Psychology of Social Media Class Week 7 Reflection June 11

In the last week of class, presentations about different social media tools were conducted from different groups. Through these presentation, it is not difficult to understand the revolutionary change the Internet social media brought to human beings’ ways of life, custom, and values. Through elaborating how different social media tools influence the social aspects, marketing uses, educational uses, and recreational uses, students have been exposed to all the possibility social media can do and how much they can modify the lives of human beings.

The second part of this class focused on the negative aspect of social media. Among all these negative activities, trolling and cyber bullying are probably the most serious and infamous ones. According to the professor, trolling can be defined as “random negative commands” expressed on people’s posts. These mean and hurtful words are meant to mentally hurt and offend the posters. People’s reactions toward trolling can be ranged from anger to depression, but there are quite a few suicide cases caused either directly or indirectly by trolling. Moreover, cyber bullying is another source that threaten the peace of social media. Sadly, according to the professor, many cyber bullying are involved with parents publicly shaming their teenager children. There is one thing as psychology students we need to be aware that bullying and trolling are NOT caused by social media, social media just magnified them. The best way to fight trolling is to ignore it, as people said “don’t feed the troll.”

In the end, I would like to thank Dr. Kinghorn. His effort of bring social media to the field of psychology is amazing and revolutionary! I really feel honored and appreciated to be a part of this novel and brave class! If you are also interested in Dr. Kinghorn's research and studies, here is the link to his home page. http://www.briankinghorn.com/

Psychology of Social Media Class Week 6 Reflection June 4

In this week the class focused on the positive side of the social media. The crowd sourcing was discussed as one of the biggest benefits people can get from social media. Whether group discussion help people make batter choice or not has been a question that bother people for centuries. According to the article “Wisdom of the Crowd” from the NOVA science journal, in the middle 1800s, mathematician Francis Galton was the first person to test the power of the crowd sourcing through statistics. In his experiment, he asked 800 people to guess the weight of a dead ox. Surprisingly, out of these 800 participants, no individual could accurately find out the weight of the ox. In fact, the majority of them were way too high or way to low. Nevertheless, when Francis Galton taken everybody’s answers and take average of it, it the answer was exactly accurate! In other word, the average of all the guess is actually right! According to statistics, the more data we have, the higher chance we will have a normal distribution. This is called the “central limit theorem.” Given this knowledge, it is obvious that the crowd sourcing social media such as Yahoo Answer or Ask.com actually help people getting better solutions. In the article “So you think you’re smarter than a CIA agent,” the “good judgment project”, which train a group of regular people to do predictions, was introduced. Surprisingly, with a little bit training and good search, a group of normal civilians can have 30% better prediction than CIA agents who have access to all the classified files. Moreover, the website “Phylo” even have the idea to use the crowd sourcing to contribute genetic disease research. The process of identifying and catching the Boston bombers is another example of the advantage of crowd sourcing. In the gospel point of view, the only reason why social media was developed is to spread and share the gospel. Dr. Kinghorn shared a great story of how he met with another professor in New York who also named Brian Kinghorn. In the end of their meeting, the other Dr. Kinghorn was interested to the church.

Another advantage the social media and provide is the ability to change public opinions. According to the videos and articles shown by Dr. Kinghorn, social media is a powerful tool when fighting against big business and big institutions. Examples ranged from the complaint against United Airline to the protest against the racist police officers and to the Arab Spring. Whereas traditional Medias could be controlled and oppressed by the “big brothers,” Internet social media provides free access to anyone in any place. Although the credibility of Internet social media can sometime be debatable, it is no doubt the best anti-oppression way of communication. 

Psychology of Social Media Class Week 5 Reflection May 29

In this week, we discussed about several controversial concerns of the social media. In the video the “Lost Memory”, there is a quote from Eric Fischer: “Paper can last for centuries, even if you neglect it, but if you’re not constantly vigilant about keeping data, it’s just gone.” This reveals the risk of losing the data forever if the Internet is gone. Personally, I do not share the concern that digital data will be more vulnerable than the physical records. According to the book Everything is Miscellaneous, the author points out that by using the digital order of order, it is a lot more efficient to organize the data since it will not be restricted by its physical limitation. It would be a lot easier to lose a physical copy of a photo than the digital copy of it which can be access anywhere online. From the Ted speech “A cause of concern,” the speaker indicates that the reason we want digital stuff is because we do not want to miss everything. Nevertheless, in the way we trying to capture everything by our digital devices, we missed all the precious moment that we could have participated. According to the class, for the previous generation, this phenomenon seems especially obvious since they have their one foot in, and one foot out of the situation. Moreover, the professor shared a video “The digital now” to reveal the idea that by archiving everything we think that we can store it, but time is not like data—it cannot be stored. According to the video, the present encapsulates the past and the promise for the future. The price of missing the present moment might be higher than we think. Furthermore, Dr. Kinghorn showed us a speech from General Conference which indicates that: The digital world cannibalizes time, but we don’t need to let it. The free agency is always ours to control the tools around us.

The difference between the slacktivism and the activism is another topic we discussed during the class this week. The slacktivism is the product of social media. It works by sharing or posting about a specific topic that promote social change. However, the concern is that by participating slacktivism, which takes as short as few seconds, people might feel satisfied about their contribution and thus not participating on the activism that can bring real change to the society. According to the professor, the major purpose of the slacktivism is to raise awareness of different social issues. Although there are many arguments stand against slacktivism, several research and interviews reveal that slacktivism might be more useful than people thought it was. According to the research, people who took action online are actually 5 times more possible to take actual actions than people who was offline. Moreover, raising awareness is the prerequisite of social reform. With the help of slacktivism on social media, it is a lot easier for people to attract awareness to social issues. In the end, the cyber-slacktivism might be more close to the real-road action than we thought. To add on, the professor revealed that the “Arab Spring” was originally started from the cyber-slacktivism.

Psychology of Social Media Class Week 4 Reflection May 21

The guest speaker Paul talked about the negative issues social media brought to the society. The topic including the hidden TOR Network and the prosperity of pornography. According to Professor Paul, the TOR Network is what we called the “dark web.” Its special feature to escape from Internet tracking makes the TOR Network one of the biggest markets for illegal products. People often call the TOR Network the “EBay of drugs.” Other than drug dealing, TOR Network is also a host for activities against the constitution but it cannot be tracked by the government. Fortunately, inside of the dark web, there is something called the “Angel net” where just people such as police offices and FBI agencies spy on any illegal activities on the TOR Network. Most Hackers use software to connect to the dark web. They also hack and turn other people’s computers into “drums” that work as extra resource to help sustain the TOR Network. According to Professor Paul, the simple use of the TOR Network does not against any law. Nevertheless, it is a lot easier for the TOR Network users to get themselves into troubles either by accidentally broken the law or by the attacks from other hackers. One infamous example of the TOR Network is the WikiLeaks. Since the TOR Network does not usually cross with the service web (the www web), in order for information to be spread, a platform is indeed. WikiLeaks is hypothetically an ideal platform of that. When the U.S. solider Julian Assange used TOR Network to get access to the top-secret data from the military, he need WikiLeaks to get the information out. Nevertheless, the same con for the dark web can also be a great advantage of it! On the countries where people’s freedom of is oppressed and where the main stream media are controlled such as China and North Korea, the TOR Network could be the only source for people to get information from the outside world and to tell people from other countries what really happened there. Moreover, the existence of the TOR Web also help discovering information that Governments from different countries attempt to cover up unlawfully. There is also a method in TOR Network called the “Honey Pot” which often being used to discover political or corporation spies. Basicly, experts will create some information that is “too valuable to resist” for hackers or spies; once they put their hands into the “honey pot,” their identities and intentions will be exposed. This is also a warning for those who like to play around with the TOR Network because you never know whether the information you are try to access is a Honey Pot set up by FBI or other government authorities.

The next issue that Professor Paul mentioned is the kingdom of pornography. Since it is almost impossible to control or eliminate, the best way to deal with this kind of issue is to regulate them. According to Paul, decade away these pornographic website were able to hide behind the .com webs. In other word, it could be next to an educational website for elementary school! Today, the government regulated the pornography websites into the .xxx or other criteria so they can be easily identified and blocked.  

Psychology of Social Media Class Week 3 Reflection

In this week, the class moved from the introduction of the social media to the function of it. During a recorded interview with David Weinberger, the author of the book Everything is Miscellaneous, he said that “The solution for too much information is more information.” This statement does not make a lot of sense without understand the basic idea of the orders of information. According to David’s idea that “not everything has its places, we have to get rid of the idea that there is a best way of organizing the world,” human are trapped by our tendency to organize the information only in few ways that we are familiarized and believe that they are the “only” ways to organize information. The professor used photos to illustrate this idea. The traditional way told us to put photos in a chronological order by date. However, such a method makes specific photos extremely difficult to locate. For example, if a person wants to find the photos of him and his girlfriend on a specific beach somewhere around 1980s, he will need to go through all the photos on that year. Nevertheless, if the person tag his photos differently by topics or subjects, it would be a lot easier for him or for anyone in his family to locate a specific photo for hundreds of photos. As the result, it is a better idea to organize things miscellaneously. The professor further used modified movie quotes to express the idea that without modifying information according to the situation, they often look award. For example, in the Disney movie “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs”, the famous quote “Mirror, mirror on the wall, who is the fairest of them all?” was originally quote as “Magic Mirror on the Wall, who is the Fairest one of all?” If Disney adopted the original version, this line will be a lot less powerful and memorable. Given the idea that the miscellaneous orders are better, a problem occurred: what could you do to make everything miscellaneous? According to David Weinberger, there are three order of order. The first order of order involves to the physical ordering of objects. In the first order, one object can only go to one place, just like one physical book can only be put into one specific shelf.  The second order of order is about card catalog. By separating information about the first-order objects from the objects themselves through alphabetical or chronological orders, the second order organized objects so you can locate them more easily in their physical places. Nevertheless, objects in the second order are still limited by the physical restriction since one book is still one book even with tag. Finally, in the third order of order—digital order, technology helps objects and information to get over their physical limitation. According to the professor, the third order of order is actually how human brain process messages and memories. Therefore, it is just the matter of time for humankind to accept this ultimate order of order. In this order, information can appear in multiple locations and has unlimited copies. This type of order not only increase the effectiveness of organizing information, but also drives innovation since the digital order motivate people to think outside of the box. Good news is that since children nowadays are raised in the background of the digital order, their creativity and innovation will not be limited by the first and second order of order like their earlier generations. Therefore, maybe these children will be the most creative and innovative generation of human ever existed on the Earth.

Reflection of the social media class on May 5 and May 7

In this week’s class, we conducted a debate in whether Facebook will keep prevailing or will going down. Many interesting points have been made in both side. Facebook’s ability in adopting users, leaving legacy, providing non-treating way of staying contact, and intertwining with different functions increases its chance to prevail. However, the privacy issue and the change of generation are great forces that work against it. The other problem with Facebook is the fact that people tend to put positive information on it and they do not put negative news. An example will be news of divorcing. Back to the era of phone and email, it was a lot easier for a person to share his or her negative news to his or her best friends. Nevertheless, with the lack of privacy in Facebook, people are less likely to do so. Moreover, even if people do post things worth celebrating publicly on the Facebook, the chance is that their best friends or relatives who took a week off from Facebook or who doesn’t use it at all will miss them. In short, Facebook has made some information exchange passive, now people have to find out what happened to their friends by themselves. A very fascinating fact during our in class debate is that groups in both ends of the debate actually had the same argument with different entity fulfilling—it is all about innovation versus disruptive innovation. According to the class, an example of the disruptive innovation is when people in the bottom start taking marketing shares from the entire industry. The tragedy of the company Black Berry is an embodiment of this example. When the foundation of a business is taken, it crumbles and falls; when Apple took all the bottom markets, they soon ran out of business. In the end, we concluded our debate in that fact that for companies that grew exponentially, we really have no idea what will happen to it.

During the class, the professor demonstrated a series of videos that shows how difficult was for people to accept telephone back to the days. Back to 1835 when the idea of “far speaking” was first introduced, people thought that “no one will ever use it.” Nevertheless, the use of it grew exponentially. Today, the most common social media tools we are using were all considered “unimaginable” a decade ago. Therefore, for the future of our technology, we really have no idea today. The idea of the “ambient awareness” that Facebook created was also discussed in the class. According to the discussion, ambient light is an “available light in an environment,” that is just there. Although Fackbook creates an illusion of been “just right” in expressing ourselves and getting information from others, we really don’t express and get much details from it. The fact that Facebook only shares a little insight about a person makes the feeling of knowing others and sharing oneself merely a beautiful illusion.

In the second period of the class, we discussed how far have we came in social media? From 1984, the first glace of Mac, to IPhone everywhere, and to the hypothetic video of the future “a day made of glass,” we have indeed came a long way. According to the (doubtable) statistics, in 2013, there were 1.73 million social media user and in the year of 2008, the first social media president Obama was elected. Now social media is a 180 billion dollars industry! Nevertheless, the impact of social media to human beings in different aspects are still a subject under study.

Reflection of the social media class on April 30th

In the first week of the class, in order to help us understand the progress of the technology and social media, the professor began the class with a 1995 news article “Why the Web Won’t Be Nirvana.” In that article, many predictions about the internet has been made in many topics such as interpersonal communication, education, governmental system, information distribution, and business. Obviously the author of that article was not an advocate of internet. Nevertheless, many of his productions and arguments against the possibilities of internet ended up to be ridiculous today. The professor in our class has conveyed his point well through this article that: the progress of Internet has surpassed people’s imagination. Social media, as one of the most prosperous, conspicuous, and relatively novel result of the internet, has provoked many controversial debates about its influence in human beings’ interpersonal communication. Indeed, human beings have never encounter anything like social media before, in which they can find a complete substitution of direct human conversations. During the class, the professor introduced various social media tools to help students get acquainted to these technologies. According to the professor, social media can be refer to a tool that connects people together by providing them a platform to put and receive opinions, ratings, or ideas. According to this definition, even the webpages of Amazon and Walmart can be qualified as social media since they provide the opportunities for customers to leave and read comments. To be honest, I was quite surprised when the professor introduced different types of social media and asked us to create a blog and to choose a new social media to get familiarized with. I seriously thought we are going to read and memorize some research, studies, and facts about social media in this class just what I did in other psychology classes. Personally, I really appreciate the way the professor conducted this class since he tries to provide us with real life experience on the topic we are investigating through group discussion and activities rather than shower us with research papers and ask us to memorize the dead facts that we are going to forget after the exams anyway. During the class, a ted talk “Connected, but alone?” was demonstrated to show the possible negative influence of social media on human beings’ connection to each other. The speaker Sherry Turkle was quite negative about the influence of social media. She believes that social media will not only impair the intimacy between family members, but could also harm children and teenagers’ ability to communicate to real people. Personally, maybe because I am not a heavy user of social media, I do not think social media is as bad as she described. I believe, just as how people used to think that online shopping system will kill supermarkets like Costco or Walmart, social media will not kill interpersonal conversation between real people; instead, social media will just change the conversation between real people by adding something new just like how online shopping changed and reformed Walmart.