Essay 1 – My social media interaction experience

When I first started using different social media technology tools my motive was primary to have fun, although msn – one of the first tools I ever used – were also used in purpose of getting in contact with study friends in order to make school assignment processes easier and faster.

I believe that social media technologies had not been a genuinely relevant part of my life until I joined social network sites such as MySpace and later Facebook. Two years ago I decided to join Facebook and today, watching and updating me and my friends’ daily statuses, have become a routine. So, connecting with friends and family is the main motive for my usage and my increased loyal behavior towards social media technology. When I think of it, it is only a few single people I know that do not have a Facebook account. As of a few weeks ago, also my parents and a lot of friends’ parents have also joined.

One thing that I find astonishing is the power an online network has on many peoples everyday life. I am actually starting to notice that people who do not have a Facebook account are often being overlooked when people send invitations to real life activities. In fact, my mum joined Facebook only after my brother had forgot to invite her to his birthday party, due to the fact that he had only invited people using Facebook, neglecting (or at least, not taking into account people who did not have an account). Hence, not being active on major online networks is affecting peoples everyday offline lives.

Right before I joined Facebook I had become a loyal Wikipedia user, whenever I was doing research for any important subject I used this site and was amazed by its applicability. Consequently, this tool is mainly used for study purposes. I have also noticed that the number of my visits on the Wikipedia site is less than the number of times that I visit Facebook and other more direct-networking sites. Although I actually may find Wikipedia’s services more valuable than Facebook’s, I might act more habitually loyal towards social leisure sites such as Facebook and MySpace. Also as Marco Turpeinen mentioned, I have only once contributed and written a text on a subject on Wikipedia, and this was only done because I was handed the exercise in a KTH-course. On Facebook, on the other hand, I contribute and update my profile on, sort of a, daily basis.

Accordingly, the main social technologies I use – Facebook and Wikipedia –are used in support of different motives and my usage behavior is also very different between the two sites. This also proves that just a fraction of readers actually have to be active contributors in order to create a value-added site, like in the case of Wikipedia.

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

As my memory recalls, the social media technologies develop with the boom of Internet. During 90’s, friends usually talk through telecommunication networks and sellers always communicate with their consumers by mass media, such as printed newspaper and commercials. These kinds of communication are either covering limited rang of people or lack of interaction as well as feedbacks. Thus, when the first social media technological tool appeared after the invention of Internet, everyone just rushed to get it. For me, the first social media tool is ICQ,which is an instant messaging computer program and was first developed by the Israeli company Mirabilis.[1] It’s kind of like MSN in nowadays but at that time, the function of ICQ was quite simple and that’s chat with friends online. It’s also another way for me to practice written English because the version of ICQ at that time was only in English and most of users of it were English-speakers. Later, if I remembered right, the huge wave came from QQ, which was founded by a mainland China software company named Tencent. The first version of QQ started with the same function as ICQ but targeted to Chinese-speakers market and it add many innovative and creative new ideas into the programming. For example, users can change their appearing pictures in front of their names and there are many different kinds of emotions they can choose from when chatting with others to express themselves more visually. When I was in junior school, having a QQ number is a symbol of fashion among friends and it was a new way of meeting people. Till now, QQ is still the most popular free instant messaging computer program in Mainland China, and the world’s third most popular IM service.

After the emerged of these two important social media tools happened in my life, the relationship for me with social media technologies are getting tighter because more other kind of social media appeared in the short time and with more attractive usages. For instance, Blog and Forum. I think I have 10 Blogs at least from the first trend of it. From my point of view, Blog is more private and personal while forum is much public with more practical information but both of them cover more scale of people than ICQ or QQ.

To put all in a nut, I think I started to use these tools just for fun and continue using them because these social media technologies are becoming more fun and user-friendly through the additional applications along the development of the techniques.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICQ

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