Farah's Blog

Zefaire’s jewelry is a group on facebook created by two girls to promote the different accessories they create themselves. Farah and Yasmine are the two girls behind this small business. The main purpose of this group is to show a large number of people the different bracelets, necklaces, rings and earrings they create. They offer these accessories in silver, gold plated or real gold where girls can also create their own designs. Each couple of weeks they upload a number of different pictures of some new designs they create. Many females are members of this group and in some rare cases there are males as well who are looking for cheap extraordinary accessories for their females’ partners or mothers.  

The main two goals for Yasmine and Farah are to reach a larger number of audiences and increase the number of sales. These girls use a large number of high resolution pictures to show their audience the designs available. Compared to the large number of visuals they use to show their designs they also provide the prices of each piece of accessory and whether it’s available or not. A discussion occur on the wall page of this group where members ask about the different accessories they offer. Comments are also added some of the pictures where members ask about prices and the availability of these designs.

This visual presentation of both Yasmine and Farah is pretty simple as they added some information about themselves in the info page of the group. The group is mainly there to present the work they do and provide people with this special service.  The main audience of this group will be females who like shopping for different types of accessories that these girls make possible at very cheap prices.

Stuart Boon and Christine Sinclair both clearly describe the difficulties in engagement, the effect on identity, and the superficiality of the issues being discussed through the use of both Facebook and Second Life in the article “A World I Don’t Inhabit: Disquiet and Identity In Second Life and Facebook”.
Speaking about identity they mention some of the reasons behind the “idealistic virtual re/presentation of our real world selves on Facebook”. And it’s due to the cultural pressures, social mores and individual desires that people tend to artificially represent themselves on Facebook and Second Life. In the process of recreating ourselves in digital form some people tend to hide or change some information about them, which might be personal information in some cases, in order to perhaps appear different or better. According to me, I personally don’t prefer adding all my personal information on my profile for everyone to see. I actually prefer to hide some personal information about myself to those who aren’t my friend and in this way I feel more comfortable and in control of what people who are either my friends or not know about me. This also takes us to another topic discussed in the article which is about the truth behind the information presented and whether I should trust it or not.  Facebook itself is just a combination of e-mail and database programs and that has neither the functionality nor the capability to ensure proper authenticity of identity. This might cause great frustration to individuals when trying to validate the “realness” of their own or someone else’s identity on Facebook.

The “ambivalence of identity leads to low and artificial levels of engagement” between users and within cohorts. The connections between people might be strong at first, but as time passes and the people get more involved within the digital environment and while creating their virtual identities this connection happened weaken and in some cases hallow compared to that in the real world. The use of rhetoric in digital space here appears to be affected as well since many people are artificially representing themselves and at the same time failing to communicate with one another.

Along with the use of Facebook to encourage strong meaningful connections and relationships with friends it encourages the creation of false communities of superficial relationships. There are a large number of groups on Facebook ; some have purpose and other don’t.  One of the new very popular groups these days is one that is called the “overheard at AUC”  where people go in just to add wall posts about their experiences everyday at AUC, some of these postings just tells a funny situation that happened in a class or an overheard conversation between a couple of students. The feature that is presented by Facebook and also mentioned in the article is the poke me feature, where people are able to send hugs and kisses to one another at anytime. How superficial is this? Will this be the way people share thoughts and feelings in the future?

Another life is taking place in the virtual space over Second Life where anyone can sign up, create their full three dimension self and start living a life where they are free to create wonders and do whatever they want without any fears. In this state it’s “impossible to assess the real identity or the authenticity of another user”. This makes it highly attractive to people, however the impact of this other life on our real life is very huge.

Along with many of the disadvantages of digital environment other benefits concerning education appear. Many educational uses are made possible through the digital environment; however this must not make us forget the challenges that will be faced with these changes. The rhetoric itself will be greatly affected when education turn to digital media and start benefiting from it.

Online privacy is one of the biggest threats faced by the web users. Large number of people hesitates for before they write information about themselves that would be published on the internet and every user will be able to access it. Some people would prefer to remain anonymous or would rather lie about their identity, which will also result in more problems in the web environment. I personally believe that people should be honest about who they are and give a convenient and correct information about themselves. They should remain anonyms or give too much information about themselves because this could turn back on them and they could get harmed. Everyone should be able to have their privacy that others should intrude.

One of the new internet tactics that has been discussed in the article “Online Ads Follow Web Users, And Get Much More Personal” by Stephanie Clifford is the use of internet cookies to save personal information about web users and then use these information for different advertising purposes. Clifford states that offline information about users such as their income, the type of car they drive, and much more is been used to determine the different offers they will get. According to different information about web users different companies are assigning different formats for their web site and different offers to appear to the user. This appears to be a very successful tool for advertising that marketers can use to gain and satisfy their customers, but the question here is whether this should be considered ethical or not. I personally believe as far as it is very successful for different companies and helps the customers get what is best for them, it shouldn’t be. There are number of different ways for companies to attract customers and meet their needs and for customers to get the best offers, than this way. I know it is optional for users to be tracked down by cookies or not, but as it is stated in the article sometimes cookies are activated without us even knowing or seeing any difference in the browser we are using. But still I find this tactic to be invading privacy and it tends to compile too much personal information about the web users that might be used for other purposes that are unknown till this moment.

In simple words SNSs are just web-based services that allow individuals to do a number of things which include: construct a public or semi-public profile, form a list of other users with whom they share a connection, and also view or transverse their list of connections and those made by others within the system. This form of service tends to be increasingly attracting people from different fields all around the world for different purposes such as research and academic.

SNSs such as MySpace,  Facebook, and Bebo attract million of users everyday where many of their users have became engaged in these sites as one of their daily activities. Different SNSs are designed for different purposes and for different people. Most SNSs help people with same interests to connect with one another and share their views either about their interests, different political topics or any other activities.

One of the main advantages of these sites beside the technology and options they can offer is the number of audience that could view and become members. There is no limit to that, however some sites are open to a diverse audience population, but others only allow people either with common language or shared racial, sexual, religious, or nationality-based identities.

From the start of 2003 and onwards, a large number of new SNSs were launched and more are everyday. But at the beginning most of these sites to the form of profile-centric sites such as Friendster in order to become successful as they are or they would target specific demographics. Now there are different types of SNSs that cover different topics in wide range of fields.

A strong debate was raised in the article “Capitalizing on the Internet: Social Contact, Civic Engagement, and sense of community” where the authors discussed whether the revolution of the internet has affected the social capital and specifically social content, civic engagement, and the sense of community. They wondered whether the internet had increased, decreased or completely supplemented social capital. They did this by looking at three forms of social capital which are: Network capital; the frequency of social contact with friends, relatives, and workmates, Civic engagement; the participation in voluntary organizations and political activities and Sense of community; the strong attitude towards the community which mobilizes the willingness and effectiveness of people.

The internet has increased social capital by providing a meeting space for people with shared interests that would overcome the limitations of space and time. It also provided online communities which promoted open, democratic discourse, allowed for multiple perspectives, and mobilized collective actions. On the other hand, they illustrated how it decreased social capital by mentioning a study of new users of the internet that showed that high internet use was associated with lower social contact offline, and higher depression and loneliness rates. Considering if the internet supplements the social capital then it will have an important and persuasive but yet evolutionary effect on the society. I personally believe that the internet is not supplementing the social capital at all, however it might be increasing it in some way and again decreasing it in another. It’s affecting the society positively and negatively at the same time. It allowed the decrease of many activities such as face-to-face interactions, but it didn’t result in them disappearing completely.

Social networking in general has a number of different positive and negative effects on the society and this means that its constant use will continuously cause changes in the society. Some of these changes can be easily spotted while others are hard to see. Social networking enables many people to communicate with one another and build up different communities and this affects the society in different ways as it allows online socializing and other forms of communication that changes the society. The different types of communication between different members of the society promote different values and challenge other resulting in a change in the society. People influence on another in different ways on the smaller scale and that result in a continuous change in the society.  On the other hand, these different activities might promote negative actions against the society such as fraud which occurs in large number these days. Another example would be identity theft which regularly occurs across the different networks such as facebook and myspace.

The main topic I am planning to explore through the wiki is social networking, which can be classified into different sections and each would be covered thoroughly. Social networking has been rapidly spreading through the different sectors of the society these past years where it’s influencing and affecting many of peoples’ lives and the activities being performed through the World Wide Web. Social networking is having a huge effect on the society in general. In the article “How social networking has changed society”, the author mentions that due to the constant interactions “hierarchies, pecking order, and enforced social structure are bound to emerge” where these communities will be establishing new social rules. It is not only this that the author mentions about the changes caused by social networking, but he also discusses the fact that it fosters and encourages the relationships between friends, families, and even new people.

Another interesting article called “Is MySpace Good for Society? A Freakonomics Quorum” by Stephen J. Dubner shows the different views of people about the issue of social networking and whether it made the society better or worse from three different point of view: economical, psychological, and sociological. Most of the people responded saying that the bad side of this technology is that it diminishes the value of friendships and interactions in general, and it also violates some privacy issues. However it helps in the process of socialization as well as many important business meetings that take place over the internet.

Through the wiki when looking at the AUC society I am planning to concentrate on the interactions that occur between students and their colleagues and the faculty as well. There are different ways for these interactions to occur, such as blackboard, facebook, auc mail, auc blog, and many others. I will be discussing how did the social network enabled these interactions and what are some of the effects that came along.

The uses of digital media in different sectors have been growing rapidly over the past centuries. Now people are able to do anything they want through the World Wide Web. Instead of sending each other mails that took days to be delivered now you can send an email that takes less than a minute to be delivered and can be easily replied to. This is not the only opportunity that the digital media offers to its users there are many more such as viewing and commenting on news, which was never available before with print media. Internet users can now also share their different views and ideas on specific topics that interest them as a group through blogs, which are easily created and managed.

It is not only constricted to the above, but people using the internet can also go shopping, view the weather forecast, check for traffic updates, book their plane tickets, students can contribute in active learning, graduates can earn degrees, and much more can be done online. This is some of what can be done through the internet, but other digital media devices such as mobile phones, digital cameras, and ipods enable their users to interact with others and they entertain them whenever they want.

What the digital media offers happen to have a huge effect on the world in different ways as it promotes free expression and encourages freedom of speech. It also connects the whole world together where they benefit and affect one another in different ways.

Wikis are created by users as a source of information to everyone else, where people other than their creators can edit and collaboratively add the information. The uses of wikis and wiki technologies have been growing rapidly these days. Wikis are being used by different people for different purposes, for example Wikipedia which is being used by endless number of people who easily contribute to the information. Another important example is the use of wikis by researchers making it easier for them and others to develop collaborative documents.  

Wikis can be used by anyone very easily as they don’t require an additional website to enable the users to edit the information. They are also very useful for users with similar interests as they can develop a culture where they share information and work together. However, wikis may suffer from a lack of strong vision and leadership as there is no one in control. They might also face difficulties with copyright as it’s sometime hard to track the sources of information. Wikis tend to be less credible sometimes since anyone can add to the information available. There are different number of advantages and disadvantages for wikis and wiki technologies; however I believe that they are a very useful form of technology that allows many users to collaboratively share information and benefit from each other’s knowledge.

The use of different digital devices and digital media have grown enormously nowadays creating more opportunities for rhetorical studies as it has been stated by James P. Zappen in the article “Digital Rhetoric: Toward and Integrated Theory”. The digital environment grants its endless users self-expression, participation, and creative collaboration. It also enables the users to explore individual and group identities and take part in communities of shared interests.

An example of a rhetorical situation that I view as very successful and important these days is the activity taking place over blogs where different users from all around the globe are able to add their comments and share their ideas about whatever subjects they like. And as reach is one of the characteristics of the digital media, blogging is available for multiple users resultinng in the creation of different communities of interests on a global scale. Interactivity is also important here as it permits closer access to other people allowing more opportunities for discussion and feedback. There are many web sites that allow users to create their own blogs and discuss any topics they would like, such as politics, fashion, gossip or even personal concerns.   

Websites such as Facebook, twitter, my space and many others are also media where rhetorical situations take place every day. Users of such websites share their thoughts, feelings, pictures with other in the same network. This enables creative collaboration and self-expression, however privacy tend to be a major problem in these sites. Anonymity is one of the characteristics of the digital media where it encourages free expression, but sometimes causes problems when people pretend to be someone they aren’t.

Rhetorical situations sometimes occur through the different forms of chatting that take place over the internet, such as MSN messenger, Facebook, Yahoo, aim. Users are able to express themselves freely and interact with one another sharing their different views and interests.