I really enjoyed doing this paper. It was fun immersing myself in two worlds that I never necessarily would have been involved in otherwise. My biggest problem getting a sound idea of the two sites was my socializing skills. My friends do not use MySpace anymore, having replaced it with Facebook many years ago. And I am a textbook introvert, so I was unlikely to befriend new cyber-pals just for the heck of it. (I, in fact, did not befriends new cyber-pals just for the heck of it.) Long story short, my descriptions of the social aspect of MySpace were more from personal experience and my memory of actively using the site three+ years ago. From what I can tell, though, the main features are unchanged. Likewise, with foursquare, I have only been able to acquire a handful (six to be exact) of friends with whom to socialize. I'm using the term socialize loosely here, as I do not really see the merit in foursquare being called a social networking system/site. It seems as though the creators made it purposefully difficult to communicate over the foursquare waves.
My favorite aspect of the project was learning the technical things that made the paper so interesting. I never knew about text-wrapping, inserting hyperlinks to pictures, or creating thumbnails before formatting my paper. Adding the visuals was fun and helped make my paper's points better.
I was disappointed, though, that when I uploaded my paper to GoogleDocs it broke my hyperlinks and would not let me reestablish them, even though the images I wanted to link were in my GoogleDocs folder. Does anyone know why this happened or have a solution?
It's interesting that I had almost the opposite experience while writing my comparison. I chose two sites that are somewhat similar, yet different in how they run the content. One site was completely foreign to me, while the other site was somewhat new. I discovered that there is so much more to social networking. Sometimes, users develop a unique sense of belonging to the site, just as they would to an offline group of friends, or a group of classmates. Since I am not very active in special interest SNS sites (like Flickr or Lookbook.un), I haven't really felt attached to any online community.
ReplyDeleteIt's interesting to see how special interest sites differ to FB. FB is usually, at least for most people, a support for offline relationships, so an attachment doesn't really form. Instead of an attachment, it would be more of an obsession. Overall, I think my largest take-aways were the differences between special interest sites and regular SNS sites.