g) social networks

I’m sure most other people will say this but Facebook is by far the most effective online way to communicate with people. It’s a common site between pretty much all of my friends (and for some people professors, family, coworkers etc.) so it is easy to contact multiple people at once and you can casually browse other people’s pages to see how they are doing. No more boring vacation picture slideshows because you can click through all of the photos once they’ve been uploaded in a matter of minutes. There are also no annoying email addresses or screen names to memorize, it reminds you of birthdays that you normally would have forgotten, you can be invited to parties you might not have been otherwise, you can catch up with people quickly through the chat section (since we are online way too much)… the list goes on and on.

Personally I have never used Twitter – maybe since I never created an account it wasn’t possible for me to get addicted to it or anything like that, but overall I think it is kind of a waste of time. You get very little information (a sentence at a time) or a link that will distract you even more than you already are so you can procrastinate even further. It doesn’t really provide any useful purpose, especially since on Facebook everybody has a status they can update which does the same thing as Twitter. I suppose some people find it amusing to follow other people’s Twitters (like celebrities and whatnot) but I find it to be kind of a waste of time… no offense :P

I think the electronic interactions have been interesting as I got to see other student’s ideas about the concepts we were learning in class, that I might not have been exposed to otherwise. I thought it was appropriate for the class considering we were looking at blogs and different ways of online communicating – it forced me to delve into that world just a little bit to get a clearer idea of how those media work and what you can do with them.

As for online communication systems… I think that they aren’t as much of a distraction as just a part of modern life. It’s not something most people can avoid entirely – it’s our way of communicating now. Yes a lot of the updates we get are completely useless (I get invited to events in Taiwan during the year even when the people hosting them know I won’t be able to make it) but some of them are “important” as they relate to our daily lives. I make lunch dates and arrange to work on school projects through Facebook, I’ve even written apology letters through it. You can always be in communication with the people you need to be. Yes I’m addicted to it.