First Topic : Social Media

-Discuss how this new phenomenon is affecting your life and the lives around you-


Critical Reflection on Social Media
1. Well, this clip has really shown how important this social media is. Using residents of Scoopville and ice cream as the metaphor, it has clearly stated that how social media has changed the current lives of ours. As we all know, magazine, newspaper, television, radio etc, are all useful social media. However, the one which affects my life the most will be the networks, so let's talk about the World Wide Web (WWW) then. For people who seldom watch television programs and newspapers like I do, the WWW plays an important role in socialization. For example, the common websites that I often browse are friendster, facebook, and deviantart. All these mentioned websites do help me alot in communicating or keeping in touch with all my friends, families or peers who have moved or migrated, thus sharing the different experiences that we are having in different places everyday. As the frequent user of Friendster, it even helps me to widen up my eye sight towards the world, as I am given chances to know more friends who are from different countries, and I get to understand more about their countries and cultures as well through all the chatters we had. Lastly, website provides the latest news about politics, entertainment, sports etc for us to read about, and indirectly, it gives us many topics to start a conversation with and discuss about, and thus widening our knowledge about the current world. Therefore, WWW as a social media is indeed an eye opener for the users.

2. Social media does help in establishing a bridge for the gap among the people, and from that, we are able to improve ourselves in this self-proclaimed "E-global village". Well, it is a fact that we will not be able to know all the people in this world, but at least with this networking which happens to be one of the social media, we can meet more and hence improving more. Let's take an example, website like Deviantart has helped gathering majority of art lovers and allowing them to exchange opinions based on the artwork of theirs, and it does help in improving their artwork through the feedbacks they get from each other, just like the improvement of the residents' ice creams in the clip shown above. People improve under other people's comments or perspective, and social media helps enhancing it. Moreover, just like the shown clip, many companies set up a website to get feedbacks from the customers who have utilized their products, in order to improve and come out with a new and better product. This does not only helps saving cost, but it kinds of getting a better response from the public than broadcasting an advertisement.


Personal Reflection on the Media Culture Class
Well, for this week, we were taught about "Media Society". In this class, I realized about how influential Social Media is, as in the current world, we are surrounded by all these media and in fact, we are more like living on them. However, social media has been so reliable until it has an ability to manipulate people's mindset. Therefore, we were reminded to be real careful when we are applying these media, as there might be some people who misuse that for a harmful purpose to fullfil their own selfishness. In a nut shell, this class was quite an interesting class, as we were told or acknowledged about something that we may not realize in our daily lives.