Blog Post # 4: The future of Social Media

How do you think social media will change in the future? What other trends would you add to the mix? Are there any specific technologies that you think will gain popularity or emerge?

Social media changes every day, whether they are improvements or not. I do believe social media will absolutely become even more mobile than it already is, as we are a society that likes instant gratification. Social media is something of a growing organism I’ve noticed over the last few years; people come up with new applications, new ways to use social media to their advantage and are always updating and trying to improve the current applications and modules. I think it is good that it grows and changes as we all do, but sometimes I also think that you shouldn’t mess with a good thing or you will upset the users that don’t like rapid change. 

 I don’t think I would add any trends to the mix necessarily as there are so many already out there but I do like the concept of web 3.0/ semantic web. I am a bit bias on this as I am a library technician student, and we want to organize everything, classify it, etc. it is interesting to see how that would work as the web is so big you can’t organize everything, but it is fascinating how they said that they could somewhat create structures by creating ‘relationships’. Also how they want to make search engines smarter in the future, to get to know you personally to give you appropriate answers to your requests, I think might end up going to far as it sounds like they want to make them smarter and I end up having flashes of I robot.

 I think it is a good idea overall that they want to give machines metadata they can read so they can understand your requests more adequately as this will make things easier on users and more efficient. I think with all the technology emerging and improving/ updating that people need to be careful still and know exactly how something on the web works and uses the information they input as anyone might be able to access this information later- due to improvement glitches it could also end up being leaked.  Change is good, but we should approach it cautiously. 

   ~Chantel 

Blog Posting #3: Social media & the 2012 election

U.S. President Barack Obama has been touted as "the social media president" and the history books will certainly mark the 2008 election as the first to be influenced by social media. Do you think that social media will continue to play an important role in the 2012 election, or is the phenomenon over-hyped?

  

Obama's participation in social media

Social media is a growing phenomenon, increasing in popularity at an extraordinary speed. Unlike in any other Presidential election, the Obama campaign harnessed a range of social media tools to help connect with the voters and encourage support. On his website they posted videos, photos, and speeches. After the election the Obama team continued to use social media, within 24 hours of the successful vote, Obama's transition team rolled out the http://change.gov/website which was designed to continue the conversation that began during the campaign. The site gave people an opportunity to share their thoughts on important issues and respond to policy ideas. This made people feel they were being heard and that Obama was listening, it is extremely important to people that their opinion matters and will be listened to. Social media breaks down communication barriers and lets all people interact and communicate with one another which was important in the 2008 election as Obama used social media to better communicate with and better reach the voters. Also because technology is always advancing and social media is growing, using it in his campaign showed the voters that he adapts to the changing technology and will harness and use it to his advantage to communicate with the voters. A recent study from branding agency Digitas found that 88% of U.S. adults on social media are registered voters, and that over half will use social media to learn about the presidential election. This is a huge development and will most likely to increase due to students coming of voting age and growing up in the ‘social media world’ and growing use of technology in everyday life. In spite of its massive and unprecedented growth, political strategists are still in the early stages of figuring out what social media can and can't do. The trend is clear, however: digital will be an ever more important factor as each new election cycle rolls around. Social media offers an opportunity for government to speak directly to their constituents and has helped to spark the new Government 2.0 model which focuses on transparency, collaboration, innovation, and participation. Social media will continue to play an important role in the 2012 election and it will continue to grow and develop for future elections as well.

   ~Chantel~

Blog Post #2: Quality of news and information

Social media has allowed everyday citizens to become authors, editors, and publishers of news and information. Do you believe that social media has increased the quality of news and information or decreased it?

       I think that with social media allowing everyday citizens to become authors, editors, and publishers of news and information that it has decreased the quality of news information. With social media it allows you to get news instantly but it is most likely not from a reliable resource with proof and it makes it a lot harder for people to distinguish what is fact from fiction. Social media has made it a lot harder to get the truth online especially with twitter; people will "Retweet" what someone else said and it can go on and on starting rumors and spreading them to the general population. I think social media has increased the quantity not quality of news and information. You also have to be careful when researching to use good sources and provide evidence; especially with sites where anyone with an account can edit pages and give you false information about any topic you are looking at for example Wikipedia. I also think that legitimate news and information sources do use social media to improve the quality and quickness of news and information reaching people. Such as CBC News using Twitter to inform people, they have a different Twitter for each region and they also have a CBC top news stories and news alerts Twitter. Social media makes a lot of things easier for people but at the same time people have to do a lot more work looking for legitimate information and news sources which is funny considering one of the reasons people use social media is to get news faster and easier. I believe that social media has permanently decreased the quality of news and information that we receive because it enables anyone to author, edit, and publish information whether it is the truth or a random made up story to garner attention.

    ~Chantel~