Week of 09-28 Blog Post

I am now writing a blog poster for a New Media Course in school. I will be discussing what I’ve learned in the recent sections.

I’ve learned a cornucopia of information about social media and most of them are novel. I first learned about poster designing. I was working with an excellent artist to make a poster attractive and aesthetic appropriate. My main contribution is to select a background with a cosmic picture. I also picked up some merits and demerits for it. During the process of picking, I noticed that almost all the problems and controversies are about decentralization, addiction orientation, and speed in information spreading of social media. For instance, the first two points on the group poster “Social media spreads information faster than any other media” and “Social media enables the spread of unreliable and false information” are decentralization and speed-focused (“Pros & Cons”, 2020). In the movie the class watched September 26th, I was witnessed many practitioners’ opinions. Many of them narrated social media as an abusive and outer-control leviathan-like being that affects everyone’s life. Social media is highly addiction oriented and provoking to the civilians. Social media could make society a more separated and hateful place and it is tended to do so. Social media companies are also profiting from their users by analyzing the data the users produce every day.

After a short period of time studying advertisements. I learned the psychology models the advertising industry is currently using. There are generally three models (thinking, feeling, and the combination of two above) for advertising based on the mechanism of how man’s brain functions. Aside from the three main models, advertisement designing can also be classified by the psychology it uses. There are generally two states a person desires to achieve in a group: to be alike or to be distinctive. Many products are advertised based on the two desires. Many more fundamental aspects of humanity can also be used for advertising. Fear, for instance, “[is] widely used in the nonprofit sector, encouraging people to help save the environment or help eliminate poverty by giving money to charities” (Contributor, 2020). As a customer, I also derived a conclusion: most of the commercial advertisements are dishonest or at least exaggerated somehow. A customer should always remain skeptical before getting promoted by an advertisement he saw in the hallway.

Again, I failed to reflect on my own life after discussion and learning about advertisements in class. I am not a social-media-heavy-user and I would like to take all necessary procedures to reduce my exposure under advertisements. After watching the movie's social dilemma, I started to reflect on my own life once. I asked myself: was my political opinion affected by algorithm deeply in the same way shown in the video? My answer was negative after a while of thinking. Even on a platform which I have been used for years, I still read and watch contents I disagree with every day.

 

Reference List:

Contributor, C. (2020, September 17). Fear Appraisal in Advertising. Retrieved September 28, 2020, from https://smallbusiness.chron.com/fear-appraisal-advertising-18259.html

 

Pros & Cons - ProCon.org. (2020, July 02). Retrieved September 21, 2020, from https://socialnetworking.procon.org/