twitter.com/kimchiquita

Twitter is a very interesting tool. I have yet to come to terms with my feelings for it. I don't understand still why there is an importance for it especially since, as of right now, it doesn't seem as popular, or could be as popular, as something like a Facebook.

I read the news article about James Buck being arrested and how the public became informed about his situation by his use of Twitter:

On his way to the police station, Buck took out his cell phone and sent a
message to his friends and contacts using the micro-blogging site Twitter.

Honestly, I'm really happy for James Buck but if I had texted my twitter with any sort of update on my status of well-being I doubt anyone who actually knew or cared about me would see it. It just seems like a one and a hundred chance that someone I care about would be constantly checking Twitter.

On the other hand, I can understand why people would want to use Twitter for their own personal benefits. As stated in 25 Twitter Tips for College Students, I would definitely use Twitter to send me to do list updates or to use "tweet what you eat" -- it sounds so fun!

I made a Twitter and so has my roommate...check ours out and maybe one day you can save me when I've been arrested in a foreign land.

Networking IRL

My dad made me start keeping an excel spreadsheet of all my contacts/business cards I've ever received since my senior year of highschool. It was probably one of the best things I've kept up with because now I have a lot of contacts stored in one place on my computer.

I've been to a bunch of networking events and just with the nature of internships I've had, I meet a lot of people in a lot of cool industrys. It is absolutely necessary to keep in touch with these people because obviously it's not what you know, but who you know. Especially networking for students...I've fine tuned my elavator speech and I even have my own business cards. They are pretty snazzy.

Did you know that through the career center here at AU you can go on trips to NYC to meet with AU Alumni in high level positions in different communications/marketing fields? It's a really great opportunity and you should look into it!

It's never a bad idea to put yourself out there and grab any opportunities that come your way!

Totally Unreal.

Fast Talk: Getting A (Second) Life examines the wonderful positives of being a part of the virtual world. One can hold business meetings, network with others, or even fly. The article states that the IBM uses second life in order to educate and accustom its new employees to the culture of IBM.

While this all sounds fine and dandy, think about how people skew their actual personalities and appearances on the Web. How do you know who you are speaking with is genuinely what they act like online? You don't.

I feel that it is extremely risky for businesses to have mentoring programs or any sort of acclamation into office culture on the Web because...it isn't REAL. No one can actually gauge the office mood by being online.

Even in a Virtual World, 'Stuff Matters emphasizes my point of people being something they're not. I have a cousin who gets so caught up in the virtual world that he just sits on his computer all day and does nothing else. Who knows, he could be THE man in second life.

But it's not real life. And to the public who engages and interacts with you everyday - you, in the real world, is what matters.

"[Socialization] in a 'Pulsing Star' Pattern"

While reading Social Graph-iti and Clive Thompson on Real-World Social Networks vs. Facebook, it only further deepened my concern for people losing their will to communicate with one another in person.

Thompson talks about how scientists are using "reality mining" (Reality Mining defines the collection of machine-sensed environmental data pertaining to human social behavior. -MIT Media Lab) in order to accurately deduce when/how people are going to gather their information and then bring it back to the table to discuss it with others.

Scientists track what you are doing via your cellphone and other technologies in order to predict when you are going to sit down and have a chat with another person...

They called this socialization method the "pulsing star pattern" because "[people] fan out to gather information, then regroup" (Thompson July 2008).

Anyway, besides the interesting scientific part of this article, it really just creeped me out even more. The fact that the government, scientists, and my peers can track what I am doing at any given moment because of the internet and this new technology is freaky.

One of my friends attended a conference about social networking and the future. She told me that this one think tank predicts that in the future there could be these special "glasses" that you could wear and any time you see a person, who also has these glasses, you can see all of their information surrounding them.

Imagine a facebook chart about the person pops up in your "glasses". In return, you could customize different phrases such as "I'm lonely say hi to me" or "practicing spanish, speak to me" so that if someone looked at you, they would know what you were thinking.

When she told me this...I was astounded that someone was trying to create this. How in the world is this remotely okay?

This brings me to the next article I read, Social Graph-iti. If people are going even further with this social networking techonolgy craze, I would analyze how many people now are getting sick of the facebook/myspace invasion. In this article there was this one paragraph that really stood out in my mind.

"But unlike other networks, social networks lose value once they go beyond a certain size. 'The value of a social network is defined not only by who's on it, but by who's excluded,' says Paul Saffo, a Silicon Valley forecaster. "

Facebook, MySpace, etc. are having this problem and I know more and more of my friends are being turned off by it. Facebook was supposed to be a way to network with people from college and now it's open to anyone and their mothers.

All in all, it's crazy to think about the expansion of social networking and technology in our daily lives past just my computer screen. More so because people I know are livid with it already.

Can't we just revert back to mailing letters? What happened to face-to-face communication?