Facebook Frenzy

Hi, my name is Caton McKenna, and I am new to blogging and new to Comm 245. I am a junior communication major and AEM minor in CALS. Hopefully, I will become a journalist or marketing executive in the future. I enjoy traveling, reading, creative writing, sarcasm, movies and rainbows. It’s 12:46 at night, so I’ll be honest- I’m just trying to type fast. One time, actually, quite a few times, I have taken those speed typing tests- they get addicting. I love doing that though, especially the one with the monkey and the bananas.

Anyways, so, I guess that’s enough about me. As far as this assignment, I’ll focus on facebook. Facebook offers a virtual community to users. For me it’s kind of like screening calls. You see a friend or acquaintance’s name on your cell phone and have no idea what he/she is calling about. Instead of picking up, you let your voicemail do the talking. Hopefully the person will leave a message and you can decide whether it merits a reply. This leaves you completely in control and leaves the other person completely in the dark that you aren’t taking his/her calls. You have the power to halt the communication process by just listening to the message and gleaning all the necessary information from that. No vocal connection is needed.

So, I guess that’s a stretch, but I think it’s somewhat similar to facebook. It’s a one-sided conversation. You can anonymously check out any of your facebook friend’s information, photos and relationship status at anytime you want, for as long as you want, without anyone knowing. You have complete, I’ll say it, “stalking” power. Plus, there’s no remorse or consequence for looking (despite the complete lack of productivity for that hour, two hours, etc.).

For some, you care about your friend’s life and feel somewhat connected to him/her as he/she travels around the world and you click through his/her ajillion pictures. When you two meet, the pictures/information on facebook has already familiarized you with the trip, so your conversation can be shorter with your newly gained knowledge. Yes, I do believe facebook allows people to avoid or simplify conversations. The information on facebook is public, and anything on there is assumed common knowledge. There is no need for speculation, questions or conversation when all the answers you need are broadcasted on this website.

Additionally, facebook has become an outlet for complete and utter judgment of friends and acquaintances. Oh my gosh- I can’t believe she got married! What was she thinking? Does he think he looks attractive in that picture? Wow, someone gained weight. Again, judgment without remorse or tsking. You can peruse photos, info and wall posts, use your sleuth-like skills to deduce secret relationships, or tumultuous ones. You can make connections between people that you never existed and interpret any message’s connotation to your heart’s content. Facebook gives you the freedom to gossip with yourself.

Facebook is asynchronous, since participants do not exchange messages in real time. Additionally, facebook has persistence in that it remains in the web domain as a record or file of some sort. Finally, facebook has limited anonymity for the facebook profiler, but limitless anonymity for the facebook friendly “stalker.”

must've been asleep

Hi all,
Haha I forgot to say which environment I believe that I am participating in. I think the blogger environment mostly emulates why Wallace describes as the "asynchronous discussion forum."
sorry for the multiple posts!

You can find everything on eBay

Hi Everyone!

My name is Catherine Walsh, and I am a Junior Communication major. Although I am a junior, this is only my second year at Cornell; I transferred from University at Albany last year. Albany was a fun place, but I am happy to be at a more academic focused University. I am what people would call a “townie”; born and raised in Ithaca. Ithaca is an amazing town and I am really happy to go to school here. My parents still live in Cayuga Heights, so I can occasionally take the five minute drive home to do my laundry or have a good meal!

I love using the internet and think that wireless internet is one of the greatest technological inventions of all time! When it comes to the internet, I guess you could say I am like any average college student. I use the internet for research, to check my email and facebook, and to use IM. If I am typing a paper you can count on my facebook profile and IM buddy list to be open as well. However, I don’t really use the internet for anything other than the programs already mentioned. I don’t talk in chat rooms and have never participated in a blog (this is my first blogging experience). Where I differ from my peers is the fact that I have never used eBay, a major internet phenomenon. I don’t think I have ever met anyone my age who has not used eBay, which in itself proves the phenomenon.

In case any of you are also an inexperienced eBay user, the eBay website states “eBay is The World's Online Marketplace®, enabling trade on a local, national and international basis”. My understanding of eBay is that people post items for sale and other users bid on the items in timed auctions. After the auction has ended, it is up to the seller to send the item to the buyer, and the buyer must complete payment to the seller. You have to be a registered user to use eBay.

The phenomenon of eBay falls into several internet environments. The most significant environment is the World Wide Web. eBay, a website that can be thought of as a catalog for online shopping, connects consumers to millions of products, new or used. Another internet space eBay exists in is the asynchronous discussion forum. Users of eBay are given the opportunity to communicate by posting feedback comments after a business transaction occurs. For example if you buy a glass vase from a fellow eBay user, and they send you a broken vase, you could write this in the feedback comments to warn other shoppers.

Are eBay and other online shopping communities, which contribute to increased internet use, contributing to the reduction of family communication and social involvement?

Is the Internet making us more pop culture focused?

With more information at our fingertips than ever before about pressing, disturbing, and complex global issues we seem to have become a nation focused on pop culture oriented news. Buzz worthy sensational lifestyles, crimes, and trends often make the headlines on the webs most popular news source websites (i.e. yahoo.com, msn.com, and aol.com) before political, economic, and social crises both here and abroad. So this begs the question: are we just really celebrity focused pop culture junkies at our core or is the Internet making us more intent on these issues? I realize that with advent of mass media its figureheads have been put under the microscope by popular demand, but I can’t help but feel that people’s concern with issue is growing in breadth and intensity. (Yes, those adjectives came from the reading ; ) ) I find that most of my casual conversation with people in social settings is much more likely to digress into the latest pop culture gossip than into thoughts and opinions on current events. How about you?

Spam sPam sPAm!!

Hey! My name is Taek Kyun (pronounced tech) and I am a Junior in the College of Engineering. I am currently studying Operations Research and as my name’s pronunciation suggests, technology and gadgets are my thing. I grew up in the Bronx but I was born in South Korea. An interesting thing about me is that until this day, I have trouble differentiating between my left from my right, I need a minute or two to figure it out each time. It’s as if something in my head never clicked, and I’ve come to accept that I may never instinctively know which is which.

So, let’s move on to an internet-related phenomenon. How much email do you get daily? 10? 20? How much spam do you get? The topic of this discussion is spam. This phenomenon occurs in the “email space”. Ever since I’ve owned a computer, I was connected to the internet. Starting with America Online and NetZero over a telephone line on a 56k modem to a Cable Broadband connection these days, I’ve sorted through hundred of spam emails daily. Spam had never been a nuisance because of the many effective spam blockers but the extent that the companies go to in order to advertise their business is phenomenal.

Looking into it, I’ve discovered that a lot of the spam comes from websites using “tracking cookie” files that are loaded onto the computers when a website is accessed. These cookies return the user’s information and some recent activities to servers. The receiving servers then use the data to tailor advertisement messages to send out to the email addresses that were acquired. Personally, I believe this is a sleazy method and I can’t think of a single person who enjoys or even looks at the spam mail. This is a phenomenon because even when one carefully avoids websites or services that may generate spam, there is still a disgusting load of spam that ends up in the already congested inboxes.

When the spam blockers and the spam filters fail on the email servers, spam is able to serve its purpose. The people who send out the spam use interesting names and subjects in an attempt to catch our attentions. The most interesting part of spam is the persistence of some of these advertisement companies. I begin to wonder if anyone actually buys or even looks at the messages. I mean, some must, since the spamming hasn’t stopped. I wonder who would consciously sign up for or enlist themselves to receive information from the sketchier spams. In the email online space, spam plays an enduring role in cluttering the mail boxes with unnecessary advertisement. It is a phenomenon that they have been around for so long.

The humans are dead.

Hello, my name is Austin and I am a junior in the College of Arts and Sciences. I am currently studying Information Science and exploring a possible minor in AEM. I am from Fairfax, Virginia which pretty much is to DC as Westchester is to NYC except fewer Jews. I love music (rock, hip-hop, jazz, house, indie, folk), DJing, hi fi stereos, cars, Entourage, Flight of the Conchords, standup comedy, and working out.

Like most of you I have never been on the writing side of blogs. However, I am somewhat of an RSS addict with Google Reader always ready to give me a fix. Feeling a little bit of withdrawal in my Psych class this morning I quickly browsed through blogs and feeds from Lifehacker to CNN Money to Digg. Through a twist of ironic fate I ran into this article. Minding the Meeting, or Your Computer? (http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/26/business/yourmoney/26pre.html?_r=1&oref=slogin).

While it is not specifically about one specific online space, the article, written by a Microsoft employee, describes the ubiquity of laptops in meetings as well as classrooms and the common negative consequences resulting from having so much information at our fingertips. Thus our interaction with online spaces is simplified however our behavior in offline spaces may be affected

How can I keep myself from being distracted by my laptop when I am sitting in class trying to escape boredom?

The usefulness of bringing a computer to class is definitely there, you can take notes, go through lecture slides, look up terms in Wikipedia or have an intelligent, on topic AIM chat with other students in the same class (yeah right). The other side, however, is infinitely more tempting. This encompasses the solitaire playing, ESPN stat checking, email writing, AIM chatting, Facebook poking, or Youtube watching that I’ve do in class. Hey, I see you do it too. Putting aside the fact that I was guilty of the distraction caused by my computer, I think this article emphasizes how the more easily we can access information, the more time we spend processing it. This leads to less focus on the content of information but more time spent on categorizing the overflow of news, lecture notes, to do lists, etc.

I remember the days when schools banned pagers because the thought of having that much information accessible to kids automatically meant they were drug dealers. Professors that outlaw laptops from their classrooms would lose popularity faster than Lindsay Lohan. Limiting Internet access in classrooms would also limit the educational reasons for bringing a laptop to class. As laptops eventually replace planners and notebooks as the de facto classroom tool, professors will look at walls of Dell and Apple logos instead of the bobbing heads of dozing students. How will we tame the beckoning our technology to pull us away from what we should be doing?

"...the internet is not something you just dump something on. It's not a truck. It's a series of tubes."

Hi, interweb boys and girls and fellow student bloggers. I'm Siddhartha Bajracharya, a senior biology major in CALS, concentrating in microbiology. For what it's worth, I've yet to read the Hesse novel (thanks, I've got a copy already), and my name is pronounced entirely phonetically -- but most people call me Sid by way of convenience.

I don't know really quite what to say by way of further introduction, but from glancing over the previous entries in the Green Blog it looks like I'm one of relatively few non-communications majors here. I suppose my credibility in this class will come from having been a nerd from a tender age. There's a picture of me here in my local library's Internet Club, circa 1996: I'm in the white shirt in the middle of the picture, at about age 10. This is, of course, in the golden age of multimedia CD-ROMs, the Pentium chip, and AOL. The library's 128kbps ISDN line seemed inconceivably fast to me, and I didn't have so much as AOL at home. Today, I suppose I'm a senior geek, working at the CIT HelpDesk with Alex, who posted a ways down, spending my spare time kicking at my salvaged Linux server only to discover it went down because someone unplugged it, and realizing that you and I are probably among the last generation in this country to remember the day when we first got Internet access at home.

There's quite a few bits of Internets phenomena that I'm interested in, but I'll just touch on one here in this short post. I'm particularly interested in antisocial and disruptive behavior online, generally known as 'trolling' in web communities like chatrooms, discussion forums, and blogs, or 'griefing' in gaming communities -- what forms antisociol behavior takes online, what makes it distinctly and radically different from antisocial behavior IRL, who perpetrates these behaviors, and what motivates them. Trolling has had a long history online, appearing in virtually every type of online space Wallace cites, from its earliest appearances on Usenet to modern glorified MUDs like Second Life. Trolling has also taken an incredibly diverse variety of forms. from forum invasions run by the infamous Anonymous (briefly discussed by Jenna), extended taunting of bizarre borderline personalities, as seen on the now-defunct LJDrama blog, to something as simple as friendly-fire player killing in Counter-Strike. Trolls are generally deeply unpopular in the majority of Internet communities (excepting, of course, trolling communities), but trolling remains very common, to the point where being exposed to certain classic trolling techniques has become something of a rite of passage and part of Internet culture among Internet users. Furthermore, for such a well-known part of Internet culture, very little academic work seems to have been done on it (at least in my limited research).