A brief summary of my blogging experience

I have started writing diary since I was Secondary 2. The reason why I insist to write diary every day is I hope one day if I forgot everything, I could refer back to my diary in order to recall my memories.

In fact, my memory is rather weak and therefore my diary is so useful for me. For example, I rarely jot down the dates of my friends/family members' birthday on my schedule. And if I want to confirm the birthday of them, I have to  check my diary for figuring out the exact dates.

I guess people would think this is so troublesome and annoying for someone to do so. However, I do enjoy doing this because everytime when I checked the incidents in the past, I was so exciting to read what I have written in the past. Sometimes I would feel embarrassed and sometimes I would feel so happy. That's why I love to write diary very much and I believe I will keep writing it until I cannot write anymore.


http://en2848aggie.blogspot.com/b/post-preview?token=kBlTZi8BAAA.8wbVx5HKMsw4GeF2XE48ug.TO28771COozapjal3cwk5Q&postId=2867965915151078040&type=POST

I have chosen this post not only because it was an alerting experience for me to share with web users.  More importantly, I always keep in my mind of the careful usage of web services as it helps to prevent bad things from happening as a result of using web in a convenience cause. 

The check-in function was a recent example to me.  Indeed, there are many examples of improper use of web which I had come across.  It might happen on me or people around me.  Imagine when you were using web phone chat or even web meeting inside the bedroom in your house.  The other side may saw or heard about your privacy if you mistakably forgot to turnes of the mic or webcam.  Or in some occasions you might be post on the wall of facebook about your boss giving hard time to you on that working day.  The post might be watched or peeked by someone else unexpectedly.  Eventually your boss may know about you criticized on him.  Despite I am grateful to the convenience provided by the usage of web functions, I always be aware of the safety usage of it.

All in all, what I want to emphasize is that PRIVACY is so important to me, and to everyone!

List of blogs that I have commented:

http://en2848claire.blogspot.com/2011/04/normal-0-0-2-false-false-false-en-us-zh.html?showComment=1303058892506#c4870767666990547406

http://en2848pauly.blogspot.com/2011/04/blog-post.html?showComment=1303059708213#c6748550317506291698

http://joycema-ma.blogspot.com/2011/04/blog-post.html?showComment=1303060293317#c1032242745124301016

http://en2848crystalwan.blogspot.com/2011/03/ideology-behind-texts.html?showComment=1303060620254#c1757336875883370391

http://en2848crystalwan.blogspot.com/2011/03/social-networking-and-me.html#comments

http://julia0406.blogspot.com/2011/03/as-mentioned-in-lecture-attention.html?showComment=1303061229402#c5651117376348832747

http://en2848claire.blogspot.com/2011/03/normal-0-0-2-false-false-false-en-us-zh_18.html?showComment=1303061711141#c8981229987288350872

http://en2848claire.blogspot.com/2011/03/normal-0-0-2-false-false-false-en-us-zh.html#comments

http://joycema-ma.blogspot.com/2011/02/using-txt-talk-is-kind-of.html#comments

http://en2848ursula.blogspot.com/2011/03/technology-addiction.html?showComment=1303062398575#c7178555530360886787

THANK YOU 
so much
for sharing posts 
and
reading
my posts 
:D

Web-monitoring between superiors and subordinates

Thought about web-monitoring, I came across the check-in function of facebook.  There are plenty of convenience and entertainment which I can access through the cherish iPhone.  Frankly speaking, I use my iPhone to log in and chat with my friends, update my status and gallery all the time even when I was working at my office sometimes.  Yet there is a function of facebook which I won’t give a try.  That is the “check in” function which the facebook can detect your current location and display it to your friends who were also using the facebook.  It was a true story happened in my working place.  A colleague of mine used this function when he was on his duty that day.  When he took his meal break at a favorite place where he was not supposed to be, he “checked in” himself through the facebook in convenience of his iPhone for fun.  That’s when he was allocated by his superior that all the colleagues were warned about the incident although no one was punished at that time.

On the other hand, subordinates would also be able to monitor if their boss is working in the office. My father told me that when he is in office, he would probably login MSN. It not only gives him a way to communicate with his colleagues, but also to monitor his boss. He clearly knew that his boss would go online on MSN when he is in his room, in order to make sure that he is there or he is not there, the staff of the company would login MSN to check if the boss is "Available".

I think it is so-called "Two-way communication".

There is NO privacy at all!

People concern about personal privacy and think it should be protected. However, in Internet world, it reveals your own personal data in different places. It means the more you want to protect your privacy, the more chance for you to leak it.

Take Facebook as an example again, my friends have uploaded some photos of them which including my face. They have tagged me in order to let the photos appear in my photo album. However, those photos that I didn't want other people to see it and therefore, I just removed tag and I believed the photos would not be shown on my photo album. Although I removed my tag, I did leave some comments on my friends' photos in their photo album. One day, my cousin asked me something about those photos and I was just wondering why she could see those. And finally I discovered that when I left comments the photos even I removed the tags of mine, people could still see the photos of mine. It did shock me!

Since then, I normally do not trust the functions of protecting my privacy. I have a question that when I am going to create a photo album on Facebook, it would provide four options for us to choose the person/persons you want to share the photo album with: Everyone, Friends of friends, Friends only, Customise. Now I wonder if this function really works or not?!

Facebook VS Weibo

Facebook works as a social network site (SNS) that gives people ways to communicate. I login Facebook every day and I found I would possibly miss “something” if I don’t surf Facebook day by day. Although Facebook is so popular nowadays, I discovered there is another SNS which could fight against it.

I recently found that Hong Kong artists love to use “Weibo” as their SNS. It is a channel for them to express feelings, share experience and photos, communicate with fans and so on and the functions are multiple. The reason why I knew these people like to surf Weibo is that the reporters of magazines and newspapers usually quote some posts uploaded by these artists from their Weibo other than Facebook. The reporters often wrote like this, “Angelababy wrote in Weibo and said she loves sponge cake… ”, “Andy Lau said in Weibo he was having live concert in Beijing…” I see the trend of having a Weibo account among the artists in Hong Kong.

In my point of view, this becomes a trend is due to the disconnection of Facebook in mainland China. People living in China basically couldn’t surf Facebook, and they even couldn’t get a Facebook account in China because the internet servers of China block the connection of the website of Facebook. I am not going to talk about the specific meaning for internet servers of China to block Facebook.com here, but I would like to share my opinion about Hong Kong artists prefer using Weibo rather than Facebook to communicate with their friends or followers.

In fact, People in China are not hundred percent prohibited to access Facebook unless they install a program like “Cracker” in their computers in order to get over the fire wall so that they could browse Facebook.com. I think it is rather troublesome and problematic for majority of people to do so. As most of the people in China couldn’t surf Facebook in their country, they use Weibo instead. China is the world's most populous country which has over 1.3 billion people while the world's population is approximately 6.7 billion. We can easily imagine that there is a huge number of people might be using Weibo in China as their SNS, like people using Facebook in Hong Kong. And therefore, Weibo can definitely help those artists (Weibo users) attract more potential fans in China and maintain relationship with existing fans in China who are having Weibo accounts.

Actually, I don’t use Weibo as my SNS, so I am not quite familiar with its functions. Nevertheless, I guess it is a very functional SNS for people (especially people in China) to communicate due to its popularity within these years.

Quoted from Wikipedia:

 

Sina Weibo is a Chinese microblo site, similar to Twitter, launched by Sina corporation, China's biggest web portal, in August 2009. According to Sina, the microblog site remains in beta, though it has more than 100 million users and millions of posts per day, and is adding 10 million new users per month. The company also said it now has more than 60,000 verified accounts, consisting of celebrities, sports stars and other VIPs. The top 100 users now have over 180 million followers. Furthermore, Sina said that more than 5,000 companies and 2,700 media organizations in China are currently using Weibo. The site is maintained by a growing microblogging department of 200 employees responsible for technology, design, operations, and marketing. The site is currently available in both simplified and traditional Chinese characters.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sina_Weibo

Innovation or not?

Netspeak stands for a combination of letters or symbols which can replace a phrase or a complete sentence. I think this is a creative usage of English and it saves the time used for showing meanings in complete sentences. I use Netspeak for the first time in ICQ to chat with my friends. Initially, I was confused by some “new words” used by my chat mates in our communication. For example ttyl, brb, oic, k, omg, etc. I had no idea of the meaning of these “words” and I have to ask for their explanations. I felt anonymous at the beginning as I could not catch the meaning of those “new words”. At that time, I supposed it was a simpler way of communication to use instant messaging. Yet, it was kind of interrupting when I need to ask again and again the meanings of the Netspeak. And I thought that our communication could be more fluent if we use traditional complete sentences throughout our instant messaging. However, it took not so long for me to get used to using Netspeak and I created some “new words” sometimes.  For instance, I used combinations like “PEL” to stand for Pretty EyeLashes, “ST” to stand for Sun Tanned, etc. These combinations were used only between my chat mates and me. Thus I thought Netspeak encourages people to be innovative to create their own combination of words.

In the Powerpoint slides, it was mentioned that some researches show secondary teachers prefer their student use their composition-writing rather than computer-writing. Although survey reflects that there was no side effect on standard usage of English by students to hand in their electronic homework through computer, there was a bad effect on me. For instance, the spelling and grammar check function of Microsoft word automatically display the correct or advised use of words which let me neglect my own proofreading when composing my article. Until the written examination I took last semester. I realized that the computer tools for composition cause me less confident in using my own words either in spelling or grammatically when I have to write instead of typing my own passage. Technology may offer convenience in our daily life. However, it also made people lazy and over dependent on its usage.

Yesterday morning, my friend sent me a message via “Whatsapp" by using her smart phone. She said, “Gm!”, and then I wondered why she called me “General Manager” so I asked her the reason why she called me like that, and she told me “Gm” stands for “Good morning”!!! Omg, misunderstanding happened again.

Vicious circle of having too much information

“SPAM” appears everywhere! I think many people including me must feel “SPAM” is really annoying. We always receive SPAM emails, telephones and SMS which are about advertisements, surveys and some useless notifications. Like me, I always got more than 1700 unread emails in one of my email boxes.

Most of them are promotional materials, updated news of some products that I am not concern about, notifications of many kinds of websites and I can’t tolerate the emails from unknown persons who asked me to do something like:

Here’s the deal Aggie you have to hop in the drivers seat and take some control everything you need will be taken care of since when is work a stress a relieve I found this review before I signed up http://bit.ou .. you have to you can start it now and you can swiftly be successful there they are running out of open spot fast.

I feel so weird about that kind of junk emails and most important is that I have no idea why they know my name. Every time when I signed in my hotmail account, my friends besides me would probably say that I am so crazy to have so many unread emails and they usually asked me to select them all and then put them into trash. I found that I have got too many undesired emails from various kinds of organizations and I just simply ignore them. Frankly, I have no time to read them, I have no interest to open them, and I don’t even want to spend just a few seconds to delete them. What a pity that the purpose of information technology is supposed to be a convenient way for people to cope with their daily life; however, it has been drastically changed.

Moreover, once I switched on my computer, I would possibly follow several steps: First step: login Facebook, second step: login http://www.cityu.edu.hk/, third step: login email account, search information via Google or other search engines, check the dictionary via Yahoo or Cambridge dictionary, watch movies online, chat with friends via MSN, download useful software, visit the blogs of others, etc. Usually I am likely to browse around 8-10 websites simultaneously. At the very beginning of the power point of lecture 3, there are some questions required us to answer. I am sorry to say that I have 17 YES altogether. I can’t admit I do suffer from information overload. The questions reflect the reality and tell what I think! Due to tons of electronic information provided, I really want to read faster so as to reduce my time and to get as much as I can.

Search engine is one of the helpful tools for me to get information from the Internet. I have tried “Way Back Machine” to take me back to 1999’s interface of http://www.cityu.edu.hk/. Comparing it to the latest one, the 1999’s one was comparatively simple, less informative and less attractive I would say. “Way Back Machine” is a funny search engine that is very different from that I have used. In my point of view, I think it is not only showing us the different styles of interface over the years, but also implying the trend and technology are ever changing in the world.

Digital media colors my life?

When I was in Secondary 1, I started using ICQ to chat with friends and people from all over the world.


When I was in Secondary 3, I first tried video conferences via MSN.


When I was  in Secondary 5, I have been familiarized to text my friends through SMS.


When I was having my Associate Degree, I shared my ideas and expressions with my family and friends via Zanga and Friendster.


When I started working, surfing Facebook became my habit.


A month ago, I started spending so much time with iphone.


I can't believe that I can manage my life smoothly and efficiently without digital media.  However, I've encountered some problems of over-using digital media.


Two months ago, most of my friends have got iphones while I was still using my Nokia. I found that it was problematic for me to communicate with my friends who got an iphone. According to my observation, iphone users like to discuss the pros and cons of various kinds of "apps" and they love to share the experiences of using those "apps" with other iphone users. Definitely, I would be mute, for at least 15 minutes during the gathering. I felt like I was the out-group and I was being left out. And now, I have got an iphone and same thing happens. During lunch or dinner time, some of my friends complained about me that I keep checking messages and emails, surfing Facebook, playing online games etc. via iphone. Unfortunately, I did ignore them.


I realize digital media entertains our life, yet, we should make proper use of it. One of it's functions is to facilitate communication, but not to ruin social relationship between us.

Hello mates

I am so happy to join the course of Language and Digital Media! I would like to share my opinions and happiness in this blog. I am looking forward to meeting my friends here:)