Essay 1 – [Me and social media – my relationship to social media technologies]

Social media are primarily Internet-based tools for sharing and discussing information among human beings.[1] Social media have different functions, such as communication, collaboration and entertainment etc..

I always use MySpace and Skype to keep in touch with my family and my friends in China. Usually I update my blogs in MySpace once a week. They can know about my daily life by reading my blogs and watching my photos in my space. After that they will also comment on them. As I see the comments, I will also give my feedback on those comments. It is not an instantaneous communication. To communicate instantaneously, i always use Skype to give a phone call to my family. Skype is a sofware for users to make phone calls on the internet. It is cheaper to call my family in China using Skype than using my phone. And the phone calls on the internet also have good quality as on the cellphones.

In my study, I always use wiki, YouTube and google doc as assistant tools. When come up to an unknown concept, I always check it in wiki. I think the explanations in wiki are authoritative. YouTube is a good place to learn about new technologies and new products. We can find many experiments done by other people with the technologies which we are interested in. And it is also a good video resource. When we do our experiments, YouTube is always an important video resource to assist our ideas. At the end, a final report is always required. We always use google docs to finish the report together. Google docs is a on-line word processor, which allows users to edit the same documents while collaborating in real-time with other users.

The good thing is that social media make my daily life easier, because it is convenient to communicate with my family and friends on-line. The bad thing is that it makes the time that I talk to them face to face shorter. On-line Communication is definitely different from the face-to-face communication. when we talk to our friends face-to-face, we can feel whether our word is property or not. Our feelings can also affect the other’s emotion. This kind of communication is much more deeper than the communication on-line. When we communicate on-line, we face to our computer. While talking to others, we can watch a movie, play games or even do our assignments. As what I feel about, the more we communicate online, the colder the relations are.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_media