Reflection: Can we become more social if we use more social websites?

COMP3505: REFLECTION BLOG

41408140- Izadora Fakamuria

Back in the old days communication over long distances involved either post-carriages or some kind of ship. Social interaction between people such as their greetings, conversations, gossip, the way they share their interests or the methods in which businessmen conduct their affairs were also quite different.

Nowadays, with companies continually competing to bring out better communication devices, or social services advertising a better social experience people are always influenced to improve their lives, their social statuses, and relationships with people.

This blog looks at if integration of social-interaction in social websites can cause people to become more social in their real-life.

Last.fm is a website that recommends music by gathering information from your playlist and comparing it to other user’s playlists.

Delicious, previously called del.ici.ous, Is a social bookmarking website where you can bookmark sites share it with other users.

Twitter is a micro-blogging social website where users continually update their statuses in short instant messages. This service can be used simply for updating friends on your current activities or can be used by companies for commercial purposes.

Flickr is a photo-sharing website. Similar to Photobucket, users can upload photos and tag them. Communications amongst users are done mostly through commenting on photos or sending direct messages.

With this site you are required to download a plug-in, scrobbler, which gathers information from your music libraries in ITunes or Windows Media Player. The plug-in also allows you to search for particular artists such as “Korn”, if the artist is found then a station, in this case “Korn’s station”, is created which contains songs of similar artists that are also found in other users’ playlists. This is a good way to find new music to listen to and I found it useful especially for that.

Users can leave comments on artist profiles or on songs they like. They may also use an avatar on their public profiles, and leave some small information about themselves. Similar to MySpace or Facebook, other users may also leave comments or “Shouts” on these profiles, or if they wish to send a private message then they are able to as well. With these I used to comment on a friend’s taste of music, or what songs and artists they were currently listening. Our conversations usually consisted of nothing outside of music,and not much of anything else.

‘Neighbours’ is a feature on Last.fm which basically lists all the users with similar tastes in music as you. This feature was interesting as I wanted to know about what other music that these people listened to.

This feature also shows what artists you have in common, so you’ll be able to see how your music tastes are similar. There is also a music compatibility rating on every user’s profile. This shows how high or low your music compatibility is with any user.

When I used Last.fm the plug-in was all that attracted to me, I wasn’t interested in making friends or adding groups. It wasn’t that important to me to find people I already knew on Last.fm, as I only owned an account to use the plug-in. According to Java.A, mutual awareness in a social website was what drew users to be more active with their online profiles. However this wasn’t entirely true for me. I’ve tried out Last.fm’s commenting and mailing features to leave “Shouts” on friends’ pages, but it didn’t hold my interest for very long as I found other social websites, such as Twitter, far more preferable to communicating with friends. You might have friends with an account as you have, however your compatibilities may be low and have a really high music compatibility with some one you’ve never met.

So if your taste in music is different from that of friends than I guess it would be hard to discuss your favourite Japanese pop artist with your friend, who loves Finnish rock.

This site is useful especially if you’re on a public computer, then you can bookmark and save the links of these sites using delicious. On bookmarking a site you may also tag them, through these tags users can search for a site of a particular topic. This I found to be useful and I used it the same way I used Google or Yahoo search engines.

Delicious also has a similar “Add Friend” feature, except that you add other users to your network. It doesn’t really support communication between users, as there is no way to contact users, chat or email them. There are no public user profiles, or a customizable personal web page to allow the user to fit to their personal styles. It’s not a social profile. Clicking on a user’s name from a page they bookmarked simply leads to their collection of bookmarks. If you’re trying to discern what type of personality or interests they have then having a look at their “Top 10 Tags” or “Tag Bundles” (a way of grouping sites of a particular topic) is the only way that you can find out.

However, looking through the most popular tags in the site it seems that a majority of the sites have a relation to IT or design in general. Hence it may mean that this website is widely known only in IT circles. IT can be seen as a professional field, leading to work and occupation related themes. Hence, it can hardly be seen in the same light as Facebook, i.e. no support is made to allow users to interact with each other to a more informal level(or formal). Hence, the only socializing that can be made in this website is through sharing bookmarks, hardly something that may influence a person’s social interaction in society.

Twitter allows you to “follow” other users’ updates, a similar feature to adding friends. Twitter has a simple interface, with each user having a page similar to a timeline of updates. The updates can be made by them or other’s they follow.

McFedries.P mentions that Twitter is a combination of social networking and microblogging.

Bloggers may often post topics, as an attempt of keeping social ties with friends, families or even create new ones with complete randoms. These may concern events that may have happened within the last week. The time-frame in which these blogs are posted may be done every few days, weeks or even months[1]. Where updating blogs may happen every few days, it only takes a couple of minutes to post a tweet. This may leave more time for socialising as it is quick and efficient. By socialising I mean, quicker replies, and a better time-frame to understand the sequence of tweets.

Twitter even has a place where users can post their secrets anonymously as though posting a normal tweet. A secret you would not share to friends or family, can now be posted to the public anonymously, this vastly changes the traditional diary writing which symbolize secrecy and personal matters.

Similar to real-life there can also be some pressure on users to produce something witty and refreshing through their tweets. An example in real-life conversation, one may want to appear as intelligent, funny or over-the-top sarcastic, this impression still remained with me when I used Twitter. It may be that some of your followers, not all, have interest in what you say, and so displaying a bit of wit may make you appear more interesting. Users can also be influence by tweets, such as a funny comment or an opinion here and there.

As mentioned by Java.A details such as “I’m having cereal and fruit for breakfast” may seem trivial but may also be important to family or friends. From my experience, I found it useful to know what friends were doing at times, or where they were – in case I could see if they were available or busy. From this I was able to socialize with friends even more, during as well as outside of class.

From my experience of using Flickr, it didn’t seem advertise a socializing aspect. There are some features that allow users to create online communities and it does support some communication between users. Users are able to create groups for anyone with similar interests, and can communicate over the photos shared over the group’s pool. Any user can join these groups, but sometimes only invitations are issued to accept users. Browsing through these groups, there were several that seem to involve members that are professionals. Hence these invitations can be issued to those who are admired in their artwork.

In this sense all socializing is done in the form of critiquing artworks of others for more professionalism. This may not be the sort of socializing done through commenting on Facebook, informal – friendly – flirty all the styles probably not useful in a professional environment. However this can prove useful for amateur photographers, as they can become more adept at socializing at a strictly professional level and gain opportunities to further their career.

Flickr certainly serves its purpose well as photo-sharing website as it doesn’t stray away to including instant messaging features, customizable profiles, applications or too many adverts- things which seem to be the foundation of a social site. So user can use the site daily. The atmosphere for Flickr felt very artistic. Since I am not much of a photography fan or artist I did not feel as comfortable compared to Twitter or Delicious. However, from the large amount of professional photographs and the advertising of a “pro-account” I almost felt that I had to become more artistic and understand art more in order to fit in.

From the four sites I used only Twitter seemed to be the most powerful in communicating and socialising. Delicious and Last.fm seemed to be mostly for personal use, while Flickr seemed to use socialising for a professional artworks and the like. In reality, there are many types and levels of being sociable in a formal or informal manner. This is also integrated into social websites as well. So in a work-related aspect, yes socialising online may cause people to become more social in their work careers. But some other sites, while considered a part of social networking, dont always cause people to be more social.

[1] Java.A, Song.X,Finin.T and Tsong.B. “Why We Twitter: An Analysis of a Microblogging Community”. Viewed online 2^nd March 2009.[http://delivery.acm.org/10.1145/1350000/1348556/p56-java.pdf?key1=1348556&key2=/
4750478321&coll=GUIDE&dl=GUIDE&CFID=28738883&CFTOKEN=82403388]

[2]McFedries.P, “All-A-Twitter”, Technically Speaking, IEEE Spectrum. October 2007. viewed online 2^nd March 2009. [http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=4337670&isnumber=4336089]