Social Media and Work Place

Some companies, like IBM, started using social media to communicate in the workplace. But can social media replace normal interpersonal communication?Social media indeed draw distant between people much closer than in the past, but that only applies to people who are not in the same location. But as for work place, can they produce the same effect? Personally, I doubt so.

I am not an expert in psychology and behavior science, but from personal experience, interaction is very important. Interaction is not only with verbal conversation, but also non verbal communication. We pick up clues from all the non verbal communication a person make, and sometimes get our satisfactory there. Will you feel better when your boss

send you a one page email to praise you in your work, or having a pat at your back from him and receiving a big smile from his face? One of Maslow's hierarchy of needs is socialization, and human relation in the work place is one of the most important factor for work satisfactory.

And these socialisation in work place can bring along more ideas for the company in a meeting when different ideas come together to form a new one. Some companies try to make things more convenient for their employees by having these discussions on a Wiki site where everyone has a platform to share everytime anytime. However, this limits the chances to get non verbal responses and also blocks positive arguments.

Control? Constrains? Affordance?

It is a common debate on whether we are controlling the technologies or we are being controlled by them. I was just working on a publisher and it strikes me when there are a lot of things I wanted to do but I can't do. One of it is I can't publish the file into words after I have designed my file on publisher. I need to export it into a word file for further editing.

This is one of the control mentioned in the lesson. However, I do not agree that human is being controlled by technologies. Human create these technologies for our own convenience, thus human is the one controlling it.

And as to standardize everything, a system of rule have to be set to the program. This bring a huge benefit and convenience to our work as we do not have to worry about our work not being able to be opened by some other computer. This is the affordance technologies gives us. And we might not be able to get this affordance if not constrains were made in the first place. Thus instead of seeing it as a control, I think it is more corect to see it as a constrains that brought to our affordance.

And if anyone still thinks they were controlled by technologies, they can choose to stop using them. There are a lot of examples in the world that a lot of people choose not to have a mobile phone as they do not want to be "controlled" by the calls, then they have to give up the convenience provided by it.

So in my point of view, control, constrains or affordance depends on how you look into the technologies that you have and how you manage the use of these technologies. And I definately prefer to look on the bright side.

Social Networking

I have been in touch with social networking websites since very long ago without me knowing the exact benefit of it.

Since friendster, I have been actively participating in social networking activities. It was kind of fun in the past to write testimonials for one and other. But without more fuctions, friendster soon bores everyone off.

With the constant problem of friendster, I started using hi5 with my friends. Here, there is a function of groups, and people start creating groups... When friendster was once again back to function, many of the people switched back because of the number of people using it. Many people did not sign up for hi5 and thus we usually have more friends on friendster than hi5.

Soon, facebook is out for everyone. I started off considerably slow as social networking was not as popular in Hong Kong than in Singapore. But with the many many different function, it attracted lots of friends to start social networking. And now, my facebook have grew till 800 friends.

But I didn't know the advantage of me having such networking until recently. I found out that I have a considerably huge network cluster when I tried out some of the apps. This means that these connections might help me through my life. But frankly, I am not used to making use of it. But it is either I use it or I lose it.

P.S. Here are some other social networking website that I have used.

myspace


twitter

Netspeaking - Part of my life

As I have mentioned before in my previous post, I did netspeaking since very long ago when I first used mIRC. Since then, I never stopped netspeak. Netspeak take place almost everyday as it was popular to go to chat rooms everyday.

Then, mobile phone came into my life. The use of sms further enhance my netspe

aking through textspeaking. I find it so easy and convenient to type in shorts that I forgot to change it back even in my academics studies. And of course, the note was unreadable and I gave it up in my academic studies.

Frankly, textspeak did affect my academic studies quite greatly at the start when I do not know how to manage the two "language", I have to throw a year of scien

ce notes away due to the excessive use of textspeak. So if others were to debate on whether textspeak affect academic studies, my case will be yes.

Then, I continue to use textspeak even on email no matter with my friends or family.

"den u oso type very long to them la.. so tt they will reply u long long oso.. i mean sure gt things to tok about wan la... rubbish oso can wad.. las time oso everytime tok rubbish rite.. hahah.. u all siao wan leh.. so many email.. lol.... u noe my add anot.. nvm i gif u now.."

Until one day, my dad could not tolerate me anymore. By then, I learnt that if I continue to use textspeak too excessively on my daily life, it will affect me greatly. I have to stop usin

g it in formal situations like emails or formal text messages in order to give others a professional image. That was when I start to manage my textspeaking. The only time I will use textspeak is on chats or sms.

Information and Information Overload

After reading the supplementary document, I realised that I have have the problem of information overload due to not being able to clearly identify what are the information I need and the ways to retrieve them.

In Facebook, there is a function of news feed which provides frequent updates to users. I do not know how everyone one of you use your facebook, but for me, facebook is a place for getting more informations on my friends, e.g in a relationship. And thus news feed is very important to me to stay updated. And there was a time where I check ALL news feeds in order to get important updates.

Let's us imagine, in the morning we start school at 0930 and reach home after dinner at let's say 9 plus, there will be over 300+ news feeds waiting for you. Moreover, some of the feeds might be album, events, notes, or videos, which take much more time to read them. Among 300 feeds, if 10% are useful to me, there will already be 30 news feeds. Among them, 5 are notes, 5 are albume, and 5 are videos, once in awhile, videos will link to other videos related like the Apple Daily Videos. It usually take me about 2 - 3 hours to finish the feeds, which is 12 midnight.

Because there are too much data i nthe news feed, I take a long time to find my information. At the same time, the filter system is not useful to me as I would like to know more about different people, even if they are not close to me. Thus, I am looking at loads and loads of data to get around 10% of information.

In order to solve this problem, I took an extreme step, which is giving up my information. I do not look at news feeds anymore nowadays, and this saved me 2 hours on other stuff. Come to think of it, those gossip do not worth so much time of mine and I am lucky to realised that I am overloaded with all these unimportant information before it is too late.

My Digital Life

This post will definitely reveal my age.

I would like to introduce my digital communication channels to everyone of you.

From the very beginning of computer being commonly used at home, I have be using different communicative software to chat with my friends in leisure.

First software that I used is mIRC, which is a very popular internet relay chat client at that time. It seems to be less common in HK than it is in SG. Anyway, there are different Chat Rooms in the different servers all over the world. People will usually go into their local server and join chat rooms with common interest. For example, I can join a HK server and create a room call BAEP, anyone of common interest will gather together to chat, or a better word, GOSSIP.

During the same period, there is ICQ, this software should be more common in HK as compared to mIRC. But as IRC is the dominant software at my time, I seldom use ICQ. ICQ is an instant messaging program used by computer. And most people might not know, its name come from "I Seek You". ICQ allows you to connect to people by adding them from their account number. This allows you to locate people whom you wanted to chat with directly if you have their account number. However, it is really troublesome to give your account number to your friend as you cannot remember them.

Later on, there comes MSN Messenger created by Microsoft. This instant messenger functioned the same as ICQ where you can locate your friend directly. MSN comes up with a convenient way of locating people, which is by their hotmail address. This makes life easier for many internet users as the found it much easier to remember the ID that they created, e.g. secret_cheung@hotmail.com. Thus, more and more people are using this software. MSN messenger also constantly upgrade and modify itself for the better, its function is the most user friendly among all software I used. And now, it has changed its name to Windows Live Messenger. And until now, I am still a great fan of it.

Well, I am not sure if this course will touch on these communication channels (I hope it does as I can learn something about it that I didn't notice). But still, I would like to share some of my experience in using it, which is "bring chats into daily life". When I first started using chats, I can't help but brought it to my daily life. It become soooo much easier to type short forms that I use it in academic studies. I wrote my note in short forms used in the chats. E.g. 1st u haf 2 add salt into e water. tt will cuz water 2 bcome unpure. This form of writing speeds up my note taking skill. However, when I pick the note up to revise, I throw it all away after an hour of studying. It is totally unreadable. This is one of my bad experience with chats. :P