The effects of "online life" on education? On marketing?
For this week's blog, I read these articles:
And I want to share a video related to the topic. It's about two youtuber revealing that a hotel manager wrote a book which distorted the history between Japan and China and placed the books in every guest room. The video then raised heated discussion and fierce boycott of the chain hotels in China.
- Social media? Get serious! Understanding the functional building blocks of social media
- Facebook and academic performance
- Facebook and academic performance: Reconciling a media sensation with data
I believe that the influence of social media on students' study was a controversial hot topic, but it was years ago. Now we seem focus more on the online resources facilitating school performance and the other negative influence of social media, like vanity, fake information, too much care about outer beauty or through maverick behaviors to get fame. As for mere school performance, I hold the opinion with Josh Pasek(2009) and his colleagues that there is unlikely a direct relationship between Facebook, a major social medium, and students' GPA. Social media is a common distraction for those who study indeed, but it's no different with things like maybe some snacks, good friends calling you to hang out, and I've seen it in a video about procrastination that people prefer to spend much time tidy up their desks before starting to work. While when you are distracted by social media, it does not mean for sure that you're wasting your life. Maybe you just want to get inspired by others online, or you need some resources to fulfill your work. Anyway, in my opinion, the side effect of social media is limited and steerable, which is counteracted by the support of unlimited development of ICT.
In respect for the "life online", compared to teachers, corporation managers should concern more about it since the power of social media to destroy the reputation of a firm is far greater than that to degrade a student. As listed by Kietzmann(2010), social media can influence firms through 7 functions, including identity, conversations, sharing, presence, relationships, reputation, and groups. In general, as customers it's nice to know that
In respect for the "life online", compared to teachers, corporation managers should concern more about it since the power of social media to destroy the reputation of a firm is far greater than that to degrade a student. As listed by Kietzmann(2010), social media can influence firms through 7 functions, including identity, conversations, sharing, presence, relationships, reputation, and groups. In general, as customers it's nice to know that
"the firm is no longer in control of the conversation, and that any social media strategy should also focus on increasing customer happiness (e.g., how well cus- tomer issues are resolved) and customer input (e.g., suggestions for improving a product or service)."Kietzmann(2010)
Hi Joan,
ReplyDeleteMy point is that it is not reasonable to make a conclusion that CMC/online life/Internet is good or bad, since how CMC works is closely related to it’s users. When the user is different, the results will be very different. So I’m strongly agree with McKenna and Bargh's view: “There is no simple main effect of the Internet on the average person”. In my opinion, CMC is not a dichotomy entity. What we can do is to find it’s advantages and disadvantages, and let those advantages enhance us and avoid the disadvantages as much as we can.
Hi Yanran,
ReplyDeleteI agree that we have to deal with a complicated situation when telling if our life online does good or bad to our academic performance, and actually there are too many confounding variable in this case. As far as I am concerned, it is necessary to combine educational psychology studies to explain the influence mechanism. And thank you for sharing this meaningful video. Although I have watched it before, at this time I found another interesting point-- the publisher of this video is an American girl, which is the "third-party" between the issue of China and Japan. I think this kind of online identity may help people feel more objective and impartial in this discussion.
Wow! Thanks for sharing that video. I feel that with the power of social media, that hotel chain likely suffered a serious blow as Chinese people boycotted it. And in this instance, I think that it is a positive societal thing (boycotting a right-wing nationalist CEO's company).
ReplyDeleteIt really is astounding that social media has so much power--but if we think about it, it's not so much the social media as it is the social media plus the social media network (the people). It's amazing at how social media speeds up communication so much compared to older mass media like television, radio, and even telephones. Truly social media is as important as the printing press, television, radio, and telephones.
This made me also think about the many United incidents that became viral and seriously harmed the company. And even more significantly, social media and fake news influenced the U.S. election (and European elections as well)! If social media can have such a profound effect on those things, then I think it is highly likely that they can have a profound effect on users. But I'd have to back that up with research ;).
Daniel