Question 5

Social Media is changing by digital advancement. More and more people are getting involved, and newer Second Life applications are being refined every day. Mobile media will soon be advanced, and bringing class with “you” is something I can see happening in the future.  The communication model is different than communicating with someone face-to-face because one loses some of the senses. By communicating online you lose smell, so human interaction is becoming minimal. By reading a message being communicated to you through a Web 2.0 application, you lose dialect and tone. Tone is very important to communication, if you lose the tone, you lose half the message-especially since the creation of sarcasm. Hearing that message and reading the message are two very different things, and distortion in messages when sent through the computer can convey meanings a person might not have wanted to convey. On the other hand, Social Media is a great tool for advertising and marketing, especially in today’s world. It’s free, which is HUGE! People can market a business so much easily! If you think back to before technology, business owners had to go by “word-of-mouth” marketing. Social media has torn down geographical barriers because now people can access a business or service immediately halfway around the world. Thursday’s anxiety came from not knowing what to expect from the source. I feel Social Media is a great tool, but the messages being delivered felt distorted because of how I perceived the tone. I felt if I messed up accidently there would be no way of getting a question answered in the amount of time allotted-not knowing the tone of the senders message was intense.