Weekly Reflection Post for 10/20 Class

In E. Gabriella Coleman’s “Ethnographic Approaches to Digital Media,” the author surveys different approaches and particular areas of interest of many ethnographic works relating to digital media.  What I found most interesting from this survey was her discussion of the duality of digital media.  On page 493, Coleman talks about how both sides of any political discussion can be found in digital media and points to an example of Iranian protests.  It is interesting how, as Coleman says, “social media tools can simultaneously support grass-roots political mobilizations as well as government surveillance and human rights violations.”  It seems that although social media have provided new forums for individuality and freedom, they are also forums for oppression and conformity just like all other social forums in the entirety of human history.

Ilana Gershon, in her The Breakup 2.0: Disconnecting over New Media, examines how social media affects modern relationship, focusing especially on the end of relationships.  The most pervasive theme of the first two chapters is the idea that everybody has different media ideologies and that these media ideologies are established through both use of social media and communication with peers about social media.  For me, this seemed to highlight an interesting quality about the new social media; these forms of social interaction were not constricted to their primary online location and instead diffused out into everyday normal interactions.  In that way social media becomes more than what it appears on the surface and makes interactions using social media that much more influential.  That is why many people view Facebook relationship status as the most “official” representation of that relationship.  Once the relationship is on Facebook everybody knows and it becomes gossip fodder for the entirety of its existence.