Participation is the fabric wk10

The conclusion of Citizen Marketers left me with a renewed sense of faith in the future of social media. Like many people, I was a true skeptic of the Lonelygirl15 videos from the start. She seemed too posed and rehearsed for something as sporadic and candid as a YouTube video diary should be (as we've defined in our society). It's this system of checks and balances that applies to the world of social media and makes it so great. Those who care about social media (and probably even those who don't) are able to sniff out the "fakes" in the blink of an eye. It has become so easy to tell whether someone is being sincere or not. I'm confident that the future of social media is in good hands: ours!

One other quote that stood out in my mind was "Social media makes relationships easier to create and maintain because of participation, and participation is the fabric" (174). How true is that? There is no way that social media would work without participation. But the fact of the matter is there isn't anyone behind the curtain saying we MUST participate. The participation is voluntary. Just another example of how the power of one can turn into the power of many!

The 1 Percenters demanding transparency... wk 4

I kept sitting back and laughing to myself while reading this week's chapters in Citizen Marketers. The 2nd chapter on the 1 Percenters opened my eyes to several things I hadn't noticed before. Firstly, I was never aware that anyone had the time/energy to sit around and formulate "power laws" based on tons of information that I never in a million years would think to compilate into a statistic. However, I must say that the 1 Percent rule is alarming to me, because if asked this question on a test without reading the information, I'd SURELY guess that the number of people contributing to social media sites was more than 1%.

The 1 Percenters are also interesting to me because I find similarities in that group of people and my Millennial Generation. Wasn't it on the first day of this class that we learned the characteristics surrounding our generation? The book says citizen marketers are usually "in their 20s, highly educated, intellectually curious, sociable, interested in many things and in finding new interests." Wow! Does that describe this generation to a T or what?!

Consequently, I also found a tie to this generation while reading chapter 3 and the push for everything to become more transparent for everyone. We're always the ones being called "control freaks" for getting upset when a professor bumps a test up by one day... or when they change ANYTHING on the syllabus (man, I hate that!) Maybe it's not that we're so spoiled that we need to have everything laid out for us, but rather, that our society is one that is becoming more dependant on transparency!

So which came first, the chicken or the egg? The Millennial Generation, or the demand for transparency in life? Perhaps this debate will go on forever, but I'm sure that as long as one exists, so will the other.