Social Media/ Web 2.0 Response

1). The Amateurish or "homegrown" style that advertisements are trying to emulate today is a prime example of a media "fad". I believe that the drop is professional production levels is a response to the population's realization that technology has developed "user-generated" content. People have become fascinated with the ability to publish and not be professional. The media's job is to appeal to society, and right now, nothing appeals more to the American public than this "homegrown" fad. I believe that professional production levels aren't dropping and won't begin to, but rather, professionals are experimenting with this different approach. Just as the media focused on appealing to user generated sites like Myspace, this new amateurish approach will pass with time. I also believe that user-generated content won't get better necessarily, but perhaps will explore the "homegrown" sytle more deeply.

2). The article I used for the tag comparison was an article about how the use of marijuana by senior citizens goes up as the baby boomer generation continues to age. I felt that some tags that would help define what the article is about include marijuana, baby boomers, retirement, drug laws/politics. However, to my surprise, only one of the tags that i suggested were posted on an online site. Delicious.com used tags like boomers, marijuana, seniors, and USA (in that order) to describe what the article was about. This exercise helped me to realize how the web helps bring peoples different perspectives together. Only one of my suggestions was listed online and i though each of my tags sufficiently described the article. I also learned that if you search for broad tags and then narrow down your search, you are more likely to find the article you are searching for.

Article Link: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100222/ap_on_re_us/us_seniors_marijuana

3). Transparency is more important to today's culture than it has ever been in our society. In our ever technologically-advancing world, social networking is continuing to become more and more prominent in everyday life. The social-media world was constructed based on people's need to communicate and share ideas through an easy to use and efficient medium. For example, we saw business people using "Real World" avatars in order to conduct business meetings in the Digital Nation video. Without transparency, social networking sites like facebook, myspace, twitter, and youtube would not exist. I feel that transparency is more important online than it is in the offline world TODAY, because our generation grew up with the web and the web will be a prominent component in everyones life in the near future. If transparency didn't exist on the web, it would be much harder for humans to communicate, network, and advance.