Brannon's New Media Blog

With social media sites, I feel as if they all fill out a specific niche that the internet ecosystem has evolved to need. Starting with the most popular, Facebook. Facebook has become so much more than it was when I first began using it around 10 years ago. What used to be a way for people to connect with friends, which is one of the primary reason for social media in the first place, became so much more, a way for celebrities to connect with their fans, a place for people to create groups for mutual interests, and even a way to buy and sell certain products, such as the buying and selling pages that have become increasingly more popular, to the point where Facebook has created a marketplace directly on their website. However, other websites now serve different purposes as well. Twitter has become a place for people to share their thoughts in a more free and frequent manner due to the way that the home page and feeds are designed. Creating an opportunity for anyone from Trump to Kanye ...

Social media has been a hot topic for controversy in recent times. Especially after the Cambridge Analytica scandal regarding Facebooks privacy. However, in may ways, these technologies are here to serve a legitimate and good-hearted purpose, to connect. What used to be a phonebook full of different phone numbers and business cards became a friends list on Facebook. However, the usefulness of social media does not end there. In David Carr’s article on the New York Times from 2007, he states that the Obama administration used social media to help his chances with the upcoming election by collecting data and using social media as a way to spread awareness and his platform. Many other companies also use social media to gain consumer insight through advertisements and surveys. As for benefits for society, social media fulfills its purpose as a medium for people to connect. Social media can also be specifically catered towards what the algorithms assume you’d like to see. It does ...

The internet has grown in many ways people did not see coming. Over the last 20 years, the internet has exploded into an ever-growing organism, evolving to fit every days new wants and needs. As a testament to how much the internet has grown overtime, one can simply focus on two forms of media. The blog and Wiki spaces. In many ways, these two forms of media are extremely similar, both provide for a way to share information in a quick succinct way, making digging through extremely technical databases and extensive libraries obsolete in todays information sharing age (except in certain cases). However in many ways they cater to different purposely on a deeper level. A Wiki is more based around a collaborative, with many companies using it as a way for team members to work together on a project as a collective. For example, in "More on How to Build Your Own Wikipedia", Margaret Locher states in the second paragraph that "Diverse organizations, including businesses, schools...

     I choose to do my project on how Reddit has led to various cases of groupthink and group polarization: a deeper look into the downsides of such large group discussions. I choose to do my project on this topic because of two main reasons. One being, a specific story involving the Boston Marathon bombings. It is a well documented story that one of the bombers was actually misidentified on Reddit and led to various issues and serious problems for the misidentified bomber. The second reason being my fascination on group dynamics. I took a class on Social Psychology at Baruch and in one of the chapters, my class discussed the positives and negatives of working in a group setting, with a variety of different factors effecting overall experience and execution such as group size and the role of the group. The positives of a group setting are definitely apparent but some people tend to overlook the downsides of it. I believe this second category to be much more interesting be...