ITM 501 Mod 3 disc response to Richard Marshall
Various groups exist within the social media platform that express the needs of the members. Most of them are meaningless as they form the basis of idle talk. Turner (1988) admits that most have formed connections for business deals while the big percentage survives through a feeling of a false connection with the outside world. In social gatherings, for example, little interaction is experienced as people are busy glued to their phones chatting with their online friends (Cañamero & Aylett, 2008). Individual measure of the social bond is their number of online friends and followers. The connection is fake because in real life, the friends are virtual and only exist in the mind of individual.
Classroomsalon.com, for example, is only helpful to some. The majority members participate due to pressure from their peers. They fear a leave-out from the circle of classmates. They live their lives, not as they desire it, but how their peers wish them to live. The platform is to blame for raising very irresponsible students who are lazy (Zarrella, 2009). They do not want to be creative in generating solutions to their course readings because the platform has ready answers. After all, it is a click away. What was previously taking students a whole day is achievable within minutes. The time for research is dedicated to other activities, mostly out of the class context (Cañamero et al., 2008).
The classroomsalon.com idea does not prepare the students to enter the workforce in any way. Competence in the workforce calls for the individual performance within a team. The study of Cañamero et al. (2008) shows that the workforce requires a solid background of independence, which the classromsalon.com has eroded the students. Most of the careers require an individual to possess excellent interpersonal skills. With the social media encouraging individual’s participation by giving scores on how active or influential they are, it deprives its members the chance to develop their interpersonal skills.
References
Cañamero, L. & Aylett, R. (2008). Animating expressive characters for social interaction. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Co.
Turner, J. H. (1988). A theory of social interaction. California: Stanford University Press.
Zarrella, D. (2009). The social media marketing book. Sebastopol, CA: O’Reilly Media, Inc.