The text book used for this class, Social Media and Cyberspace, is a collection of essays from various authors on the various aspects of social media through the years. There have been very different forms of social media over the years, and it has changed into a large business that may or may not benefit society in the long run. Along with the different types of social media, the audience of the media has changed too. Now the audience has the ability to become the speaker also. With websites like Wikipedia, Digg and Slahdot, people can work together to create their own media to be published and read by others. The essays in this book are broken up into Mechanisms, sociality, humor, money, law, and labor. The main question that goes in connection with all of these topics is whether or not social media is a bad thing or beneficial to the people who use it. Within the book itself, it is broken up into two separate parts- part one is an analysis of the technical and social practices that lay the ground work for the social media. There are thirteen writers in this part that all provide their own opinion about how to work together for social media. The second part of this book talks about how social media changes the social dynamics of its audience and writers. There are fourteen writers in this section that talk about how culture changed and advanced along with the way we communicate, along with the business side of social media.
Chapter two talks about Shareable goods and economic production. For example, distributive computing platforms and carpooling rely on social relations and an ethic of sharing to mobilize and allocate a resource. Social Sharing is the sharing with others of their private goods in order to create a large scale and effective system for provisioning goods, services and resources. Social media to me is about sharing ideas in a quick and easy fashion that benefits all. So there are many companies that are trying to make that possible. Shareable goods, such as information, in Yochai Benkler’s words, would be better shared through relations than through secondary markets. In other words, it would be better to communicate and share ideas rather than just looking to make money off of the sharing of ideas through a second party. Sharable goods are considered “lumpy” and “midgrained” granularity. Granularity in this essay means to capture the technical characteristics of the functionality-producing goods, the shape of demand for the functionality in a given society and the amount and distribution of wealth in that society. Social sharing also can help the economy. Social sharing is present in the most advanced economies. The free software allows more information to be spread, allowing more people to get informed and allowing businesses to grow bigger. There is no restriction on technology but it does constraint how effective the sharing of information is. Putting an economic restraint on how to share information with one another is something that people still have a lot of questions about. We need to put restrictions on music sharing and other things that might effect a copy-right. Social Sharing is the way of the future, but trying to figure out the power way to manage it is the problem.
In chapter three, Siva Vaidhyanathan talks about an “open source” has led to successful ways to conduct research with one another and develop different ideas quickly and efficiently. Open source means that there are no restrictions and that anyone can use the information given. Copyright is used to protect ideas and software but it is used top much to the point where it becomes difficult to share data. Copyright has also been used as a law to stop hackers. I believe that the internet should be used as a space for gathering and sharing information but people abused that power and now there needs to be copyright laws. Richard Stallman took a stand against the Copyright laws when he could share his information. With other programmers, he created a software called Linux, which is so far the biggest threat to Microsoft. Allowing people to coordinate a project together allows them to create great ideas on a free software that is available to everyone. They can do this under a creative commons license that allows people to share information, music files, and other resources on a free software. This I think is helpful for those doing research collaborately. Open speech journalism is what many journalists use today in order to get their point across. There are also some problems with copyright such as with educational purposes and criticism. A copyright is useful for people who are afraid of someone else steling their ideas because each copyright comes with a bunch of rights under it. Each creation is a social act, thus causing social media. Open source media in my opinion has shaped the way our culture is and the way that most people think.
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