Essay.1501.How do social media change our understanding of individual identity, with regard to the kinds of people we have in our social networks?

In today’s society, social network sites (SNS) have several other purposes than mentioned in this essay. Citizens of today’s world consider the SNS such as Facebook as their main communication channels. In this essay one of the focuses will be on the SNS Facebook, and to what extent Internet dating is used in today’s society. One of the histories goes back to 1997, when what seemed to be the first social networking site sixDegrees.com were launched. The site allowed people to make simple profiles, and in the beginning of 1998, the users could search their friend list. SixDegrees.com was shut down in 2000 for lack of purpose for its concept. Looking back, its founder believes that SixDegrees was simply ahead of its time.

In 2008 the sixth most trafficked website did not start out with the purpose it carries today (Lewis, Kaufman, Gonzales and Wimmer, 2008). In the beginning of 2004 Facebook was designed to be a college network for Harvard students (Cassidy 2006). One of the necessities to be part of this college network was to have a university email address associated with those institutions. In the beginning of 2005 they included high school students and professionals inside corporate networks and eventually, everyone (Boyd & Ellison 2007). Key terms addressed in this essay is as following, the way social media is used by consumers in today’s society is numerous.

Social network sites can be defined as web-based services that allow individuals to construct a public or semi-public profile within a bounded system. What makes social network sites unique is that people make contact with strange people from other countries in their social network, this can result in relationships that would not been made otherwise. (Haythornthwaite, 2005)

People taking on various identities online to fit the cultural norms in the society, is not a new matter. Social network sites such as various dating sites allow people to create profiles that contain personal and sensitive information about themselves (R.Gross & A.Acquisti,2005). The use of information technology to find and meet new partners can be located all the way back to the 1960 when using information collected from a questionnaire were used to match people. They promoted the research as ‘scientifically’ matching people to gain trust and popularity. Internet dating is characterised by a” seamless movement between reading descriptions and writing responses and exchanging messages” .(Godwin 1973)

In recent years the use of online dating and personal services online has burst out. In 2003, at least 29 million Americans that is two out of five singles, used a online dating service (Gershberg,2004) further on in 2004, on average 40 million visit any online dating sites each month in the U.S. A research conducted in 2001, found that over a quarter of online dating partakers reported misrepresenting some aspect of their identity, most frequent, age (14%), marital status (10%), and appearance (10%) (Brym & Lenton,2001)

Some of the benefits from Internet dating is that the awkwardness, physical stress and the embarrassment associated with real-life dating can be avoided. Dating sites reflects the diversity of individuals and are dedicated to such people belong to same religious group, sexual preferences and disables people. However the majority of dating sites appeal to the heterosexual marked, and can often be seen advertising with “finding your soul mate”. They can further on be divided into whether they are free of service or charging users. It may appear more trustful to use services with fees. ( M. Hardey 2002). Self-disclosure is an act of revealing personal information about oneself to others.

Self-disclosure is one important subject when it comes to who people present themselves as online, especially in a dating setting. Research reveals the relative anonymity of online interactions and the lack of a shared social network online may allow individuals to reveal potentially negative aspects of them online (Bargh et al., 2002). The perception that people are lying about whom they are on their online dating profile is not a new phenomenon. This may encourage to mutual dishonesty, concern about this deception in the dating industry has made services that help online daters uncover inaccuracies in others’ representations and run background checks. As a result of this, the dating site True.com have started to run background checks on their user, and are working on introducing legislations that would force dating sites to run background checks on their users or to display a requirement to do so. (Lee 2004). Online predators finds online dating very useful because such sites give them an unending supply of new targets of opportunity of internet fraud, a study conducted by Liebert & McGerty 2000 found that there was a false degree of safety assumed by women looking for a partner online, exposing them to stalking, fraud and sexual violence.

In conclusion online dating is a relatively new phenomenon; such expectations may change as it becomes more commonplace. Most of the current literature about online dating relies on self-report data, therefore the offers only limited insight into the extent to which misrepresentation may be occurring and result in inaccurate information in the field. There is also to be found people creating fake profiles to benefit other than themselves.

Reference list:

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1083-6101.2006.00020.x/pdf

Lee 2004

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com.libraryproxy.griffith.edu.au/doi/10.1111/j.1083-6101.2006.00020.x/pdf

sexDegrees.com

http://blog.afridesign.com/2010/09/sixdegrees-com-social-networking-in-its-infancy/

Lebert & McGerty 2000

http://web.ebscohost.com.libraryproxy.griffith.edu.au/ehost/pdfviewer/pdfviewer?vid=2&hid=7&sid=da3bccd8-aa34-4eb3-a2c1-c1f98bac2cb2%40sessionmgr110

Lewis, Kaufman, Gonzales and Wimmer, 2008).

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi=B6VD1-4T3M686-1&_user=10&_coverDate=10%2F31%2F2008&_rdoc=1&_fmt=high&_orig=search&_origin=search&_sort=d&_docanchor=&view=c&_searchStrId=1510202696&_rerunOrigin=scholar.google&_acct=C000050221&_version=1&_urlVersion=0&_userid=10&md5=dcb39a3d8ab5014e8e12bc8737b4d27f&searchtype=a

Cassidy, 2006

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1083-6101.2007.00367.x/full

Boyd & Ellison 2007

http://net.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/ECR0713.pdf

Haythornthwaite 2005

http://books.google.com.au/books?hl=en&lr=&id=zeP1UdZKYfIC&oi=fnd&pg=PA121&dq=(Haythornthwaite,+Social+networks+and+Internet+connectivity+effects,+2005&ots=3Q8AyGY6Wt&sig=YSLJXNHAF4-jxl9V2gTKE_EnF_k#v=onepage&q=(Haythornthwaite%2C%20Social%20networks%20and%20Internet%20connectivity%20effects%2C%202005&f=false

R.Gross & A.Acquisti,2005

http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1102199.1102214

Godwin 1973

http://www.springerlink.com/content/r057728733834116/

Gershberg 2004

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1083-6101.2006.00020.x/full

Brym and Lenton 2001

http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.122.3957&rep=rep1&type=pdf

M.Hardey 2002

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1467-954X.00399/abstract

Bargh et al., 2002

http://www.annualreviews.org/doi/abs/10.1146/annurev.psych.55.090902.141922?journalCode=psych

Liebert & McGerty 2000

http://www.liebertonline.com/doi/abs/10.1089/10949310050191863

Lee 2004

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1083-6101.2006.00020.x/full

Week 10, course evaluation

I have decided to make this evaluation of the course as fear as possible. So i am going to say 5 positive, and 5 negative things about the course.

Always start with the positive.

1. I think the lecture topics and the information given was relevant, at least to some extent.

2. I found it really exciting to blog each week, I would have never in my life created a blog, but here i am blogging. And i LIKE it.

3. We got a really nice and helpful tutor Lauren, i must admit i felt sorry for her the times she was suppose to give us instructions , and nobody from the "higher level" had made them.

4. The Tutesparks, were both challenging and fun at the same time.

5. I really enjoyed this way of learning and writing things in my own words, i am used to read page up and down and write boring academic reports, i really liked doing things in a different manner for a change.

No unfortunately NEGATIVE.

1. as mentioned above, this course lack of organisation and structure.

2. the way due dates are changes with short notice is really frustrating when you have 3 other subject to organise also, i must admit that is very unprofessional for a University.

3. I thought it was a joke when i found out that our week 8 tutorial task, was copied and pasted from a internet page, plagiarism!!

4.i must admit the topics in the lectures was a bit all over the place, i left a lot of lectures asking myself " what was that really about"?

5. it ways way more time consuming then i had ever imagined.

week 9. tutorial

I chose topic # 5 for my essay; "How do social media change our understanding of individual identity, with regard to the kinds of people we have in our social networks?"

My first thoughts around this essay topic is to define Social Media, and write about social network sites such as Twitter/Facebook/Dating sites. Also, I want to adress the issues surrounding the problems regarding people altering their identity to their benefits. People making fake profiles to lure people ti believe they are someone else. I started to look for academic articles, and i found at least one i am going to use.

Abstract:The concept of Social Media is top of the agenda for many business executives today. Decision makers, as well as consultants, try to identify ways in which firms can make profitable use of applications such as Wikipedia, YouTube, Facebook, Second Life, and Twitter. Yet despite this interest, there seems to be very limited understanding of what the term “Social Media” exactly means; this article intends to provide some clarification. We begin by describing the concept of Social Media, and discuss how it differs from related concepts such as Web 2.0 and User Generated Content. Based on this definition, we then provide a classification of Social Media which groups applications currently subsumed under the generalized term into more specific categories by characteristic: collaborative projects, blogs, content communities, social networking sites, virtual game worlds, and virtual social worlds. Finally, we present 10 pieces of advice for companies which decide to utilize Social Media.

www.sciencedirect.com.libraryproxy.griffith.edu.au/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi=B6W45-4XFF2S0-1&_user=79777&_coverDate=02%2F28%2F2010&_rdoc=1&_fmt=high&_orig=search&_origin=search&_sort=d&_docanchor&view=c&_acct=C000006418&_version=1&_urlVersion=0&_userid=79777&md5=f845489663eb8844fe2bd10bb2fda3b5&searchtype=a

week 9. Lecture summary

This weeks lecture was about the subject CyberPunk, with a big focus on one of the worlds leading authors on that subject William Gibson. What i personally struggle with is the term "cyberpunk" since it is not something that can be specifically defined. I think about words like, mutation, technology, people controlled by machines etc. the main goal i think is to make people aware of what impact technology can have on people, most ways negative. To spice up the lecture we did see a clip from one of the worlds most famous movies the Matrix. There are several examples of films made to "predict" just what the technology can do to mankind: The Terminator, Alien, 12 monkeys, Robocop, Irobot, The Matrix, Total Recall and the most recent film AVATAR. this are all names taken from the nerdie page;www.cyberpunkreview.com/, i must admit this in mot my kind of genre. I think is most about weird fiction, but it also highlight what technology is capable of doing.

The focus was also on the author William Gibson.He is one of the leading authors in science fiction.

he has been given name such as the king of cyberpunk, he first started writing his Sci-Fi novels in the 1970´s. I found a frase were he is describing the period were he got the into writing again"In 1977, facing first-time parenthood and an absolute lack of enthusiasm for anything like "career," I found myself dusting off my twelve-year-old's interest in science fiction. Simultaneously, weird noises were being heard from New York and London. I took Punk to be the detonation of some slow-fused projectile buried deep in society's flank a decade earlier, and I took it to be, somehow, a sign. And I began, then, to write"

William Gibson, "Since 1948.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Gibson