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.