Greetings denizens of CS 371 Social Media and Social Life for the Fall 2022 term! 

Welcome to the collaborative class blog!


• Sharing resources, ideas, links, and feedback with your classmates
• Maintaining engagement with the themes and concerns of the course
• Using social media platforms and practice to write for a closed and supportive audience

Remember

THINK HARD AND HAVE FUN

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Blog Post #3: Instagram's Transformation from Photography to Marketing by Stella Aisenshtat

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The Guardian article titled "Facebook aware of Instagram's harmful effect on teenage girls, leak reveals" speaks to the negative impact social media platforms have on teenagers, specifically girls. According to this article, the main issue causing depression and anxiety among Instagram users is what Facebook data scientists call "social comparison". I briefly mentioned this in my last blog post, how "Influencers" portray a false image of reality that pushes an unattainable standard of beauty and life by altering the shared truth of popular culture.  Baym discusses four perspectives on the relationship between technology and society, all of which can help us further understand the anxiety about the interactive nature of social media as evidenced in the aforementioned Guardian article. Namely, the perspective of the social shaping of technology.  In other words, technologies have the potential to force change upon society but, simultaneously, individuals...
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Blog Post 4 - "Friends" on Social Media

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Hey everyone, my blog post this week centers around main subjects covered in our midterm. Social media, as discussed by Baym, remains an impersonal form of communication due to a lack of intimacy and authenticity. Part of this reason can be subjected to the amount of followers people interact with on platforms such as Instagram and Twitter. According to Dunbar, the size of human social networks stabilizes around 150 individuals, known as Dunbar’s number. He states that our brains can only capacitate to know a max number of 150 people. Dunbar further elaborates that 150 is made up of 50 friends, 15 good friends, and 5 close friends. However, with many users interacting with more than 150 people, the level of intimacy decreases further. Many friend groups contain more than five people; however Dunbar suggests that not everyone in the group has the same level of intimacy. Now applying this to social networking, people have thousands of followers that a percentage they don't even know....
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Hello everyone! After reading one of the articles from unit 2 my perception of TikTok changed a lot. The article is called W hat TikTok does to your mental health: 'It's embarrassing we know so little'. In summary, this article is revealing the negative side of TikTok that so many of us do not think about, know about, or that is being hidden. Some of these negative effects include taking part in dangerous trends (for example the blackout challenge, or the Benadryl challenge) that have led to numerous deaths (Paul, 2022). Another effect that caught my eye is the fact that TikTok has become a space for people to share "very intimate and intense things" about their lives (Paul, 2022). People follow these behaviours over TikTok because they want to fit in and because this seems to be the platform's spirit (Paul, 2022). One of the examples that the article speaks about is how many individuals use TikTok to discuss their mental health and the abuse that they are dea...
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