Social Me (dia) Rivers

This week, everything came together in a huge wave.  I have come to see the Web 2.0 applications as huge machines demanding more and more to feed on,  and we seem to have programmed ourselves to feed them ever increasing bits of information, photos, opinions and social chit chat.  Despite our best intentions to create positive identities, I have a vision of the search engines as trawling machines chewing up our words, letters and pictures, removing them from their original context, mixing them with other peoples words, letter and pictures, and then spewing them out through their mouths for all to see.  Scarey!

You do have some element of control by gaining an understanding of what the search engines feed on, and adjusting your web presence accordingly.  Also you can also link your social sites to create a positive social stream in applications such as Friendfeed which will help to create a more meaningful river (Leaver, 2010).  Identity in the era of 2.0, as described by Helmond (2010, p. 22), is "always under construction, never finished, networked, user-generated, distributed and persistent".

References

Helmond A.  (2010).  Identity 2.0: Constructing identity with cultural software.   Anne Helmond. New Media Research Blog.  Retrieved from http://www.annehelmond.nl/wordpress/wp-content/uploads//2010/01/helmond_identity20_dmiconference.pdf

Leaver T.  (2010).  Social me(dia) rivers [iLecture].  Retrieved from http://lms.curtin.edu.au/