Hung Nguyen's Learning Journal

This week's reading mentioned social media laws and ethics, which everyone can easily relate to based on the popularity of social media platforms in the past decade, and as the number of users increases, the rules and regulations are also tightened with the intention of creating safer online environments. I find that rules and regulations on social media platforms have always been too relative, they are applied differently in different circumstances, and people with bad intentions will always try to exploit them. Thus, it makes me question the ethical factors of these social media sites, if they were designed with potential human harm in mind, then the laws and regulations surrounding them would be more complete. Even though p otential human harm will always be present in any human creation including social media, technology ethics should also be made available as a guiding metric for entrepreneurs to avoid unwanted incidents in the future. For example, the recommended algorithms t...

After carefully interpreting this module's reading, I have realized how great of impact pictures can have on our perception, especially for social media users. Words have always been considered the primary form of communication and have contributed to one of the most popular communication channels (verbal). However, non-verbal communication forms that are tended to be expressed through images, and pictures are able to provide us with more reliable information and engage us more than just solely words. Therefore, pictures and images have always been used to convey emotions or thoughts that words failed to on social media platforms, but images and pictures posted on those sites aren't always genuine. They can be adjusted, modified, or even stolen from other sources with the current development of technology, even if an original image is authentic but if you decide to change it using photoshop tools to make it better, it would still be considered a fake image to me. As I mentioned...

Innovation and Investment LJ4 Understanding social media trends also means that you must be able to predict the next technological breakthrough and the preferences of the current and upcoming human generations. Many people believed that social media trends have always been set by influencers and celebrities, but in my mind, entrepreneurs have always been the ones who held that crucial role. Since entrepreneurs are those that can quickly capture the movements of the young generations and expand beyond everyone's expectations with innovations and technology, they have essentially developed and created those mobile applications of social media platforms for us to use with convenience. Smartphones or just portable devices in general have become a necessity in everyone's life, and come with them is a wide variety of mobile features and social applications. Having start-ups with great innovative ideas willing to spend efforts and time, in addition to angel investors that are willing ...

Social Media Metrics and Analytics: lj3 From the "We Are Data" reading and previous materials, I now know that every activity we do online leave behind digital traces, which then are picked up by algorithms to create personal databases of our "online" selves. And the same also applies to social media, Application Program Interface (API) is what allows data to be shared across social media which will then be organized by social network algorithms to group similar data categories together. There are multiple social media metrics for performance such as followers, interactions, popularity, and these metrics will inform the users of their social selves, which are also derived from data that the algorithms collected from digital traces. The word cloud visualization I did last couple of weeks was an excellent example of metadata, which is data about data, of how data are collected and grouped together through keyword detection just like how word clouds are created. It doe...

Time Diary For the time diary assignment, I choose Instagram because it's my favorite social media platform and where I express myself the most. Since the Instagram app on the computer has fewer functions and shortcuts, I only used Instagram on mobile, plus the convenience of using it when you can lie down comfortably as well. I never actually spend too much time on a social media platform unless the content posted is really attractive or there's a live stream of my favorite content creators, so my usage is usually short 5 - 10 minutes sessions of checking out friends' stories and celebrity news on the platform. And each session happens every hour and a half or when I get bored I will just constantly check on Instagram for entertainment. Besides the small checking sessions, I also usually chat with my friend on the platform and most conversations start with a story reply or when we share funny content with each other. On average, I would say that I spend around 20 minutes p...

Data from Privacy: lj 2 The "We are Data" reading part provides us with knowledge about data privacy and essentially the personalization of the Internet based on the data of each individual person throughout the globe. Starting with the "right to be forgotten" by EU courts forced upon Google in 2014, where "European users can submit a takedown request of European search results that are "inadequate, irrelevant or no longer relevant, or excessive in relation to those purposes and in the light of the time that has elapsed" (Cheney-Lippold, 2019) . Even though "scientific positivism of the twentieth century" demands that we let data speak for itself, but as cited in the book "data cannot speak for itself and doesn't appear out of the wild" because humans collect data, manipulate them, and then massage them to explain the phenomenon, therefore, who else besides human which has the power of speaking for the data and shaping our view...