June 13, 2015
Intimacy in Social Media
Unpredicated tweets – love this concept.
Interesting perspective that “social media is a low-bandwidth form of communication.”
“When we lose these social cues, we also lose common mechanisms for signaling intimacy and the boundaries of group membership.”
“ … that people assume everyone will react the same way to the “variables” in unpredicated tweets. “
Coincidentally, I’ve found myself posting more regularly similar instances with items like, “so this is happening.”
How Second Life Affects Real Life
“No surprise that what we think about ourselves affects the confidence with which we approach the world. What is a surprise is that this applies in the virtual world too.”
Completely agree and believe this statement: “”When we cloak ourselves in avatars, it subtly alters the manner in which we behave,” says Bailenson. “It’s about self-perception and self-confidence.”
Question – if our behavior online mimics that of real life, could monitoring and analyzing the “big data” collected in these virtual worlds be used to create a sense of society as a whole?
FCC Issues Snapshot of U.S. Internet Usage
This seems both very accurate and also reflective of my Internet subscription: “Other figures in the report show that Internet adoption rates grow along with income and education.”
Social Commerce Article
“The motivation that drives customer participation in social commerce”
Intense set of hypothesis and testings/findings. Not sure I entirely followed the material, but it appears the greater influence of technology on the consumer will directly relate to their interaction with social commerce, to the point that the author found, “our results suggest that social commerce providers should manage the technological features and test the impacts of these features on customer experiences.”
Very interesting finding “Therefore, managers should add emotional elements into commercial interactions and strike a balance between cognitive focus on marketing tasks and emotional concerns”
Conversational Implicature article
Article dives into the implied meanings of what is said versus the actual or literal meaning of the dialogue.
I’m wondering if anyone else in class found themselves reliving certain situations described within the document?
NPR You Have an Accent Even on Twitter
Interesting that regional and national dialgects start to show up in social media, but not too surprising. I find myself typing “gunna” and iPhone correcting me, because I live in the south and it’s kind of a common, spoken term. “Fixin” also sees the light of social media days from time to time.
“There was no way to identify that kind of regional variation until now,” Eisenstein says. “And now, through social media, we have written communication being used in a very conversational, informal way, and we’re starting to see all the same richness and diversity that we see in spoken language … in written language, too.”
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In this week’s material, we begin to understand and process the richness of social media and social networks as it relates to our usage and interaction within.
The first article, we learn about unpredicated tweets and how the lack of additional context within a tweet is inherently understood by the followers/readers of the post. While the article contends the channel is low in richness, the posts themselves can carry tremendous positive or negative implications and connotations. Coincidentally, I’ve found myself posting similar instances with items like, “so this is happening,” attached to a photo, feeling or location. I’m not sure why, but personally I’ve been in a “less is more” trend for my posts.
Our second article dealt with the virtual world and our self-perceptions within the digital world and how they can be reflexive back into our own interactions within the real world. I found myself completely agreeing with, “‘When we cloak ourselves in avatars, it subtly alters the manner in which we behave,’ says Bailenson. ‘It’s about self-perception and self-confidence.’” I also asked myself, if our behavior online is a precursor to our eventual real life interactions, could monitoring and analyzing the “big data” collected in these virtual worlds be used to create a sense of society as a whole?
The article from the NYTimes on digital bandwidth isn’t too surprising, but the correlation between social status and income to the speed of Internet was of interest, given that lower speeds or connection/data available is tied directly to the cost of that speed.
With regards to the social commerce article, I found myself lost in the hypothesis and various data points, but it appeared to me that the greater influence of technology on the consumer will directly relate to their interaction with social commerce, to the point that the author found, “… our results suggest that social commerce providers should manage the technological features and test the impacts of these features on customer experiences.” Additionally, the first finding of the research is of note, “… managers should add emotional elements into commercial interactions and strike a balance between cognitive focus on marketing tasks and emotional concerns.” As the one responsible directly for my company’s ecommerce efforts, this was of particular note and reinforces the psychology of a site, its interactions with its users, and the sentiment necessary to persuade an online purchase.
Finally, the last two articles were great to read, as they dealt with the “unspoken” side of communication and language. The necessity of a recipient of communication to not only have contextual understanding, but be able to apply inference to the message to understand, digest, and react back with a message is fascinating. The NPR article about accents in Twitter were somewhat an extension of these observations, given the localization of users, both nationally and regionally. Personally, I find myself typing “gunna” and my iPhone correcting me, because I live in the south and it’s a somewhat common, spoken term. “Fixin” also sees the light of social media days from time to time.
Questions:
MMC6400, Richness, Social Media, Web Theory,