Reply to Clarke about social implications of the Chinese social media platforms

The Renren concept of the food print is the magnified version of the Facebook because it explores further the central theme of social networking sites—voyeurism and exhibitionism of the self. To keep tag on who has made the effort to “step” on your profile and the regularity of the visit is an important interpersonal clue about this person’s interest in your personal life and the level of association he or she wants to have with you. The Facebook definitely caters more to the American tradition of the need for privacy and comfortable personal distance, whereas Renren revolves around the mechanism of “peeking” aspect of the footprint function.

 

And specifically in resonse to Clarke’s comment about Weibo’s usage being a social media platform versus a mass politicization tool, I want to clarify further about the weibo platform. You are absolutely right in that anything remotely resemble "aiweiwei" would be censored the moment it is posted. However, the high speed rail debacle in fact is a very politicized issue. It is beyond corruption and the lack of judgment, but reflects the deeper discontent and social unrest of the Chinese public. The problems of unaffordable housing, hiking CPI prices, and the lack of upward social mobility all contributed to the massive outcry from the public after the rail crash. And the weibo became the platform in which these outcries are communicated and expressed. Despite weibo's many imperfections and close monitoring by the government(as all media outlets are in China), it is nevertheless the new and only public sphere in China for expression. The momentum that is building on Weibo, where many public comments about socio-political issues including public officials’ children getting around the law and the unjustifiable government budgetary probing, is slowly elevating—and I believe it is powerful enough to force the Chinese government to consider alternative regulatory changes and fulfill the public demand for justice in order to stay in power.

Methodology and Social Media - Inherently lacking?

Methodology and Social Media - Inherently lacking?

After looking into research methods for social media, it seems there is no one method that gives definitive answers on the medium. Given, each study’s motive has perhaps a better suited methodology, but the nature of social media, as it is so broad, means it necessarily cannot be captured by one scientific approach. Although the research method is one of the less fun or “sexy” aspects of modern media to talk about, it is a critical issue since, as Baym’s example points out, the research method has a direct effect on data results and conclusions made about the medium.

            That is not to say, however, that the same method cannot be used to different ends. Nardi and Boelstorff, for example, both chose to use participant observation. However, whereas Nardi used to explore how World of Warcraft participation fit into the scheme of everyday life for the players she interacted with, Boelstorff examined Second Life as its own microcosm, a place with its own norms, customs, traditions and lifestyle, worth researching for their own sakes. The method does have its limitations however, as not only is the data purely qualitative, but every interaction is also refracted through the researcher and is thereby going to have their own implicit assumptions embedded in the information. I think this is a major fallback to the participant observation method.

            It would be interesting, however, to put the two of these researchers in conversation with those who examined retweeting. Where as the data in this study was quantitative and undoubtedly more holistic, pulling from Twitter’s general timeline, it doesn’t have the same emotional insight as Nardi’s and Boelstorff’s studies. Considering that ethnography seeks to understand a culture, cold numbers, while important and telling, lack the heart and insight that Nardi got from interviews. Perhaps the best approach to a study would be a sort of combination of both. While the retweet study attempted to do this – by crowdsourcing questions on a public twitter feed, it represents a skewed sample, even less representative of a general population than those investigated in participant observation studies. 


Ceci Diaz

Modes of Analysis for Studying Social Media?

In studying social media technologies, it is easy to become lost in the vast number and variety of communication outlets that fall under the ‘social media’ umbrella.  With no geographic hub and no set modes of interaction, defining the exact parameters of ‘social media’ can be taxing.  For this reason, I agree with Dr. Beer in highlighting the necessity of classification in social media technologies – in order to begin to understand a social networking site, we must narrowly define its contents as to stray away from the broad implications of ‘social media,’ or in Beer’s words, with “rapid cultural shifts and the dynamic and disjointed nature of much contemporary online culture there is a pressing need to classify in order to work toward a more descriptive analysis” (518).  Beer elaborates on his ideal means of studying social media by stating that in order to fully understand SNS, we must examine the daily proceedings of the average SNSer while paying an unexpectedly close regard to the capitalist aspects of the SNS, or the “information about us [that] is routinely harvested and used to inform” – the third party, capitalist interests that accompany social networking sites (526). 

 

By putting Beer’s “Response to danah boyd & Nicole Ellison” in conversation with another example of boyd’s research (along with Scott Golder and Gild Lotan), “Tweet, Tweet, Retweet: Conversational Aspects of Retweeting on Twitter,” we can further examine Beer’s guidelines for studying social networking sites by working with a single site: Twitter.  Beer would commend the author trio for explicitly defining the qualities of Twitter aside from the broad generalizations of SNS – its background, conventions, constructions and implications of a retweet, and so on, but, as the document focuses primarily on the sole act of “retweeting” in a social sense rather than the website’s means for profit, the only mention of capitalism is the “worst” purpose of a retweet: “pandering for social capital” (6).

 

Although I support Beer’s idea in that an SNS should be broken down and defined by a researcher in order to further his or her understanding, these social networking technologies are endlessly advancing and culture’s responses are endlessly evolving so that it seems nearly impossible to define a set-in-stone way to ‘properly’ study social media.  Beer stresses the importance of noting the capitalist, non-SNSers making use of the information on social networking sites, but that is a development that has come with the rise in SNS’s rise in popularity.  As the popularity of SNS continues to rise, the future is indefinable and unpredictable, and research methods must perhaps continue to grow and morph along with social media technologies.

 

Jen Lewis

 

Ways of Studying Social Media

Having been in class last week as well as completed the readings, it seems that ethnographic research is the best way to go, in my opinion. As we discussed, the way the user (us) uses social media has been constructed, socially, due to all of our individual participation. How do social constructions occur?  Human beings create them over time after repeated actions that start to appear natural, although they have been achieved by many aspects of communication coming together. I believe that the best way to go about studying something as new as social communication is by immersing oneself within it: ethnographic research.

 

I do think Beer successfully achieved his goal of picking apart previous analytical research from other authors and shedding new light, yet I think if he had more real life experience/ examples, his points would have hinged better. He makes very good points about questioning the “dominant visions of the democratization of the web toward models of ‘collaborative’ or ‘collective intelligence’ and ‘participatory cultures’”, yet I think that if he had made the article even more relatable due to his own experience within the web, it would have been stronger. But I did not have as much problems with Beer’s attempt as I did with the Twitter article.

 

While I know the Twitter article by Boyd, Golder & Lotan was interesting to some, and partly ethnographic (due to the twitter participation) I thought that all the quantitative research was a bit much. The most amazing thing about social communication is how quick it is advancing. Already, twitter has changed since this article has written; it has a ‘retweet’ button and it has become almost second nature to retweet as often as not. I find that studying specific data structures is even less effective then, say, Hargittai’s survey of college freshman (which isn’t to say that this method is extremely effective either). Why study the technology so much, when you have a whole bunch of other meat in there? What I am trying to say is that I find research of social media extremely timely and sensitive. You have to do it right if you want to get results that are going to be able to stand the test of time, because time is moving so fast now. While every author offers their own attempt at this quickly changing mode of communication we are immersed in, I think the way to really go about it is ethnographically. Communication is about feelings and emotions, and the only way to really understand those, is if YOU, as an AUTHOR, immerses yourself into the medium and reflects on your reactions the medium as well as compare yours to others. I do know that quantitative analysis has its merits, but I wanted to focus solely on the pros of ethnographic in this post and just see what people thought about it.  

 

Sophie G. 

Blog #2 - Response Post

Response to http://csmt11.posterous.com/csmt-blog1

 

I was drawn to this blog post, because I’ve recently become interested in looking at the internet on a global scale.  This is partially because I spent an extended amount of time in another country, and was interested in the different technologies and ways of social media usage. By displacing yourself from your normal environment, it not only shows you what’s different, but highlights interesting things you regularly do and take for granted.  At the time I while I was abroad, I didn’t realize, but in a way I was unofficially taking note of my own ethnographic ‘research’ (fascination) in which I observed and started conversations with people regarding their social media usage.  The author of this blog posts discusses the different technology which is similar to Facebook, Renren.  While the UK didn’t see to have much difference in websites from the US, I noticed some smaller differences in the way people used them.  For example, I noticed that there was less of an inclination to ‘collect’ large quantities of friends and people.  This assumes that they are less likely to casually friend an acquaintance, thus keeping their online presence and network more confined.  While there are certainly people who did not fall into generalization, it was definitely something I noticed as somewhat of a trend.  If I did a larger scale research project on this question, I’d be interested in attempting to find out the cultural contexts which lead this assumption to be true (or false).    It’s also interesting to note that such subtleties are much easier found and recognized when you’re fully engaged with a social media site as opposed to merely ‘studying’ it.  This example illuminated the point that social media isn’t all about the technology itself, but also how we use it which dictates its influence and relevance.  In one of my current courses, my professor told us an anecdote about how there are some people in Africa who have developed a code which translates the specific number of calls and ring tones to a particular message/meaning in order to communicate in a way that avoids the traditional payment system of cell phones.  People all over the world have cell phones, which in a way unites us, but that doesn’t necessarily mean we all use them in the same way to conduct our day-to-day lives.  Each culture creates in a sense, their own discourse surrounding a particular technology. 

 

I also took an ‘International Communications’ course while abroad where we took a more traditional, academic approach to studying communications, in which we understandably spent a lot of time examining internet usage.  In the course we focused on how social media helps transcend space and time, thus creating networks that couldn’t necessarily have previously existed as easily. In my mind I almost built up an idealized view of social media, as the glue which brought together the people of the physical world via a ‘virtual’ one.  While this is certainly not false, this vision didn’t necessarily take into account limitations of legal, technological, etc. variety.  I don’t have the same access to someone in Beijing, if we’re not operating and conducting the majority of our social interactions on he same technological platforms.  Similarly, sites like Twitter haven’t been available for as long.  While there are ways around this, it has made me realize that the internet isn’t necessarily the ‘great equalizer’ if it’s not free to access and it’s not uniform across all users.  This is just an observation as opposed to a criticism, because I simultaneously believe that not only should each country be allowed to set their own ‘terms’, but it would be seemingly impossible to get everyone on the ‘same page’. 

 

I thought it was really interesting when the author mentioned how one of the prominent features of Renren is that visitors of your page leave a ‘footprint’ and that privacy is thus ‘intruded and exploited’.  It would be interesting to see if this has any effect on how users use Renren in contrast to something similar like Facebook.  Are people less likely to engage in casual, harmless ‘Facebook stalking’ if they know people will ‘see’ them?  More importantly, what kind of larger impact does it have on friendships and connections?  Are Renren users more conscious of their actions of they know they’re more monitored- how does this impact internet ‘identity’? Etc.  Another set of questions raised by this discussion is that is it cultural practices that affect our need and use of technology or is it the other way around? Does technology dictate our cultural practices? I think it could be argued both ways and when it comes down to it, it’s probably a synthesis of these two theories. 

 

Finally, I wanted to quickly address the author’s note on being a more of an observer on weibo as opposed to a participant, and particularly how they use it as a news resource.  It reminded me of this quote about consumers of news which sets forth a “Theory of Interlocking Public”; “There is an involved public, with a personal stake in an issue and a strong understanding. There is an interested public, with no direct role in the issue but which is affected and responds with some first hand experience. And there is an uninterested public, which pays little attention and will join, if at all, after the contours of the discourse have been laid out by others” (Kovach and Rosenstiel).  The interactivity level of news on social media allows for people to easily fall into whichever category they want—whether it means getting involved in citizen journalism, or simply relying on what other have to say to stay up to date on what’s going on in the world. Though news media organizations still have an important hand in ‘breaking’ a story, once a piece of news hits the web, it can take on a life of it’s own depending on how internet users disseminate it to their social networks or choose to comment/respond to it.  Amy Mitchell, of the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism has found that “Seventy-seven percent of social-media users say they get their news from social media” and not only that, but “Facebook is now the third biggest referral site for news articles, following only Google and the main new site from which an article is linked” .  Again, one could question whether the advancements in the realm of ‘news’ stem from the developments in technology itself or our personal, cultural demands to be able to have a hands-on approach with our news.
 
Emma L.

Blog#2 Response to http://csmt11.posterous.com/csmt-blog1

http://csmt11.posterous.com/csmt-blog1

This post (maybe Ivy’s?) made me think about users’ identities on SNSs when she talks about her experience of using a Chinese SNS, Renren.  

As it is said in the post, I also think that the feature of “footprint” causes users to make social networking activities different from other sites such as Facebook because it makes them more sensitive to their own privacy. But also, the idea made me think further of this sense of privacy that the users might feel on the Renren. This sense of privacy might be related to how people on the site want to protect their personal identities and others’ impressions on them on SNSs.

This footprint feature of Renren reminded me of the similar feature of Mixi, a Japanese SNS, which I mostly use to connect to my Japanese friends. Like Renren, the system of footprint on Mixi also used to make it visible for users who came to their pages and checked contents such as diaries and albums. Moreover, Mixi allowed the users to know what time the person came to see their pages, which means that they know by whom and how often exactly their pages have been seen.

I do not really get what the purpose of this feature of footprint exactly is (it might facilitate users to gain a closer connection with friends by letting them know their mutual interests in each other’s life, might make it easy to discover and come back to their existing friends, or might make it noticeable who stalks them?). However, in spite of these possible facilitations that the footprint feature can provide, it is true that there are complaints from users that they cannot go to their friends’ pages or check non-friends’ pages so easily in order to see what’s there because of the footprints. They say that they do not want to check others' pages because their footprints are always automatically left. In fact, Mixi got rid of the feature of footprint this summer, responding to this kind of complaints and compensating those footprints' facilitations with another feature, which does not disclose as much information of users’ browsing activities as the footprint used to do.

What makes the users on Mixi be so concerned about the footprint? What keeps them avoiding to make footprints on others’ pages?

Users of SNSs create and control how they are presented on the sites by making their own profiles. They choose their profile pictures and choose what personal information should be open, being aware of public eyes. The information that is available on their profiles is chosen by them to represent who they are or who they want to be on the site.The information disclosed by the users themselves is cues that primarily compose their personal identities perceived by other users. Yet, the users on SNSs are not identified only by these cues. Anything that is visible on SNSs including the person’s activities, comments, and their photos on friends’ (even friends’ friends’) pages might be able to add something to their individual identities – which is described in Baym’s words, “ individual identities are deeply enmeshed with the social identities” (111).

As Baym says, on SNSs, “very small pieces of information, which were often not intended to be sources of information about the self, can become inordinately influential” (120). Even trivial information that came out in the public space while engaging in socializing activities can be a part of "self" on SNSs. Those who did not feel good about the footprint on Mixi might be more concerned that the information which their footprints tell friends and other users can contribute something more than they show on their profiles to their individual identities; even though the footprints information is a tiny part of vast, detailed information available on the site,  for anti-footprint users, it might be a part of their privacies  that can reveal more than they intend to reveal about themselves.

 

Sachi

Response to Google Chrome Ad

Response to Kayla's post (a response to Gaby's original post) http://csmt11.posterous.com/responding-to-gabys-1st-blog-httpcsmt11poster


I really loved the Google ad (“Dear Sophie”) that Kayla posted when it first came out—Google is obviously known for its creativity, and its advertisements don’t fail to tug at the audience’s heartstrings. The ad demonstrates the ease of using Google’s products and the span of their capabilities. A father is creating a digital scrapbook for his daughter to look back on and finds an image of their home through Google Maps, writes notes using Gmail, uploads photos with Picasa and videos with YouTube. The process looks seamless and effortless—so many memories can be captured by using Google’s services alone.

 

Though I love and appreciate Google, I think that David Beer would perhaps have something to say about the extent of Google’s reach. In his paper “Social network(ing) sites…revisiting the story so far: A response to danah boyd & Nicole Ellison,” Beer focuses on SNS relative to the producer’s intents and the capitalistic goals on which they are structured. Beer encourages the reader to consider how user data might be utilized other than for the users’ own purposes:

 

“So, when we ask about who are using SNS and for what purpose, we should not just think about those with profiles, we should also be thinking about capitalist interests, of third parties using the data, of the organizing power of algorithms, of the welfare issues of privacy made public, of the motives and agendas of those that construct these technologies in the common rhetoric of the day, and, finally, of the way that information is taken out of the system to inform about the users, or, in short, how SNS can be understood as archives of the everyday that represent vast and rich source of transactional data about a vast population of users.”

 

As the video shows, an Internet user can rely solely on Google services during their online experience; thus Google has a huge store of personal data on its millions of users, from name, age, social relationships, location, search terms, photos, videos, preferences, etc. With cloud computing likely to become a standard in the future, the company can own even more personal data. Google has already faced many suits in different countries on privacy and antitrust issues.

 

While companies such as Google have made communication and information access much easier, it is also important to consider the scope of information we entrust to SNS and the Internet, especially when under one umbrella. This raises questions of privacy and a company’s place in ownership of personal information. Most people automatically skip over the “privacy policy” when registering for a new SNS and don’t consider how public their online personas can be. As our everyday lives become increasingly intertwined with the digital realm, though, new standards have to be made accordingly.


Cindy H.

Gaby Colletta's CSMT Post #2 Digiculture

This post is in response to Ceci's "Social Media and Me" http://csmt11.posterous.com/ceci-diaz-social-media-and-me


In the realm of social media, the tension between intimacy and the lack thereof is one that interests me.  I liked that Ceci brought to focus the many ways in which social media actually enhances not only our face-to-face conversations but our entire sphere of discourse.  Social media has evolved from something greater than a communication tool to a cyber and physical culture.   Maybe certain aspects are fads – I know my livejournal is dead – but somehow this “fad” is entwined in our culture.  The cultural imprint is not just a memory of that phase in social media.   It’s also the growth of a new language.   People want to know the latest #buzz #trendingtopic about a #charliesheen #fail.  We see how social media impacts the development of our language.

 

Twitter itself has become a cultural mouthpiece for current events meets entertainment.  I stumbled upon this #infographic that exhibited “the top 5 tweets per second events” starting with Beyonce at the VMAs, closely followed by the VA earthquake.  Thought this would be interesting to share:

 

http://www.adverblog.com/2011/09/26/the-battle-of-twitter-vs-time-infographic/

 

Social media seems to infuse itself not only in entertainment culture but also corporate culture.   On my first day of class I mentioned that an employer actually asked me for my Twitter handle.   “I’m going to follow you…see if there is anything interesting you come up with.” Twitter as a test.  Twitter as a resume.  Twitter as a job posting.  I can honestly say that in the effort to recruit for a fall intern, my colleagues and I actually posted job listings in tweets.  Not to mention the newfound revenue in tweeting. From a technology providing social capital to monetary capital, it is hard to deny the impact.  

 

Coming back to relationships.  I wanted to emphasize this idea of building stronger relationships as a result of fostering a digital culture.  Social media nurtures this culture and facilitates its growth in dynamic and nuanced ways.   I am still in awe of the fact that designers are created phone apps with augmented reality features.  I wonder how such apps might affect or perhaps heighten personal relationships? Just a seed for thought.  

 

On a side note, I wanted to share this blurb on KLM.  Thought it was appropriate given the class discussion on airline conversation.  

 

http://www.adverblog.com/2011/09/21/klm-live-reply-140-characters-140-klm-employees/

Blog Post #2: Response to Charli Lee (http://csmt11.posterous.com/blog-post-1-social-media-reflection)

I’m going to join the crowd in responding to Charli’s first post.


Like Jessica said, I immediately related to Charli’s post about her use of social media when I read her anecdote about watching a friend take a “Myspace photo.” This awkward—and quite honestly, universally unflattering—photo phenomenon has always fascinated me, so I decided to take a critical look at it in this post.* After all, you can ask anyone in our generation (assuming they are on our side of the digital divide) what a Myspace photo pose is and they could tell you, so it was definitely a wide-spread trend. However, I’ve yet to find any scholarly investigation and analysis of into how it originated. Who was the first person to do it (will we ever know)? And how did it catch on? I am surprised that there isn’t any more research on these photos, as I think they explain a lot about how Myspace users structured their identities, as well as the sort of “community” it welcomed.

Nancy Baym briefly touched on the importance of images on SNS sites in Personal Connections in the Digital Age, explaining that, “The images we associate with ourselves, including our photographs and avatars, are also important identity cues,” (Baym, 109). However, she only spends one paragraph looking at this identifier, focusing on the choice of Facebook users to typically use pictures of themselves while Last.fm users tend to choose avatars of other images. I think this invites analysis itself—what about an SNS site dictates what sort of image people choose to represent themselves with? Reflecting on my personal profiles, I believe it relates back to a question of formality. For example, I would choose a more professional headshot for my LinkedIn, while my old Xanga avatars were never of myself but of Manolo shoes and pieces from other designers that my 13-year old self couldn’t even pronounce in spoken word. But then—if there was one day to suddenly be a consensus of LinkedIn users to change their professional photos to ones of cute animals, who’s to say I would not go with the digital flow?

And this brings me back to that strange consensus that got all of us to take cringe-worthy pictures as adolescents. Thinking of this in relation to this week’s readings that looked a great deal at the social implications of SNS, I have to wonder if this strange angle was in fact made popular by the “public displays of connection” (boyd, 73). Even before the socially dramatic the days of Myspace’s “Top 8,” boyd examined how friends would analyze their “Friends” by the Friends that appeared on their profiles in her article, “Friends, Friendsters, and Myspace Top 8.” Therefore, I do not think it is a stretch to believe that it would only take a few people—most likely attractive and popular users—to start this trend, with it then snowballing as their Friends (and their Friend’s Friends) saw and attempted to mimic the sort of image that they a group they aspired to be like used.

After awhile, this angle got its name—the “Myspace angle” or “Myspace pic,” which I see as effectively uniting users who chose this sort of image into a community. In the way that Baym discusses the use of shared lingo and acronyms as uniting forces and identifiers of speech communities, I believe there are similarly image communities that users can be broken down into based on the sort of visual representation they choose for themselves—I am pretty confident in believing all of us in this class have Friends who choose “party” photos, relationship photos, or family photos as their profile pictures (Baym, 77).

As the Myspace platform faded into SNS obscurity, the pose—at least from my observance—lost popularity as well. Now done mostly in mocking, I would hypothesize that it was too closely tied to the platform to make the move with users to other sites. Interestingly enough, while Facebook has long passed Myspace in terms of users, hits, and overall popularity, I cannot think of a single specific image type that would be characterized as a “Facebook pose.” In fact, I do not know of a LinkedIn or Google + pose either. It will be interesting to see if there will ever be this sort of relationship between image and platform again, or if it is just another example of the constantly changing social media landscape.

 

* I do want to add a quick disclaimer onto the end of this post that I did not choose Charli’s post based solely on her first paragraph. While that definitely initially caught my attention due to our shared experience, I do think she made many other valid statements that my classmates have addressed in their posts, so I chose to go with this one specific example since it has always been a curiosity of mine!

 

Colleen

 

Blog Post #2: Response to Nicole F (http://csmt11.posterous.com/my-everyday-use-of-social-media)

While reading Nicole F.'s blog post on her everyday use of social media, I found that I could easily relate to the "online freedom" she referred to in her post. As we have discussed in class, this online freedom became an outlet where we could establish our own identities whichever way we wanted, whenever we wanted. Whether it was a matter of confiding personal feelings, berating another, having simple social exchanges, or intellectual discussions, the dawn of social media connected us and provided us with a voice and manipulable identity. In today's world, this construction of self continues every time we post something online or send a digital message. Especially with textual messages, I am sure more often than not, more people will take the time to consider the wording of their messages (and even their use of emoticons) to fit how they want their receivers to perceive them.

Thus, in relation to danah boyd's discourse, "Friends, Friendsters, and MySpace Top 8: Writing Community Into Being on Social Network Sites," where she discusses the culture of online "Friending" and the ambiguous definition of an online Friend, I could not help but wonder, "How does our definition of our Facebook friends (in terms of the range between personal contacts to strangers) affect our online identity? Does the network more often compromise or facilitate our online identities and the way we express ourselves? This is, of course, person and context dependent since some people may be more private than others in their online profiles. In the past year and a half, however, I have noticed a growing number of adult Facebook users --family friends and relatives-- of whom I share a mutual respect for and must accept their "Facebook adds" as a sign of mutual friendship and respect. And yet, as boyd, discusses, such things can lead to "context collisions" --in which the way we interact with certain Friends (i.e. our peers) differs from others (i.e. people who hold power over us --parents or relatives) simply because each group knows and defines us by a specific identity. And when we use Facebook privacy settings to block away the things we don't want certain people to see, my question is, (generally speaking) do we do this to maintain a specific identity --that is, choosing one specific identity over another? And does that persona, more often than not, align with who we are in-person? It's a tough question to answer. It seems that our culture is composed of separate spheres (professional, personal, friendship, etc.) and that there is an expectation to uphold the original image we had given to the people in those spheres --that our online persona should mirror who we are in the real world. I, myself, find myself blocking many of my adult relatives and professional colleagues and supervisors for the obvious reason that I want to maintain a more respectful and professional image.

In relation to the original "online freedom" we were so well endowed with when we were younger, there seems to be a change in the amount of freedom we have, and the structure with which we can use it. The reason goes beyond the fact of maturity, and that our generation is wary of the perceptions of potential employers and adults who have certain expectations of us. But in our present-day-social-media-explosion, we have finally begun to realize that everything in the digital world can be a record, a footprint, and a potentially permanent record of who we are. That is the irony of the online freedom we have. The Freedom: we can choose to post what we want and when we want, and allow others to see or don't see the content of our profiles and posts. But where is the freedom in having to hide what you do or say?

--Charli