Nowadays social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter allow us to build and keep relationships with people. These relationships can be strong or weak. They can also be built or maintained with friends, family, or even "strangers". Social media sites allow you to have an appropriate relationship with people you have never physically met.
When Mark Zuckerberg created the news feed his intentions were to make it easier for users to keep up with their friends' lives. They would no longer have to search each friend and browse their accounts. It also allowed them to find out about things going on in their friends' lives before it became old news. Although this was a breakthrough for Facebook, it affected the literacy of the users in a negative way. It goes back to the article "Is Google Making Us Stupid", people no longer had to think for themselves. They did not have to search for information or even think about how to find it. The news feed put everything right at their fingertips.
Ambient awareness is like getting to know someone through the subtle things they do or say. Each little thing they do makes you more familiar with them and their everyday lives. These things are not directed at you they are just noticed by you. They are like tiny puzzle pieces that end up revealing who the person is. Even though these puzzle piece are tiny they are all important. When something is missing you will definitely notice. I experience ambient awareness in instances where something may be wrong with one of my followers and I will know because they will tweet less or not at all. An ambient update is an immediate update of a person's life taken directly from social media. For example, you're sitting at home on your computer and your friend posts about her new boyfriend and their first date. I would not say there is a downfall of ambient awareness but it definitely changes the way people communicate. People no longer have to ask "How have you been?" or "How was your weekend?" because they already know. Ambient awareness allows people to jump right into conversations about specific things or events. They don't have to wonder what to talk about they simply start talking.
People's reading is getting lazy and becoming less significant. Because of this, the fact that social media posts are skimmable is a good thing for the social network itself. However, it is a bad thing for the literacy of the people. While reading we skip over things and when we do read them we simply decode the information and move on. We no longer analyze or look for deeper meanings in the things we read which is steadily decreasing our literacy.
Our relationships with our friends or followers on social networks are not as personal or deep as our actual friends. This is why the relationship is referred to as "weak ties" and the friends or followers are referred to as acquaintances. These relationships help us because they allow us to have more relationships at one time.
People that are 20-something feel pressured to stay connected to Facebook for a couple of reasons. One, they want to keep up with everything that is going on with everyone. They want to be up to date on the gossip instead of being the last to hear about things. Also, 20-something year olds want to make sure that they are not the topic of negative conversations and posts.
This article describes literacy in the 21st century as a way of understanding people through the subtle things they do and their posts on social media websites. It means using posts as clues to who a person is. This added to my definition of literacy.
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