Blogging

Blogs seem to be sweeping the nation like disease on a bad piece of meat. Everyone seems to have a blog. You can have a blog related to sports where you can let everyone else know just how good the Golden State Warriors are compared to the rest of the NBA (Because they can't figure that out for themselves.) There are the always popular fashion blogs that range from the best in the world to that girl down the street that wears an eye patch as a fashion statement. Heck, even my wife got into blogging when she wanted to share her cooking talents and thoughts with people around her. And of course, there is always the classic, "Let me tell you about my life." blog that is a fan favorite.

   I personally do not like blogging. Which is ironic as I am actually writing about my dislike for blogging on a blog. But hey, there is nothing you can do to stop me and I actually enjoy that part of blogging. So maybe there is a little clarification that needs to take place before I freak too many die-hard bloggers out of their cyber pants. Blogging in the sense of actually reading a blog has never interested me. It would be a safe estimation that I've read under 10 total blogs in my life that were not related to assignments in school. The reason is because thanks to other social media outlets there has been a sufficient amount of opinion and thought sharing going on for the past several years that I don't feel the need to go in and dig to find an opinion that is openly available to me in other areas of the internet that I already use. This lack of wanting to get more or deeper opinion most likely stems from the early blog reading experiences in my life and the short clips of blogs linked in from other websites.

   Now that being said, sure I don't like to read blogs but I have no problem with people actually having a blog. Their opinions are their own and I enjoying having mine. I like being able to share my opinion when it doesn't endanger or hurt someone else and other should have the same privilege. There are positives that come out of blogging for those individuals. Jessica Knapp wrote a blog dedicated to the basics of blogging and using one of her basics I will expound on her thoughts. She talks how a blog can be used to make money. Having a blog, getting sponsors and getting a positive use out of blogging in this way is just as much of a job as other options out there. Some of these bloggers making money in this form are professional writers with great experience in the writing world. Other bring their own experience from a specific field and that is valuable information to those followers.

  Another positive besides the potential money of blogging is the mental and stress relieving qualities.  Scientific America does a better job of explaining it than I do but my little opinion is just how obvious it is that some people need to get things out. It is like my wife always says, "everyone just needs to go to counseling, not because they're crazy but to just talk through things."


http://www.bloggingbasics101.com/how-can-i-make-money-from-my-blog/

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-healthy-type/

Social Media Change

How has social media changed communication?

I think I'll focused first on how it has personally affected me as I've gone through the transition in my life. Communication used to be such a simple thing to me, and it might've had to do with the fact that I was actually quite a bit younger before social media surged onto the scene of the communication world. I think a lot of my group set up came through phone calls and flyers. The biggest example I can think of is that when my friend and I would be bored on a summer night and looking for something to do we would both go through our whole contact lists and call every girl we knew until someone would give us the thumbs up. It was slow, systematic, painful, and generally unsuccessful. Comparing that to how we get things set up now days is just night and day. Now we just go on Facebook, throw up a post about a plan, wait for responses and get to the activity as soon as we can.

Another example would be to get my birthday parties set up. As a little kid I was ambitious in my party set ups. Even from the early elementary school years I would try and invite as many friends as possible to my parties, half for the friendship and half for the presents. Now I've noticed a huge change in whom I can invite. Back in the passing out flyers for my friends days I would be limited to my class and maybe a few other friends in the school. Comparing that to recent parties I've had a much larger range of invitees. School aren't a barrier for me and distance poses more of a threat to them coming rather than me inviting.

These two changes in my communication thanks to social media have macro level impacts. As people plan and coordinate events, parties or just hang out the two large influences social media will have on their communication would be speed and efficacy.

The speed of communication isn't just affected by the internet anymore and the internet itself is just a medium for the real speed increase that social media has. When one person hears about something they find worth posting or commenting about on social media it will automatically reach several other individuals. The ripple effect begins and that information can travel across the global as fast as our fingers can type or click. Before social media there had to be intention give to try and get that information to other countries or even states. Now it almost becomes the default route of social media posted information.

The efficacy is in the connections that are made or sustained. The messages you hope to convey to certain individuals are now just a few clicks away instead of phonebook searches, internet investigations or extension checking into a few small pieces of information to find one person. With most social media sights just knowing there name is enough to get you to where you want to be extremely efficiently.

Social Media Case Reflection 1

    The power of being able to respond and being responded to seems to have a much faster and deeper impact than it used to even just a few decades ago. The IndyStar article related to the Kilroy case has received a great deal of attention and does a great job of reminding us that event that might've been considered much more extreme or dramatic wouldn't have even received attention by more than just a few hundred people back before Facebook had its 1 billion + users and daily checking and updating.

The big fallout and follow up stories that cover the incident have a similar underlining quality to them. The Daily News website make the points that the woman who had complained in the bar initially had since been fired from her job, terminated her Facebook profile and wasn't open to comment for reporters. Then another follow-up article done this time by Fox News mentioned the same facts related to her job, Facebook and willingness to comment.

The follow-up article seems to really being playing to the emotional revenge that America apparently wants to see have happen to the complainer. All the articles related have this strong sense of, "look, everyone, we got justice for that jerk who complained about the heart attack victim." It's easy to see why that would be a playing point for the news outlets because they wanted bring in all of the Facebook community that was following this story and wanted that sweet moment of victory. It's kind of like that moment in a movie or TV show where the annoying villain or annoying character, villain or friend, finally get punched in the face or yelled at and the room cheers internally or in some cases audibly.

The feel the internet is trying to give is that the symbolic punch has been thrown and Ms Jones (the complainer) has fallen to the ground and landed in her own self-loving filth. Admittedly there is a part of me that would throw myself into the group of internal cheering fans to some degree but then a single word in the Daily News article crept its way in plain sight to the title of their article that reads,
Indiana woman who threw fit at bar while another patron was having heart attack let go from her job at salon....  And I was left wondering, "wait, what?" At what point did this conversation start making a point to explain the woman was Indian? Now granted, there really wasn't a lot of content that link anything of her ethnicity to the results of the incident, but the title just left me wondering if there was any kind of motive behind the intentional insertion of her Indian background. 

Of course, any online news source is going to make sure and grab as many readers as possible. But the story itself has enough emotion to drag a reader into the details of everything that happened. Several of the questions that seemingly haven't been answered (at least not through the article I've read) are related to what her friends are thinking about it. She was there paying for a $700 tab and I would hope all 700 of those dollars didn't go to her own New Year's drinking game. Do the other people at the table share their opinion with her, or did they try and calm her down in the first place? What do her friends think of how everything worked out? It could be possible that someone might defend her and explain how out of character all of this was for her. 

I thought of a recent episode of "The Middle" about a midwest family that leads a fairly simple life. In this particular episode the dad decides to start getting into social media and sets up a twitter account. At one point, while selling these diapers that allow a baby to "poop" on a teams logo (obviously it would be a team you don't like) the dad responds to a tweet someone had commented about how much they don't like the diapers. Eventually the dialogue builds and conversation becomes a huge twitter battle involving a university and the dad. This is just a perfect example of a sweeter, nicer, version of the Kilroy incident. What started off as a disagreement between two relatively small parties it just blew up into a nation wide debate. In the TV show the medium was Twitter and in Kilroy it was, of course, Facebook. However, thanks to social media, the results can be the same and now anyone can get involved.




http://fox59.com/2016/01/08/woman-who-posted-facebook-rant-about-ruined-new-years-eve-at-indianapolis-bar-no-longer-with-salon/



 http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/woman-threw-fit-patron-heart-attack-job-article-1.2489904