Psychology of Social Media Week 4 Post:

Psychology of Social Media Week 4 blog:

          This week in the Psychology of Social Media class we had a lot of required readings on topics on social media and the information age, and the positive aspects that social media brings to societies. The required readings that we read included, reading chapters from Clay Shirky's book called "Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing without Organizations" and also reading a chapter from another social media book, from chapter 3 called "Revolution 2.0" by Wael Ghonim.

            From reading the whole first chapter of "Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing without Organizations" I was just shocked, that Evan, through the use of social media and technology was able to reach the NYPD even from having a phone stolen, which cops could care less to pay attention to at times. After reading this chapter, and then talking about it in class it made me think that it's hard to get the police full on attention with any theft crime something that costs a couple hundred of dollars, let alone a phone in one of the largest crime filled cities, which a phone stolen is its smallest crime probably happening at the time, so social media can definitely aid in getting peoples causes or voices heard, thats an incredible but also scary thing in some cases. It made me realize, its true with all the points the author was making that in addition I realized that the new format of  forming groups and social connecting through technology and social media, is truly changing a lot about society, and one of them is getting one's voice heard! I feel like the last sentence of chapter one, really made a good point, and showed me that through technology and social media, now groups and individual voices can be heard in a way that was never allowed before. Movements can even be created and huge events in history can be started for the case of good for humanity and ill for humanity, the freedom of expression allowed in America, and then the use of technology, can spread ideas faster and farther than ever before.

            Next, then in Thursdays class one of the required readings we talked about was from Chapter 3 of "Revolution 2.0" by Wael Ghonim Revolution, I was also surprised of how many people joined the group within a short amount of days, and shows when everyone has a cause and comes together their voice I guess is more likely to be heard and once again, through the use of technology, can spread ideas faster and farther than ever before.We read a lot of additional required readings but, one of the websites Dr. Kinghorn gave us taught us about video game addiction, but he even stated wasn't the best website, but I still felt like it gave a little more knowledge about how you can tell, and what you can do if children or adults are addicted to video games.

            My favorite part of this week, was how Dr. Kinghorn introduced different websites, groups and individuals that use social media to show or lead others to serve and show altruism. Some sites he introduced that I honestly never heard of before and am interested in include, One of the sites we talked about was Kiva, which lends people money, and other sites like Allstarter and of course lds.org and others. We also talked about in class, the definition, and the use of crowd sourcing within social media. Different ways that people have used crowd sourcing to show altruism include, those mentioned in the CNN video in class like for example, the use of crowd sourcing to submit images to try and find a crashed plane, and also crowd sourcing to submit pictures to find the Boston Marathon bombers. All in all, just in this week, Dr. Kinghorn and other students brought up so many different positive aspects that social media brings to societies, so I'm excited to learn even more of them, because often people seem to focus on the negatives of social media and the internet.