Quote1: The Internet is one among many other ways in which people flirt, gossip, learn, shop, organize, etc. Hence Internet use has to be studied not exclusively by the traces that it leaves in cyberspace, but as it meshes with other common activities and projects comprising the common ground of people’s daily lives.
Quote1 is from The Internet in Everyday Life: Exploring the Tenets and Contributions of Diverse Approaches by Maria Bakardjieva in ‘The Handbook of Internet Studies’. In the chapter, Bakardjieva argues that the way the public uses the Internet determines the role the internet plays in their everyday life and whether they are affected by it positively or negatively. The internet has been merged into our daily lives. It’s like the air we breathe or the water fishes live by. Therefore, we cannot focus on the internet itself alone and put people’s daily lives aside. The internet should be studied with people’s activities at the same time including people’s social interactions, daily routines, hobbies, sex, and social norms since they are in a relationship of shaping each other. Bakardjieva rises three significant approaches to. internet studies. The first is the statistical approach, which discovers trends and patterns of internet usage by large-scale statistics. The second is an interpretative approach that explains the different ways people use the Internet, and the complicated changes and multi-dimensional adjustments brought by it. The last is the critical approach which aims to shed light on the oppressive aspects of the internet and discover the positive sides. The author also pointed out that the current Internet environment enhances people’s sense of loneliness, and that introverts are more likely to be psychologically affected than extroverts. I agree with the author’s main argument that the way we use the internet shapes how it influences us. Firstly, today’s social platforms provide ordinary people chances to improve their influence. People are more easily to have followers and the ‘right to speak’ and become influential. Secondly, social media and apps grab people’s attention and time thus can decrease their real-life happiness and cause negative socio-psychological effects. Hence, the impact of the Internet depends on how it is used.
(Word account: 310)
Reference list:
Bakardjieva, M. (2011). The Internet in Everyday Life: Exploring the Tenets and Contributions of Diverse Approaches.The handbook of internet studies,59-82.
Quote3: Identity scholars such as Goffman (1959) have long argued that the self plays multiple roles in everyday life and cannot be understood adequately as a single unified entity, Rather than there being One True Self, variations of which are inherently false, contemporary scholars have come to see the self as flexible and mutable, taking different incarnations in different situations.
Quote3 is from New Relationships, New Selves by Nancy K. Baym in ‘Personal connections in the Digital Age’. This quote refers to that today’s Internet allows people to have different identities and roles online. For example, a person can be a content producer, a student, a fan in a community, a sport enthusiasts, and a lover on different social platforms. Separated as these roles online, they are neither entirely fake nor the variability of an individual but based on the integrity, complexity, and multiplicity of a person. In relation to Baym’s main argument, although online identities depend on how people present themselves and one can be multiple roles, the images most people built for themselves are not as untrustworthy as we thought. Baym’s article has been incredibly significant by the studies of online identities and relationships through many real cases. She argues that in most cases, people do not take the advantages of online self-presentation to build a face and fanciful self but based on the authenticity of their real lives. Baym’s article deeply studies online relationships and concludes that the relationship built through the internet is not as weak as people worried and social platforms provide a space for more cross-sex friendships and relationships between people who have few chances to become friends offline. I agree with Baym as I believe her conclusions are based on factual case studies. Although the internet provides us a space to create an ideal self, most people need offline real lives and it could have no benefits to make the online self and offline lives totally distinct. The majority of us do not want to be considered as a liar when meeting others offline.
(Word account: 283)
Reference list:
Baym, N. (2010). New Relationships, New Selves?.Personal Connections in the Digital Age,140-169.
Quote6: The affordances of networked publics introduce new dynamics with which participants must contend. Many of these dynamics are not new, but they were never so generally experienced.
Quote6 is from Social Network Sites as Networked Publics: Affordances, Dynamics and Implications by Danah Boyd in ‘Networked Self: Identity, community and culture on Social Network Sites’. This quote refers to people participates more on the internet than before due to changes in the affordances of users and the consequent dynamics. In relation to Boyd’s main argument, this quote claims that the Internet has penetrated into every aspect and of people's lives, and people's lives are now combined with the Internet. The distinguish between online and offline is no longer so obvious due to network technologies, which leads to many transformations of publics today. Boyd’s article has been incredibly significant by the conclusion that network sites transformed people’s daily lives. The term ‘networked publics’ consists of a spatial existence and publics transformed by the network. He studies three important technologies. The first is invisible audiences refers to that the content producers cannot see most of their audiences and the actual audiences may not be the group they expect or imagined. The second is collapsed contexts which describes the phenomenon that digital environments make it difficult to create different images and styles of contexts. The last is the blurring of public and private which claims that the way people treat privacy has been changed and new ways of deciding the boundaries of online sharing and privacy are coming up. I partially agree with Boyd since people spend more time online and more stuff can be finished online because of network technologies. Network sites are transforming people’s self-presentation and social approaches. However, it does not change some basic level of people’s life such as cultural aspects. Even the distinction between public and privacy is blurring, the core and goals of people’s lives are similar and are worth exploring in any era.
(Word account: 300)
Reference list:
Boyd, D. (2010). Social Network Sites as Networked Publics: Affordances, Dynamics, and Implications.Networked Self: Identity, Community and Culture on Social Network Sites,39-58.
Quote10: The network is therefore a collaborator in the identity and content presented by the speaker, and the imagined audience becomes visible when it influences the information Twitter users choose to broadcast.
Quote 10 is from I tweet honestly, I tweet passionately: Twitter users, context collapse, and the imagined audience by Alice E. Marwick and Danah Boyd in ‘New media & society’. This quote refers to content creators use the internet to present their identities and contexts, and the imagined audience becomes a group of concrete people when creators are clear about their targets and aims on building their profiles and thus they choose what to post based on their concrete or target audiences. In relation to Marwick and Boyd’s main argument, Twitter users have different purposes for using the platform and what identity and contents they want to create. Users who want to attract more followers and become popular using different strategies from those who only want to share their lives with people who are close to them. To maintain their online identities and purposes to use the platform, people post content for specific audiences, whether a big or a small group of people. Hence imagined audiences become visible when they are the target audience. Marwick and Boyd’s work has delved deeply into the relationships of the speaker and the audience and how they influence each other online. The influential speakers imagine that they are posting to a group of fans. Their work has been significant by conflicts and tensions through online connections. I agree with them that aims to attract followers and self-branding conflicts with self-expressions and intimate relationships. Those who are building personal brands imagine themselves talking to a larger group of people and have post different contents with people who are not craving a fan base. More and more people are looking for a balance between self authenticity and keeping attracting the audiences they aim for.
(Word account: 289)
Reference list:
Marwick, A.; Boyd D. (2011). I tweet honestly, I tweet passionately: Twitter users, context collapse, and the imagined audience. New media & society, 13(1), 114-133. https://doi-org.ezproxy.library.sydney.edu.au/10.1177/1461444810365313
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