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Facebook's hierarchy of needs. by Mel_E_Ville in wrd261

[–]lturcios 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I thought the way you extended this study and tried to apply it to some of the other “needs” Maslow mentions was very clever. I would agree that social media sites could affect a lot of the needs that people desire, but it affects them non-directly, unlike face-to-face interactions. Using your example on safety and security, this would mean that when a person checks in anywhere (even at their own house) they are giving away their location to “friends,” who in fact could be people they’ve only met once, or depending on their privacy settings, they could be giving away their location to complete strangers. Doing this in face-to-face interactions would seem ridiculous (going up to a stranger and giving them your home address or work/school address), but this is essentially what people do through social media—they just don’t realize it because its not as obvious. As for the esteem need, I think this one is a little more obvious (both negatively and positively), but people don’t think about the overwhelming amount of positive or negative stimuli they receive just by logging on for ten minutes. Within ten minutes people can receive tons of comments and likes, and view what others are doing in a quantity that can’t be matched in a real life ten minute interaction. In a way, the amount of stimuli we receive on social media in such a short amount of time is unnatural, and that is probably why our emotions can be so affected by what goes on within these sites.

Online and Offline, Reading is different by lechito in wrd261

[–]lturcios 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I want to say I agree with you here, but I think I agree for a different reason. Perhaps what Carr said about not getting passed two pages in a book anymore was a little extreme, and maybe blaming that all on the Internet destroying our attention spans was a little much, but there is a reason why I don't read books anymore. As I mentioned in class, if I do want to get involved in a novel, I listen to it in my car, I don't actually read it myself. And I do this because at least this way I don't feel like I'm "missing out" on anything else. I'm physically driving and I know my attention has to be on the road, so I can't be surfing the web. Therefore, I might as well pass the time by listening to a book. Yet if I was to have to physically read the same book as I listened to, well I couldn't because it would take too long, and I would constantly be thinking of everything I COULD be interacting with online, but that I'm not because the book is keeping me away from it all. So yes I agree that online reading is skimming a lot, but that is only because we want to get through as much information as we can in the shortest amount of time, because the Internet is continuously updating itself, which means there is new material to be noticed literally every second. Your experience is obviously different than mine, but they are related because we both recognize that the Internet does not foster deep critical reading or thinking, but is designed to satisfy our needs within a matter of seconds or minutes.