SWA 4

In today’s electronic society, there are many different ways that people can communicate with each other on a daily basis. Two of these ways are blogging and social networking.
David Friedman’s blog “Ideas” is an Internet blog where he posts his ideas and thoughts about certain issues. In his blog, he makes some kind of comment and then he allows people to respond to what he has said. This allows everyone to see all comments posted by all people and they can also respond to each other. The targeted audience for his general blog is anyone who happens to read it, people whom he knows, and people looking for discussion on a certain idea that he has posted. Since anyone can see what is posted, the audience is not very limited. The author of this blog is David Friedman, an academic economist who teaches at a law school in San Jose, California. His posts are not too controversial, and his most recent about air conditioning is something that he is most likely qualified to discuss. He is most likely writing about an economical issue with air conditioning because he is an academic economist who is concerned about the economy. The main constraints with this specific post about air conditioning is that unless you have air conditioning and are directly affected by its costs then you will not care too much about this topic. Friedman most likely created this post because he had thought about the costs of his air conditioning and decided that there must be some less expensive way to receive an equal amount of cooling.
In contrast to blogging, Facebook is a different kind of online community. With Facebook, there are many different privacy settings that can be adjusted to control who sees what part of your information. You can comment to people on any topic you want and they can comment back to you. There are other features such as “groups” which are somewhat like mini – blogs about specific topics where anyone who is a member of the group can make comments. Groups can be private or by invitation only. The targeted audience is anyone who is your “friend” on Facebook, someone who is allowed to view your profile. You are the author of your profile and therefore you know everything you need to know about yourself. Posts on Facebook are designed for people who do not regularly talk to each other to stay in contact. The only real constraints with Facebook are that you must be “friends” with someone in order to see information about them, therefore, depending on the specific issue of a post, they may agree and they may disagree. Since all of your friends will not always agree with you, there constraints that they might have. Any argument on Facebook is caused because a “friend” disagrees with someone on any specific issue.
When analyzing Blogging and Facebook, there are similarities and differences. They are similar because they allow people to talk to one another over the Internet, to discuss any issue of importance they might want to talk about. They are also open to anyone, depending on privacy settings. They are also very different. Blogging is very limited to posting and then responding to that post. There is not as much of a community sense that there is with Facebook because you control who says what on Facebook. Blogging is more of place to post your personal opinions and thoughts while Facebook is a network to connect friends.