Social Media

1) What is your favourite social interaction site? Why?

2) To what extent is your communication there impersonal and non-interpersonal?

3) In what areas is your communication most hyper-personal?

4) To what extent has CMC helped your interpersonal communication?

5) In what ways has CMC hindered your interpersonal communication?

Social media is a very integral part of my life now, with my phone by my side all the time. I seem to log onto to Facebook most often, with it being the first site I go to whenever I turn on my laptop as well. It is a social platform that allows people to connect one many different levels, with messenger, photos uploads, status updates and file sharing. Groups are also created to form virtual communities of the same interest for people to connect. It is THE all-in-one social networking site, also connecting other social network that I commonly use with (i.e. Twitter).

I feel that my communication on Facebook is not really impersonal and non-interpersonal. CMC was considered to be as such due to the lack of audio, video and non-verbal cues, decreased interactivity and less socio-emotional content exchanged. However, Facebook as a social platform includes uploading personal videos and photos, users can too comment on their Facebook friend’s status and comments where his/her friend can see too. This allows for interactivity which can extend to a wide network. Also, emoticons on messenger allow for emotions to be transmitted through CMC, they may not be as accurate as in face to face but it still helps. However, non-verbal cues are still limited through Facebook as things that people post on it can be edited and thought through carefully before posting, it too does not allow people to observe other’s behaviours.

Communication is hyper-personal on Facebook as people accept friend requests from people who you are not actually that close to in real life. Hence, from the status updates and the posts of photos and videos, there tend to be an...