As technology improve, communication become easier. In the past, the only communication is face to face communication which we can see each other facial expression and emotion or communication through letters, but it takes weeks for the other person to receive. Today, communication is much faster. With a phone, we can talk to other people across the continent. With e-mail, we can write to each other instantly. With programs like MySpace and Facebook, we can interact with people through out the world by posting our favorite music, video clips, and commenting on others posts for free. At first, MySpace is a great medium to communicate and share our interest with others, but people began to use it as an advertisement of themselves. In yesterday class discussion, Nikki said that she stop using MySpace when people began to flirt with her. Sadly, we do not know if the person we are talking in MySpace is real or fake because people can fake their age, gender, ethnic and name. Thus, the internet can be deceiving. It seems as if today communication is like virtual.
In the article of the New York Time, we see that Cartier starts a new campaign of using MySpace as advertisement. By using MySpace as his advertisement, Cartier wants people to know that his jewelry product is open to everyone of all classes. He tries to give an impression that his company is changing from their old wealthy customers to equal opportunity customers. However, it is all a deceiving. By paying MySpace with the advertisement, Cartier allows MySpace to regulate or choose friend base on Cartier’s standard. Thus, Cartier’s high standard is still there, but he just disguises it in a clever way.
People in MySpace can be deceiving because we do not know these people enough. They could fake their age, ethnic and gender, so do not trust any strangers in MySpace. About two year ago, a fourteen year old girl name Megan committed suicide after a boy named Josh broke up with her in MySpace. At her funeral, her friend mother confessed that Josh did not exist. She and her daughter made up Josh to play a trick on Megan. Similarly, my brother and his friends created an account in MySpace as a female and started flirting with guys online. They think it funny to fool others and see it as a joke. They stopped after heard Megan story. From the stories, we can see that today technology communication is virtual. We do not know who is real, who is unreal, who is telling the truth, and who is lying. Can we trust people on the Internet? Is the Internet reliable?
2 comments:
Hi,
Actually, your post remind me the essay i wrote in another class that is about advertisements.It is true as you say that advertisers just disguises their product in a clever way though internet, like the advertisement Cartier in MySpace as you mentioned.They always use different method to persuade and catch their customers. So, sometimes, what we see from visual can be false. It might just a image that set by advertiser.
Same as MySpace sometimes,"people began to use it as an advertisement of themselves" Those communication tools today become used as a personal promotion. It assist lots lies, which become a moral problem to our society nowadays.
Dieu, I am very glad to see you working with two of the keywords we discussed in class this week, "technology" and "virtual." You are right to argue that the Internet complicates "virtual" and "real." I would have liked to see you link to the story about Megan and MySpace from a few years ago and work more directly with this narrative as another text. For example, I am curious to know how MySpace is described. Is it an issue of morality, as Joanna seems to suggest (but does not develop) in her comment to your post. Moreover, what does "reliable" mean and how is it connected to virtuality as a form of deception? In general, you are trying to make several different arguments in this one post. It would have been better to focus on one of these ideas, such as the relationship between virtuality and reliability, or about the possibilities of "passing" as something else on the Internet and in MySpace more specifically. Finally, I encourage you to look at my comment to Esmeralda's post about the ease of communication that these new media afford—is it really that easy? Or, what does “easy” mean?
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