“Social media platforms (such as Twitter, Facebook, Sina Weibo1) have revolutionized the dissemination mode of information, which greatly improve the velocity, volume, and variety of information transmission.”

 

— The Future of False Information Detection on Social Media: New Perspectives and Trends

 

 

Nowadays, people talk about social media more and more constantly: who posted Instagram, did you see someone’s story, did you follow this actor(actress), who shared his(her) vlog on YouTube… Everyone lives in the digital world, which is fast-growing in recently decade. However, sometimes social media brings some negative influence as well, if people could not treat it rationally.

 

    • Why social media platforms important and what are the key characteristics of them?

Social media platforms are a low-cost market strategy, which can receive consumers supports easier and quicker. As for public, companies can communicate to existing and potential consumers with more responses on advertisement and promotion. For example, shoppers use Instagram to show products and promotions. Riley states that “[o]ver 1/3 of the population is using [apps] to purchase a product or connect with businesses”, which can share their work to people and tag them who the companies or teams relate to, by posting on the social media platform (2020). As for officials, governments use social media platform to share the world. People can know real-time update news, weather, traffics… by following designated accounts. As for private, the individuals can follow others to know their friends, read updated news, go shopping, share their daily life and other activities.2 In general, billions of people worldwide are using social media because it is the easiest and most cost efficient.

    • What features & characteristics of existing media technologies make it effective for personal learning?

The existing media technologies advance communication which is not only in the individuals’ daily life, but also in the study and work environment. To be more specific, connecting people with libraries as places through social media (and other digital technologies) has the potential to expand the community base and local connections, and which means development in these areas requires human development and technical resources (Houghton, Foth and Miller, 2013). However, social media may lead some misunderstanding information, people need to distinguish which information is effective for our personal learning. The authors claim that “[sometimes] the adversarial use of social media to spread information poses a political threat” (Guo, Ding, Yao, Liang and Yu, 2020). For instance, during last US presidential election in 2016, as many as 529 different low-celebrity statements were spread via Twitter, and approximately 19 million malicious bot accounts published or retweeted posts supporting Trump or Clinton, which potential influenced the election. One of the science magazines reported this statement as “Fake News” in 2018, which arouse people’s feeling of fear and surprise (Guo, et al, 2020). Thus, when people use existing media technologies, they should notice risks, which lead personal learning ineffective, influence public opinion implicitly and threaten social media development. [1]

    • How does the technology allow you to enhance/develop your digital identity/reputation?

Identity, the term identity encompasses multiple dimensions, including culture, society, region, psychology, politics, and beliefs. Identity is the society’s definition of a person, this definition will always be with people from birth to death.

Then digital identities. After the popularization of the Internet, digital identities follow. Digital identity not only includes identity coding information such as birth information, individual descriptions, and biological characteristics, but also involves personal behavior information with multiple attributes. For example, WeChat and Facebook store social information, Alipay and Amazon store transaction information, and games and video software store entertainment information. These different attributes of information are all part of a personal digital identity.

Existing media technologies can enable users to easily access, create, disseminate, and share information in a user-friendly open environment. When we build our brand on the Internet, we need to spread quickly in social media to attract people. So we need to “take hold of your presence on social media and use it to improve your digital reputation”(Baldwin, 2020). It is important to choose a platform to create and develop digital identities for the rapid access and dissemination of media technology. For example, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, etc. have many active users every day. Put your energy into social platforms and link each platform’s information together. Stay active on social media platforms and let more and more people pay attention to yourself so that can maintain and enhance a good digital identity/reputation.

    • What are the ways the technology tracks and uses your data – how can this be used to benefit a PLN?

Nowadays, various emerging technologies have changed our lives and made our lives more and more convenient, especially the Internet communication has become easier.  In Social network platform，people can share information with each other.  And media technology allows us to easily find the information we want when we are browsing. In the Internet, technology makes social media sometimes know us better than our friends.(Emerging Media. 2017) It uses the method of data collection to recommend content that we are interested in by collecting the content and information we publish on the platform. For example, in social media platforms such as Instagram and Twitter, you can learn about our interests through our browsing history; Ilchenko recommend similar users to you through the user address book; and push similar topics through our activity status (2020).

The tracking of technology and the use of data enable our PLN to get the correct crowd recommendation on social media. Attract like-minded people to browse PLN, exchange and share opinions. For example, in the comments of PLN, we will get positive and valuable relevant response suggestions.

    • What are social considerations that should be accounted for?

In PLN, we will meet different people from all over the world and discover different opinions. In the network society of PLN, we need to consider the different social and cultural backgrounds. Every user will read content according to their culture, and different cultures will have different opinions. As a result, there are sometimes positive or negative responses in PLN. When making comments on social media platforms, you need to consider whether there is content that violates different cultures. This also has a great impact on our digital identity. Maintaining a good digital reputation, the most important of which is respect for culture. [2]

    • What are the strengths and weaknesses of the privacy, security and acceptable use policies for the social media platforms.

On the Internet, privacy and personal security have always been hot topics. In many advanced countries, they have gradually developed into basic rights protected by various legal systems. The Internet privacy that we often discuss can actually be discussed at different levels; the most basic concept of privacy can be limited to the link “whether the footprints left on the Internet are tracked”, such as cookies. Its advantage is the cookie on the web service, some websites will use it to make the user experience better; for example, transfer data when switching between different pages, so that you don’t have to fill in the information on the first page again. Or when you log in to a website that you have already logged in, you can still log in again when you browse it next time; it will not be deleted until the expiration of the setting expires. Also because of these records, when you are browsing social media or shopping sites, there will show the related products or advertisements that you have viewed before on those sites. Based on those records, the system will calculate what you are interested in and appeared on those social media. Although such a function is very convenient, there are also concerns about security and privacy leakage. There are also many social media, applications, or tool platforms that require membership to be used. In addition to using a new registered account in the email, you can also log in a faster way, such as to connect to a Facebook or Google account. Many people want to be fast and convenient, regardless of their platform credibility and bind Facebook or Google accounts to log in. In this way, personal privacy can easily fall into the third party, and they will be able to grasp personal community behavior, interests, or various online behavior trajectories. Therefore, for users, editors or corporate community managers, no matter what platform they use, in addition to still adopting the old method to create new accounts with email, they should also observe whether the tool or platform has credibility, confidentiality and security measures. Convenience and speed should not be used as the reason to allow hidden loopholes in security.

    • Provide examples of individuals who have used a PLN to become leaders in a field of interest, discuss their presence in the platform?

If PLN wants to be popular, the basic idea is to create great value and promise, and provide in-depth, high-quality information. According to each post or work, it is necessary to understand its own publishing structure and what content you want followers to know, what information followers want to know and help them solve their problems. Challenge yourself to write quality articles or show the best work. For example, PAPARAYA, a creator I like, publishes his work on Pixiv3, a drawing creation platform. On Pixiv, a large number of new works appear every day. He will steadily submit works at short intervals. This method is quite useful, because the number of followers and comments gradually increase. Some people would like his work; some people may not like it. But as long as he continues to contribute, people who can understand his work would definitely appear. So he eventually became very famous, and he can be seen on many well-known creative platforms. He would also post videos of his painting process on YouTube or live while he is creating, and interact with his followers. Sometimes he would interact with other creators in the way of drawing solitaire, and record the creative process as a video, and upload it to YouTube. At the beginning, he would create his works based on the preferences of the followers, but as his work gets better and better and has more and more followers, he starts to focus on himself and confidently shows his creations to everyone. [3]

    • How do they use the social media platforms to build their reputation/presence?

Social media platforms are essential for building a professional learning network. However, for the desired objective to be attained, the users must be keen on how they utilize such sites. This means that if they are not keen, it will be difficult to attain the required goals. Therefore, building a reputation or presence is very important. First, a PLN should formulate his or her vision and make sure that whatever they are doing reflects what they have already communicated to the public. If people start to see any deviation, they will raise a number of questions, something that will not be good since individuals will lose trust. Also, the questions that people ask should be answered professionally and make sure that individuals are satisfied at the end of the process. Consistency should be observed when the same question is asked now and again, or else adequate explanations are provided to elaborate why changes are were experienced in certain cases. APLN can use different social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram to reach various groups of people. However, to boost trust and confidence among the public, all the handles or user names on both platforms should be the same. Additionally, they should provide their contacts and physical address when they can be found when necessary. Lastly, be available to respond to the questions that are asked promptly and do not ignore any questions.

    • How will you know that your PLN is a success?

It is difficult to know when your PLN becomes a success. However, in case someone had goals and objectives, and they have been achieved, it will be an indication that the PLN is successful. When the followers on various social media platforms increase and start asking questions, it will be a confirmation that the assistance provided is useful to the people. Also, there are cases where individuals can give suggestions on how they have been assisted. [4]

 

Personal learning network is helping users control and manage their own learning, allowing users to set goals, manage learning content and process; in the learning process, communicate and interact with others to complete learning goals.  This kind of learning can promote personal growth, career development, professional knowledge acquisition and even cooperation and co-creation.  Heterogeneous members in the practice community can share implicit and explicit knowledge and regard learning as a process of changing actual operations; through exchanges in practice, co-creation and enhancement of knowledge, thereby changing society.[3]

 

Footnotes

Sina Weibo1: A Chinese application, which is similar with Facebook.

Jomahll2: My Instagram account is named Jomahll, which is from Chinese name Yuechen Zhou in Korean. It is welcomed to follow my Instagram and check my daily life.

Pixiv3: A Japanese online community for artists.

[1]: Yuechen Zhou created part 1, which is the part above [1].

[2]: Tingting Li created part 2, which is the part above [2].

[3]: Weiting Wu created part 3, which is the part above [3].

[4]: Hsienwen Kuo created part 4, which is the part above [4].

At first, our group mates discuss what we need to focus  on through the whole final project. Then, we talk about the ten questions on the final project introduction briefly. After that, we choose the topic questions which we are interested in (Yuechen Zhou chose point one and point two, Tingting Li chose point three, four and five, Weiting Wu decided to choose point six and seven, and Hsienwen took charge of the rest.) After finishing the parts what we respond, Yuechen stated that we need a introduction and conclusion to and attract audiences and strength our final project. Yuechen wrote the  introduction and Weiting was in charge of the conclusion. Finally, we went through the full text together and edited a few parts. Yuechen suggested to add a grey box before the introduction which made our final project look structured and interesting.

References

Baldwin, C. (2020, February 7). Improve Your Digital Reputation With Social Media and Content. [Web log post]. Retrieved from https://www.wsiworld.com/blog/improve-your-digital-reputation-with-social-media-and-content

Emerging Media. (2017). 3 Ways That Social Media Knows You Better Than Your Friends and Family Do. [Web log post]. Retrieved from https://www.loyola.edu/academics/emerging-media/blog/2017/3-ways-that-social-media-knows-you-better-than-your-friends-and-family-do

Guo, B., Ding, Y., Yao, L., Liang, Y. & Yu, Z. (2020). The Future of False Information Detection on Social Media. ACM Computing Surveys, 53(4), 1-36. doi:10.1145/3393880

Houghton, K., Foth M. & Miller E. (2013) The continuing relevance of the library as a third place for users and non-users of IT: the case of Canada Bay, The Australian Library Journal, 62(1), 27-39. doi:10.1080/00049670.2013.771764

Ilchenko, V. (2020, September 25). 7 Ways How to Use Big Data in Social Media. [Web log post]. Retrieved from https://www.byteant.com/blog/7-ways-how-to-use-big-data-in-social-media/

Riley, M. (2020, January 7). Why is Social Media so Important? [Web log post]. Retrieved from https://www.anvilmediainc.com/blog/why-is-social-media-so-important/