this blog, and in those cases the blogger might not be more true to his/her real feelings than a magazine. But, if someone that you might know through a friend’s friend writes something good about a product you might get a very genuine opinion from that person.

By: Marie Martinson

Essay 2 - Content quality issue in Social Media

When it comes to content quality, I am not a big ‘fan’ of social media content. I have encountered the problems of ‘reliability, traceability and measurability’ every now-and-then while collecting the information from internet. The quality of user-generated content varies drastically from excellent to abuse and spam. As the availability of such content increases, the task of identifying high-quality content in sites based on user contributions ‘social media sites’ becomes increasingly crucial. People providing information on these sites while being ‘anonymous’ makes me skeptical about the information’s transparency. Sony won the DVD format war by exploiting the opaque and untraceable social media to create conspiracies against HD-DVD.

While on the traditional mass media (TV and Newspaper) information cannot pass without the full reference to the informant. When you compare social media with traditional/mass media in terms of quality, I think the former falls short. Hiding the informant’s identity or publishing a fake one, taking away the reader’s right to know the source makes the quality standard fall drastically low.

Social media certainly have its benefits of fast search and enormous quantity of content, but unfortunately it is only qantitative but not qualititaive in my point of view. You can never be sure of which website will bring you spams and virus that will corrupt your windows. If not so, still you can not be sure how reliable is the information excluding content from some popular and well-known web sites. The enormity of information do you no good, rather it just add to the confusion and makes the process far hactic while scanning the 'rights-and-wrongs' of the content. On the other hand newspaper and televison has less content which can be traceable, far more transparent and the risk is negligibly low.

People will pay for information that is well-researched, objective, and skillfully crafted. Good journalism is hard work based on a solid tradition. It is an asset. Most people who read newspapers can discern between high-quality and mediocre content. That is why they buy newspaper and read it. Reporting, which is a full-time job, requires networks, resources, and relationships. Bloggers may try to adopt real reporting infrastructure, but many are far from the real thing.

This situation of unreliability is avoidable if you only follow some big names and get the content from there but then you have no benefit of the quantity of data available. Social media provides you with all sorts of information, open for all, download-able and cheap but it also offers risks and irritation of opaqueness.

Essay 2 – Quality of Social Media

When I compare social media with traditional media in terms of quality, it is much easier and quicker for me to find special information through social media than traditional media. For example, Yahoo! Answers is a new kind of service to find and share information among its users through the Internet. Every user can ask questions on any topic, and then get answers from other real people. Then the original questioner can evaluate the answers. In China we also use a kind of similar service called Baidu Zhidao, it is based upon the biggest website of Chinese search engine Baidu. Because of its huge amount of users, finding and sharing special information among them is feasible. Like the Slashdot, Baidu Zhidao also has its own stimulative mechanism to encourage the users, not only the answerers, but also the questioners. Comparing it with the Slashdot, it uses the points instead of Karma, when the questioner has many points, and he has the high level, and then he can ask questions and set high marks for them. The higher marks the questions have, the quicker the answerers see them and solve them. If someone can provide the best answer, the best answerer can get the corresponding marks to increase his points and improve his level. The best answer is evaluated by the original questioner or voted by other audience. It totally depends on the users, but not editors. It also has some administrators, and they can monitor the behaviors of users and filter the unhealthy and unmoral content. According to my personal experience about the Baidu Zhidao, it is very useful and effective, and in relation to what Benkler writes, it can provide relevance and accreditation as much as possible based on the great amount of users’ opinions and insights.

When I search the authoritative information about my studies, I always use Wikipedia. I think it is a very interesting example of managing the issue of quality in a good way. Because it has specific volunteers to censor and maintain the accreditation of the published content, and it requires creditable reference of the explanation, it provides a kind of new solution to the quality of social media. It tries to balance the power of authority and the masses.

For the relevance of social media, I think YouTube manages this issue very well. When a viewer visits a special video submitted by someone, on the same webpage YouTube provides the related videos, promoted videos and more videos from the same author to the viewer in order to give him more choices automatically, and it can save the viewer’s searching time of similar videos or related videos.

Lusha Wang

Essay 2 – How we may deal with internet junks?

As the development of the internet, all kinds of information have been accumulated more and more. People began to think about the problem it might bring us, like, how should we deal with all the information with “low-quality”, how to set a standard regulation to formulate all, how to tell good or bad of any piece of information if we have some kind of gatekeeper so on so forth.

I think, the most important problem is not to select the useful information among the mass, because we can always find the information we want (depend on the time we spent though), but how should we deal with the rest, those I call them internet junk. The method came into my mind is that, we may judge the value of any piece of information by the visit number and the evaluation by the visitors. Importantly, the evaluation I mentioned above is mainly not good evaluations but the bad ones. Because, if the information is really good for someone, he/she may not interested in value it high to recommend it to others, else the information is totally junk, it has more chances he/she will give it a bad evaluation. So, basically the time one information might exist is proportional as its visit numbers, but the evaluation aspect will also effect on it. For example, if the information has a good visit number while only few bad evaluation, it will stay long; If it has a good visit number while acceptable bad evaluation (for example, 25%), it will stay a bit long as well, because it might state opposite opinion against others; If it has a good visit number while a very bad evaluation (70%, let’s say), which I think probably is a junk information and such result will accelerate the disappearing period of that information. It may have lot of disadvantages, but it is the one I can think the best.

If people get use to this evaluation process, when they surfing on the internet, they are able to clean the internet environment themselves by a little effort that give a bad evaluation when meet internet junks. Hopefully, by doing this, we can have a virtual word with better satisfaction by most of the people. Internet is still a place that everyone can post anything anonymous and freely, but if it is a junk or useless to everyone, it will be deleted to somewhere and will not bother us anymore.

Mu Xiwei

How to measure quality in media

For less than hundred years ago the average person had not seen a radio or a TV-screen. The media available were very limited and the information spread did not reach everybody. Today the amount of information available for anyone has increased enormously. Today the consumers can be creators because of the low costs of producing media (Pargman, lecture on KTH October 2008).

Some might argue that since it is easier for anyone to spread news around the world today the quality of the news cannot be as high as when the traditional media handles it. However, most of the traditional media is far from objective. Some newspapers have one reputation of being more right wing while other newspapers have the reputation of being more left wing. Newspapers that have the reputation of being objective might not take all aspects into account when presenting the news, simply because it is difficult to be objective in many cases. If we consider these news as facts we might miss out some perspectives. So, even if it might feel that everything is under control when a real journalist has written an article it might not be a hundred percent objective. The reader has to react to the information and make his/her own judgment of the information.

For me social media does not necessarily imply that the quality of the news is low. The information has to be seen in the light of the context that is presented. Who wrote the statements? Why did he/she write it? Do companies sponsor this blog? What is the purpose of the writings? Does the person adding this news to this forum gain something from saying this?

These questions are important when analyzing the traditional media as well. Why did the journalist write this text? What could he/she have gained from looking at the situation from this specific perspective? Who came up with the idea of writing about this topic? What are the consequences of this article?

There is always a reason why people produce media. Some might do it because they earn money and make a living on it. Others might do it just for fun; it is part of their pleasure and leisure time. Social media consist to a wide extent of the last-mentioned group. Since this group does not earn any money and consider the time spent as amusement-time they might not have much incentives to write something that will suit someone else. We only have to consider one actors incentives to judge what he/she writes. That could imply that it is easier to judge whether the information presented are true or false. On the other hand, it is not easy to know all people writing stuff on the Internet. Even if it becomes easier to evaluate the quality in a single situation the fact that there are so many of these situations makes it more complex to evaluate the content.

So far it seems to be more difficult to evaluate the quality of social media than the quality of the traditional media. But this is actually the time for social media to shine. The social media technologies give tools to evaluate every single content producer by other producer and readers. Benkler 2006 exemplifies this phenomenon with Slashdot, where the members can get comments and points, karma. The more positive comments the better your karma will get. This is one way to solve the problem. Wikipedia works in a similar way, moderators look through the content and you have to link to other pages.

But even if there are ways to control the quality of the content produced it is still up to the reader to look the sources up and control the quality. This goes for both social media and traditional media. I think it is very important that we don’t forget that the traditional media should also be viewed critical. The responsibility has to be on the reader. I think that Slashdot express it in a good way when they are asked how the content are verified: “We don’t. You do. If something seems outrageous, we might look for some corroboration, but as a rule, we regard this as the responsibility of the submitter and the audience. This is why it’s important to read comments. You might find something that refutes, or supports, the story in the main.”

Comments on Essay 1

Comment on Karin Andersson
I also join the Facebook and I am also a loyal Wikipedia user, like Karin. But I do not update my profile on the Facebook daily. Before I join the Facebook, I use MSN and QQ all the time. After I came to Sweden, I started to run my Windows Live Spaces, so I always update this blog directly and it can automatically notice my MSN friends to read. That is very convenient for me. After the Facebook, there are more and more similar social websites and communities. I have received at least 5 invitations to join different social networks, and I feel troubled. So I choose Windows Live Spaces as my main blog, and I do not want to write other blogs. But I share my photos in different social networks with different friends. In China, there is a social website named “Xiaonei”, which is similar to Facebook. When I register in Xiaonei, I find many old friends and classmates through it and that gives me a big surprise. According to the blog, I can know what my friends do recently and share my own experiences with them. Unlike the MSN, blog is not based on the instant communication, and it can provide enough time and space to share different experiences and opinions. I enjoy the time of reading my friends’ blogs.

Comment on Gao Jie
Gao Jie’s habits of using social media are similar to my own experiences. I always use the social media to keep in touch with my family and friends. With the Internet, I can chat with them through video and audio media. Before I came to Sweden, I was used to communicating with them by telephone or face-to-face. Now the physical distance makes us choose the social media based on the Internet to communicate with each other. It is cheaper and easier than before. And I also agree with Gao Jie’s opinion of the differences between on-line communication and face-to-face communication. Now I spend less time in keeping in touch with my friends who are still in China, because I find that on-line communication is not as kindly as face-to-face communication. When I face to the computer to phone my friends or chat with them, it is easy for me to distract my attention to other things, especially during the video conversation, and I can do anything else with my computer. When I go back to China, I meet my friends face-to-face and I find that we have more topics to discuss. The social media is still an interactive medium between human being and machine. Comparing the on-line communication through social media with face-to-face communication, I think the social media can help me to solve the problem of physical distance and it should be integrated with face-to-face communication in order to consolidate the friendship.

Lusha Wang

Comments on Essay 1

Comment on Karin Andersson

When I read Karin Andersson’s essay about her mum joining Facebook in order to get an invitation to her sons birthday party I remembered a similar situation from my own experiences. My brother is not very good at staying in contact with his family when he is travelling. He stayed in USA for one year and did not take any pictures himself and sent just a few e-mails. My mum created a Facebook profile so that she could see what he was up to on his profile. By doing so she could also see all the photos that he was tagged in. At the moment he is actually travelling again and this time my mum has to be a friend of his travel friend on Facebook to get updated. I think that Karin’s story and this story really shows how Facebook has become a part of the society and how you need to be a part of it if you want to communicate with people that are using it.

I also would like to say that our social media technologies habits seem to be quite similar. Just like you mentioned, I do not contribute much to sites like Wikipedia while I contribute with content on Facebook.

 

Comment on Weiwei Zhao

If I should compare my habits with Weiwei Zhao it seems as if Weiwei Zhao use social media technologies more than I do. I have used msn before but I do not use it on a daily basis. There was a time when I used it almost everyday, since I had friends living quite far away from me. In these cases it is very convenient to be able to use msn. I can imagine that it is great to use it when you are in Sweden to keep in contact with your friends in Kina. However, I think that msn is quite unnecessary when you live close and could meet instead. You mentioned that you use it mainly to keep in contact with international friends, but some use it instead of actually meet in real life even if it is not very difficult to do so.

I find it interesting to know a little bit about QQ. Actually I have to admit that I did not know it existed. It is fun to hear that there is a feature for raising your own electronic pets, since I had a tamagotchi when I was middle school. =)

Essay 1 – Social Media Technologies and Me

The major of my Bachelor’s degree is software engineering, especially about the software development technologies. In my daily life, I almost spend all my time in the computer and Internet, not only in my studies, but also in searching information and entertainment. With the development of social media technologies, which are based on the Internet, the focus of my life with the computer transfers from the single machine to the multi-machine based upon the Internet.

With the appearance of social media, such as the Facebook, Windows Live Services including the MSN and Windows Live Spaces, and many other share and communication services among many persons, my life with the computer is becoming colorful and exciting.

Firstly, I can use social media to keep in touch with my friends and family. Now I study and live in Sweden, but my family and many friends are in China. There is a very long geographical distance between us. With the help of social media, we can share different interesting things and communicate with each other easily and conveniently. For example, I can chat with my family with video and audio software tools. Then I can know how the life of my family is, and my parents can also know my study life in Sweden. Meanwhile, I can chat with my friends through the Internet beyond the physical distance. According to the Facebook, I can not only keep in touch with my old friends, but also meet new friends through my old friends or classmates. If without the social media technologies, this can be much more difficult than now.

Secondly, the social media technologies can help me learn more about things that interest me, not only in my studies, but also in other topics. During my studies, I have many problems to solve and many questions to answer, and then I can use social media to search useful information and discuss with other people. Recently, the financial crisis that starts from the USA attracts my attention. Then I use the social media to search and share related information. I can also communicate with my friends about their life during the financial crisis and know how it affects our daily life. I can deeply know the effects of financial crisis according to others’ opinions.

Thirdly, I can also use social media technologies to do other things, such like some interesting surveys or some small movements for entertainment or monument, etc. Through the social media technologies, we can share common opinions, and discuss different opinions with others.

According to my experience of using social media technologies, I think the future of social media is bright and it is with more hope than worry. Human beings are social animals, and we need to communicate with each other, so the development of social media technologies is necessary and it can serve us better.

Lusha Wang

Essay 1 - Virtual World with Enormous Opportunities for Good and Evil

It was not long ago when my parents bought me the first computer when I was in eleventh grade, for me to follow my passions in career that required communication across the geographic bounds. It was not just this box that was useful but the internet facility, and with this internet came the inventions of communication tools that made human interactions easy, enhancing their social circle, resolving their issues and making easy to help mankind. I always used to think highly of my Graphic Design portfolio but it was not until that I uploaded it on flickr and got comments from my friends, giving me confidence boast and then I was ready to face job and admission interviews, knowing that my portfolio is worth it. I also got to see others work and could compare myself that how would my creativity be ranked in real world in comparison to all the innovative minds around me. Honestly, I need to thank the social media and its incomings for my admission across the geographic limits of my homeland and especially all my foreign friends on Facebook, Orkut, Flickr and messengers (Yahoo, Google, Skype and MSN) that provided me information and helped me realize my dreams.

For me social media means, being available to my friends, family 24/7. They can leave me messages anytime, telling me about their experiences or problems and I can respond them right away without spending a hand full of money. It is new innovative mode of communication in real time which is accessible and affordable by every being. It helps me share information that excites me including my fun pictures or the funny videos on youtube, to have a quality laughter time with my friends.

But with all the excitements it has its short comings; I always fear the fact that my account can be hacked and used purposefully. I am never confident that my privacy would be respected. It cannot be all wild and precious when you had an experience of somebody intruding your privacy and hacked your account or computer, I lost my account password, had to make another account, recover all friends ids just with the help of my memory and apologizing them if they get some useless information from my previous account. Just for the matter of fact that some person who had a lot of time to waste, found it funny to create some troublesome circumstaces for me or may be he wanted to impress with all his evil skills.

Then there is problem of fatal viruses, data loss that these social websites carry with them. I had my moments of disk crashing, data corruption on a night before submission of project, and I am sure everyone would have had their share of such experiences.

But sincerely I personally do not discourage such activities, because they create healthy competitions among web2.0 market players. Raising the standard bar of improvement every time, when a new disasterous virus is out there, it helps market player create product differentiation and making it easy for user to chose the best trade-off among such an enormous variety. For the old market players bringing constant innovation in tools is important, such as it is important for new entrants to bring solutions for all existing or anticipated problems, if they want to create Brand recognition in virtual world.

Essay 1 – Questions about Social Media Technologies

Personally, I am not that into social media technologies like most of the young generations are. To me, they are just tools to make me keep in touch with friends and family in a convenient but uncomfortable way. I think there are two main reasons why the social media technologies may make me feel uncomfortable.

1. Keeping in touch but also keeping a distance
Social media applications enables people update their own information and have the access to get others’ information that’s in their social media network. However, too much information is not a good thing sometimes. It may lead people relying on the digital and cold statements that somehow reveal people’s life and thoughts. That is to say, the way people get in touch with each other include several senses, the information they communicate, their voices, their expressions, their feelings etc, but social media technologies mostly only enable us to get the information, and make us too much rely on it and unconsciously ignore other senses. As a consequence, people call and meet each other less, instead, visit their blogs and websites more. Yes, we are able to get in touch with friends and family no matter how far they are, as long as we both have the access to the internet, but are we truly closer?

2. Time-consumed
Social media technologies are time-consumed and not effective. As we have a lot of information about the people we know, it will also take a lot of time to deal with them and the information we want is immingled among all. For example, some of my friends and I already got use to check the social media network like every 3 hours, we seldom get useful information but it takes time and energy. In addition, social media technologies needed to be integrated and cooperated. Like MSN Spaces, Facebook, Tagged, Flixter, Blogspot etc, also some local social media applications, for example, we have QQ, Xiaonei, Kaixin, Twitter and so on in China. All of them have similar or inclusive functions. That brought troubles like where I should post the information, all of them, some of them or simply one of them when someone got such need. It would be great if they are connected and associated.

To sum up, with the development of social media technologies, people gradually changed their way to communicate and connected. They did enable us do something we are not able to do in the past. But they also bring questions we have to think about. Like how we should apply these technologies in the best way for human beings, in order to have a better life with fewer side effects.

Xiwei Mu

Balancing between two worlds

I think that social media technologies gives me tools for both increasing my social network as well as maintaining my network. However, I do think about what I write and publish on the Internet. As an example, I choose the photos of me on Facebook. If other people are uploading photos of me I usually un-tag them. Mainly because it is just a few of my friends who uploads photos, which might result in a misleading photo collection on my profile. I might not go to one event very often, but all of my tagged photos might be from that type of event. In short, I want my profile on Facebook to be consistent with how I present myself in public. However, I do not see social media technologies as something worrying. As long as you are aware of the consequences, it really widens people's abilities to socialise with others.

The development of media technologies is something that interests me. I really like the idea of using one computer instead of keeping books in a bookshelf, CD's in another bookshelf and videos or DVD's in another bookshelf. I rather like to use Wikipedia than an encyclopaedia that fills my bookshelf.

I might not be very active in creating content on sites like Wikipedia or other communities. When I am about to do something I never done before I usually google my questions about the subject. Often some communities have already discussed the topic and I can learn from that. However, when I think about it, I am a member of a food network site, where you create a profile and share recipes with each other. It is great to get a shopping list so that you acctually go out from the store with ingredients that later that week can be combined into a meal!

Another way I have used social media is in one of my courses this semester. We used Wiki spaces to discuss the literature in the course. The discussion was part of the examination and we had limited space to write our comments. I think it was good because it was time flexible. We usually had about four days per discussion to write our comments and you could choose when you wanted to do it. On the other hand, a lot more time was spent in front of the computer and less time in socialising in real life. To me social media technologies are not about living in a second world. It is about being able to be more afficient in keeping contact with other people. 

I believe that socialising on the Internet is different compared to how you socialise in real life. Therfore I think that it is important to learn both. To much time spent in front of the computer makes it difficult to act natural in a face-to-face context. In the future, when more and more people use social media technologies, you will of course have to know the computer-socialising techniques as much as you will have to know the face-to-face way of acting. I believe that the key to success is to stay in both worlds.

Marie Martinson

New blog group 3

Hi! 

I have created a new blog since I can't read chinese. =)

Marie