This week was at first a confusing week, but as the week went on I started to be very interested in the class discussions. Jumping into an online class is always confusing at first because of the lack of face-to-face communication. Ironically this is what most of our class discussions were about this week. Talking about social online communities, the class discussed the advantages and disadvantages of having online relationships vs. having personal / physical relationships. The most informative part of the week was the first day of class. Watching those videos and learning about all the amazing types of technology that are out there was eye opening and it really got me thinking about the huge part technology plays in our everyday lives, in everything we do. In the first PBS video the use of magic to help discover how the brain functions was very interesting and something I had never thought about before. Using illusions to stimulate different parts of the brain was an amazing discovery and this could help in future research on the brain, which would be positive to the medical industry.
The reading about Reputation Management was also something that impacted me during the week. I am one to keep close tabs on my Facebook and because of this it was interesting to learn about the different dynamics that older vs. younger generations have on their security of their Facebooks’.
Before watching the PBS video, I had little to know knowledge of how people were learning about the brain. I knew that this piece of tissue was a powerful organ but I had no idea just how powerful. When the doctors decide to work with magicians to study attention and awareness of the brain I was skeptical about scientificness of using magic, but once I watched I realized that it is not about the magic itself but it is about our perceptions of the tricks that the doctors were studying. This helped me realize that you can take one thing that seems to be fun, and by studying human interaction with it you can learn about people itself. This concept can be brought into any aspect of human life, such as technology. How we interact with this technology as humans can teach people about human nature in itself and that to me is very eye opening.
In the class discussions about Reputation Management I learned that many different people have different opinions on who should be allowed to monitor your reputation. This can be seen when we were talking about if companies had the right to tell you how to run your Facebook. To me, I think that companies have no right to control your personal life but many other students had a different idea of how they would like companies to control their social networking online. Sara Ownes opinion was very different from mine when she stated, “I actually disagree. If you are making this information public for anyone to see, then I believe it is reasonable for employers to be concerned with what you are making public.” So it can be seen that on some topics we have different opinions but, most of us did agree with the subject of the article. The article stated that, “When compared with older users, young adults are more likely to restrict what they share and whom they share it with.” Since the majority of the people in this class are from one generation (the younger one) I think it was easier for all of us to agree on this subject. The article also talks about “Young adults are the most active online reputation managers in several dimensions. When compared with older users, they more often customize what they share and whom they share it with.” Again, all most of the students said that they agreed that instead of just not putting up typical “college photos” they change their settings so certain people cannot see it. I also do this, but didn’t really know why until I analyzed it in this class. I hide my photos from certain people because I want to share my life with my friends, but I also want to create a professional facade in front of my boss or my parents.
I am excited for the next 3 weeks of this class. The subjects we have talked about this week are interesting and they really are something we should be talking about as college students because online communities affect us everyday and in the “real world” after we graduate we should understand how to navigate them successfully. I also scarred to start my research project that is coming up and have a lot of open-ended questions about the specifics of it. I think at a later date in class this will be talked about and I think I am going to enjoy putting the concepts we have learned this first week, and continue to learn into practice for the research project and for life.
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