Culture, Communication, Technology, and my crazy life with them.
So today, after weeks of work, we finally got our JANDS Vista i3 ordered!
It will be in next week in time to do our Christmas Show on it! looking forward to the exciting stuff about to happen at Taylors FBC!
Check it out here. Also, you should check out the guys at
Bandit Lites... they are located in Knoxville, TN, Nashville, San Fransisco, London, and elsewhere int he world and are great to work with!
I normally stick to social topics, but in this case, i had to make an exception. I order ALOT of stuff from Amazon.com, and i love their new initiative in frustration free packaging. Read this note from their CEO!
Currently, I have a stack of books that I am reading/need to read. And it just keeps getting bigger:
Currently Reading:
Yet to read:
Books still en route
Basically, I will be reading the rest of my life.
Last weekend I finished up the last of the fall retreats I had to do. We gradually stepped up the equipment involvement over the series of retreats and by the end, the worship leader an I were pros at loading and unloading equipment from the student ministry area!
With the fall fading into the Holiday Season (crazy!) its time to pull out the gel swatches and start on the Christmas Lighting Designs! I have a programming at FBC Greeneville here in about 2 weeks and the Taylors FBC show in three!
Hey social media fans, what do you think about this?
The subject of social media has struck a chord in today’s society. Everywhere one looks, they can see its references and influences. From January to September 2009, Facebook doubled its number of active users to 300 million people around the world (Facebook Inc., b). Television and internet news agency CNN engaged in a race with television star Ashton Kutcher to get 1 million followers on the micro-blogging service Twitter (Heussner, 2009). Over half (55%) of teens that use the internet have some sort of profile on one social networking service (Lenhart & Madden, 2007). Given all of this enthusiasm, what precisely is a “social medium?”
That answer depends on the source of the information. Modern vernacular uses the terms social media, social networking service (SNS), and micro-blogging almost interchangeably; it does not have much regard of the actual differences in those terms. However, for use in this discussion, I will define social media as a website or similar interface where a user can create a profile to find and interact with other friends and associates via their profiles by use of public forums, groups, photos, videos, and status updates to accomplish a goal. This definition gives suitable maneuverability within the topic to include many different networks.
Social media is not actually a new phenomenon on the internet; it has been around since the late 1990’s with the website sixdegrees.com (Salaway, Caruso, Nelson, & Ellison, 2008, p. 20). Different networks started over the next few years, some more notable ones being LinkedIn and MySpace. Then in 2004, the network that has now surpassed them all in terms of visitors (Smith, 2009) arose as thefacebook.com, which the world knows today as Facebook (Facebook Inc., a). More recently, the micro-blogging service Twitter has gained a lot of momentum (Twitter, Inc., n.d.). Social media have very quickly become a major part of the American life and the global culture.
Given social media’s quick rise to power, researchers have not studied very thoroughly the effects that social media have on a person’s interactions with others and how people generally use these social media and networks beyond their manifest functions. Given that the social media marketplace scene changes almost yearly, it is still a very unstable medium of interaction that requires some insight to make any valid predictions.
As the world moves more and more towards this mediated reality via the internet, is Marshall McLuhan (2003) idea of the media becoming “the technological extension of consciousness” becoming a reality (p. 85)? People see more and more of these services devoted to giving them a full stream of what is going on in their social circles. One could now sit at home in front of their computer screen (or even today on their cell phone) and monitor the full stream of life that is coming from their friend networks on multiple social media platforms. McLuhan explains that, “As electrically contracted, the globe is no more than a village. Electric speed in bringing all social and political functions together in a sudden implosion has heightened human awareness of responsibility to an intense degree (p. 6).”
McLuhan looked into the future and saw what “electric technology,” as he refers to it, could eventually do to society. The continual flow of information from one source to another seems to create the same idea as our nervous system. One could view the media as extensions of the human body, eventually to extend consciousness.
This new world social media poses drastic implications on the ways the general populace goes about their lives; people find new uses for social media quite frequently such as “social-shopping” on sites like Zebo.com and Kaboodle.com. While society seems to be finding new ways to inject social media into more and more facets of life, what is the eventual outcome of all of this socialization of the once discrete electronic life? Gone are the days of the compartmentalized life; the era of total interconnection of the multiple parts of a person’s life is now well established and viewable with the simple act of a Google search or typing on a name in a Facebook profile search.
The media revolution the world has watched take place over the past 5 years has changed the nature of how people communicate between each other, but has it made any changes beyond that? Has it caused society to change the way the way it thinks about friendships, relationships, and any number of other core cultural values as a whole? Currently social media is, for the most part, undefined in terms of its long-term effects on society. While this is something that only time can give the full answer to, one can examine how social media’s function has evolved to see how people are using it now compared to the past. Researchers could then use this to gain an understanding of the ever-changing purpose of social media.
While there are some generally untested opinions and observations of its purpose and effects, for the most part there has simply not been enough study into this new collection of media to draw accurate conclusions. McLuhan argues that instantaneous technologies lead eventually to a collective consciousness in a tribal sense. At the time of his death in 1980, the internet was just in its infancy. It would be more than a decade before the first commercial use of it would be available to the public. He could only imagine what was around the corner when he wrote his theories, especially Understanding Media in 1963!
Most research on social media is conducted looking at it as its own alcove of media, but when viewed as a natural progression, many interesting things begin to appear. Does social media and Web 2.0 usage contribute to this natural progression and lead to McLuhan’s idea of a collective consciousness? In order to ascertain this, one must define this in terms that are testable and concrete. For that reason, I will look to see if social media usage, compared with other forms of older media, increases a person’s disposition towards a collective versus an individualistic mindset and an egalitarian versus a heretical culture. I will then be able to draw conclusions based on these findings about the overall effect of social media.
So I have been a bit MIA lately. Life has been a bit crazy.
So today, after weeks of work, we finally got our JANDS Vista i3 ordered!
With the fall fading into the Holiday Season (crazy!) its time to pull out the gel swatches and start on the Christmas Lighting Designs! I have a programming at FBC Greeneville here in about 2 weeks and the Taylors FBC show in three!
